Stars

Image showing two pair of stars, one in blue and one in read, born together and then one of them moves far away (Image courtesy Dana Berry/SkyWorks Digital, Inc.; SDSS collaboration)

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An article published in recent days in “The Astrophysical Journal” describes a research showing that about 30% of the stars in the Milky Way – which means nearly one in three – moved dramatically from the orbit it had at its birth. This surprising result was achieved by a team of scientists who worked on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) observing for a four-year period 100,000 stars with the SDSS Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Explorer (APOGEE) spectrograph.

Artistic concept of an aurora at the north pole of a brown dwarf (Image Chuck Carter and Gregg Hallinan/Caltech)

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Its aurora is 10,000 times more powerful than any other ever seen, somuch as to be detectable, although with very sophisticated instruments, from a distance of 18 light years. It was found on a brown dwarf called LSR J1835+3259 using the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), the Hale Telescope in California and the Keck Telescope in Hawaii. The results of this research have just been published in the journal “Nature”.

A comparison of the Kepler-452 system with the solar system and the Kepler-186 system (Image NASA/JPL-CalTech/R. Hurt)

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NASA announced the discovery of the planet Kepler-452b made using the Kepler space telescope. It has an orbit similar to that of the Earth around a star similar to the Sun. This puts it well within the habitable zone of its star system because the star Kepler-452 is just a little bigger and brighter than the Sun so if on the planet Kepler-452b there was an atmosphere similar to the Earth’s, water could exist in liquid form.

Picture of the Sun taken by the STEREO-A space probe (Photo NASA/STEREO)

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NASA’s STEREO-A (Solar TErrestrial Relations Observatory Ahead) space probe has resumed contact with the Earth a few days ago after more than three months and on July 15 sent new photographs of the other side of the Sun from the Earth. Its EUVI (Extreme UltraViolet Imager) instrument was used to take photographs at a wavelength of 171 angstroms, invisible the human eye, then colorized in blue to allow us to appreciate them.

This artist’s impression shows a supernova and associated gamma-ray burst driven by a magnetar (Image ESO)

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An article published in “Nature” describes the research conducted by an international team led by Jochen Greiner of the Max-Planck-Institut für extraterrestrische Physik, Garching, Germany who studied a gamma-ray burst (GRB) detected on December 9, 2011 by NASA’s Swift satellite and called GRB 111209A. It was an exceptional phenomenon because it lasted more than three hours when gamma-ray bursts typically last from a few seconds to a few minutes. It was the first case of GRB associated with a supernova, called SN 2011kl, which produced a magnetar, a neutron star with an incredibly strong magnetic field.