Astronomy

The world's most complex terrestrial astronomical observatory, the Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array (ALMA), has just officially opened its doors to astronomers. The first image revealed by this telescope offers a view of a galaxy impossible to obtain with telescopes that observe visible and infrared light.

A team of astronomers has discovered 50 new exoplanets (planets that do not revolve around the Sun), including 16 Earth-like planets. One of them orbits in the limits of the habitable zone of its star, which could contain water in a liquid state. This finding has been possible thanks to HARPS, the planet search system of the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy have identified a potentially habitable planet 36 light years from Earth. It is called HD85512b and revolves around an orange dwarf in the constellation Vela. It has been discovered using the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) instrument installed at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile.

A new technique consisting of joining radio telescopes from all over the world that work together, focusing simultaneously on the same source and simulating a single gigantic telescope has made it possible to obtain high-resolution images of distant galaxies.

The Perseids, popularly known as the Tears of St. Lawrence, are a highly active meteor shower that runs from July 17 to August 24. Its maximum falls this year in the early morning of August 13, although great activity will also be observed at dawn because the constellation of Perseus will be higher on the horizon.

Now our planet has only one satellite, but the Earth once had two moons until one of them, the smaller one, crashed into its older sister - 25 times heavier - in the lunar mountainous region known as the lunar highlands, according to a new study by scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), in the US.

The upper layers of Saturn's atmosphere are filled with water that, until now, was unknown where it came from. Now, thanks to the powerful space telescope of the European Space Agency (ESA) Herschel, scientists have been able to discover that the water comes from one of its moons, Enceladus.

For the first time, hydrogen peroxide molecules, better known as hydrogen peroxide, have been found in interstellar space. The discovery, made with the APEX telescope in Chile, offers clues about the chemical bond between two molecules essential for life: water and oxygen.