A team of researchers led by astronomer Ivan Ramirez of the University of Texas at Austin has identified the first Sun “sibling”. This star, identified as HD 162 826, almost certainly formed over 4.5 billion years ago in the same gas cloud in which the Sun formed along with thousands of other stars. The methods used to find it will help discover more of their “siblings” and also to understand in which part of the galaxy they formed.
The Chandra X-ray observatory in space, NASA has allowed the observation of a runaway pulsar, which means that it belongs to the category of stars that move at speeds abnormally high compared to what surrounds them. This neutron star, known as IGR J11014-6103, is moving at a speed yet to be measured exactly between 4 and 8 million km/h (between 2.5 and 5 mph). Another extraordinary feature of this pulsar is the tail created by a jet of high-energy particles, which extends for some 37 light years.
ESO’s VLT (Very Large Telescope) allowed to create for the first time a map of the climate on the surface of a brown dwarf called Luhman 16B, formally known as WISE J104915.57-531906.1B. It’s part of a binary system together with another brown dwarf at a distance of about 6.5 light years from the Earth. That makes them the third closest star system to Earth after that of Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s Star. Despite their relative closeness, these brown dwarfs have been discovered only in early 2013 by astronomer Kevin Luhman, hence their informal name, because of their very faint light.
The star RS Puppis was observed during a period of five weeks by the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s a Cepheid variable star about 6,500 light years from Earth. Because of its variability, its brightness continuously increases and decreases and these pulsations created a phenomenon known as light echo. In essence, the light emitted by the star seems to reverberate through the nebula that surrounds it, a phenomenon admired by astronomers thanks to Hubble.
