Astronomy

With the help of ESA's Herschel Space Telescope, an international team of astrophysicists has discovered the first carbon-rich red giant with water vapor in its atmosphere. It is called CW Leonis, it is located in the constellation of Leo, 500 light years from Earth, and with a radius of 500 suns it is the brightest extrasolar object in the sky in the infrared. Details are published today in the journal Nature.

Using the HARPS spectrograph, installed in the 3.6-meter telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in La Silla (Chile), a team of astronomers has discovered a planetary system with at least five planets similar to Neptune - between 13 and 25 Earth masses - orbiting the star HD 10180, very similar to our Sun.

Researchers from the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) are back on the trail of the youngest exoplanet ever found to date. The planet is less than a million years old, making it a true star baby.

In recent months, some studies have been published suggesting that the interior of the Moon contains more water than scientists previously thought, but now a new analysis of lunar samples collected during NASA's Apollo missions indicates that the Moon essentially it does not have any water.

A team of American astronomers from the University of Arizona, led by Michael Hart, has developed a technique that makes it possible to obtain astronomical images from Earth as sharp as those captured with the Hubble Space Telescope, and also much faster. The technique, called adaptive laser optics, was released today in the journal Nature.

Certain gaseous worlds, such as Jupiter, are covered by stripes parallel to the equator that occupy their surface from one pole to the other. In these regions, winds flow at different speeds. Astronomers assumed that they were caused by a phenomenon of convection, which arose as a consequence of the tendency of hot gases to rise and cold gases to fall.

With a mass equivalent to 256 times that of our Sun, the star R136a1 is twice as large as any that has been seen before. This stellar "heavyweight" has been detected thanks to a combination of instruments from the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

Analysis of the data gathered by the Messenger probe on its last flight around Mercury has revealed that on the planet closest to the Sun there are signs of intense explosive volcanic activity throughout its history and of very powerful magnetic storms.