Last year the discovery of Kepler-16b, a planet orbiting two stars, was announced. Now the Kepler Space Telescope discovered that in the binary system Kepler-47 there are at least two planets, one of which is within the system’s habitable zone, the area in which water can be in its liquid state on the surface of the planet in conditions similar to those of the Earth.
When in the U.S.A. it was night, the two twin spacecraft Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) had a successful lift-off on an Atlas V rocket. The twin RBSP spacecraft have the task to study the van Allen radiation belts, two rings – one internal and one external – of electrically charged particles created by the Earth’s magnetic field around the equator.
The Hubble Space Telescope has produced a stunning new image of the globular cluster Messier 56 (also known simply as M 56 or as NGC 6779). In addition to admiring the beauty of the image, the collected data have allowed astronomers to determine that this cluster is very old, dating back to as many as 13 billion years ago, when the universe was very young.
