Astronomy

The Rosetta mission will be, if all goes according to plan by the European Space Agency (ESA), the first to land on a comet. We tell you some facts and curiosities about the Rosetta mission, the Philae probe and the comet 67P / Churyumov – Gerasimenko on which it will land.

It is an unprecedented astronomical event. More than 500 million kilometers from Earth, located between the orbit of Jupiter and that of Mars, the Philae module of the Rosetta spacecraft of the European Space Agency (ESA) will descend on the surface of a comet, specifically Comet 67P / Churyumov – Gerasimenko. More than 20 years have passed since the mission received the green light at ESA in 1993 and, for 10 years, the probe has been chasing the comet, which has taken it to travel more than 6,000 million kilometers. The mission will become the first to make such close contact with a comet and the first to follow its path around the Sun. This is its timeline:

For the first time in the history of mankind a spacecraft will land on a comet, exactly 67P / Churyumov – Gerasimenko. How big is this interplanetary remnant? We compare it with some of the most important cities in Europe.

The MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) instrument of ESO's VLT (Very Large Telescope) has managed to capture a very striking snapshot for astronomy and not easy to see: that of a spectacular cosmic accident. In the image, the movement of the gas can be observed for the first time as it is ripped from the galaxy ESO 137-001 to be quickly swallowed up by a huge cluster of galaxies.

Astronomers working at the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array) telescope have managed to capture the best image to date and with extraordinary detail of the formation of planets around a young star.

Astronomers have been puzzled for years by the appearance of a strange object in the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, a team of scientists from the University of California in Los Angeles (USA) seems to have solved the mystery of the object baptized as "G2": it is a pair of binary stars that would have been orbiting a huge black hole in our galaxy, eventually merging into an extremely large star shrouded in gas and dust. The research has been published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The Orionid meteor shower, whose maximum occurred on October 21, gives way to another of the main meteor showers that we can see throughout the year: the Taurids. According to the International Meteor Organization (IMO), next November 5 will be the day of best visibility for this meteor shower, specifically from the southern Taurids.

Methuselah, an old star dated 14.46 billion years ago has led us to redefine the age of our universe. According to a new study published in the International Journal of Exergy, the universe is older than previously thought, since the dating of this ancient star is earlier than the estimated date for our cosmos: 13,817 million years.