Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2018

Editor in chief Michele Ferrara Scientific advisor Prof. Enrico Maria Corsini Publisher Astro Publishing di Pirlo L. Via Bonomelli, 106 25049 Iseo - BS - ITALY email info@astropublishing.com Internet Service Provider Aruba S.p.A. Via San Clemente, 53 24036 Ponte San Pietro - BG - ITALY Copyright All material in this magazine is, unless otherwise stated, property of Astro Publishing di Pirlo L. or included with permission of its author. Reproduction or retransmission of the materials, in whole or in part, in any manner, with- out the prior written consent of the copyright holder, is a violation of copy- right law. A single copy of the materi- als available through this course may be made, solely for personal, noncom- mercial use. Users may not distribute such copies to others, whether or not in electronic form, whether or not for a charge or other consideration, with- out prior written consent of the copy- right holder of the materials. The publisher makes available itself with having rights for possible not charac- terized iconographic sources. Advertising - Administration Astro Publishing di Pirlo L. Via Bonomelli, 106 25049 Iseo - BS - ITALY email admin@astropublishing.com ASTROFILO l’ March-April 2018 BI-MONTHLY MAGAZINE OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL INFORMATION FREELY AVAILABLE THROUGH THE INTERNET English edition of the magazine S U M M A R Y 4 14 20 22 32 News from the TRAPPIST-1 system In the last year, many studies dedicated to the extraordinary TRAPPIST-1's planetary system have been realised and published. Sometimes, works published a short distance from each other have described antithetical scenarios, but as a whole, the efforts made by researchers portrayed that system even... ESO’s VLT working as 16-metre telescope for first time One of the original design goals of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) was for its four Unit Telescopes (UTs) to work together to create a single giant telescope. With the first light of the ESPRESSO spectrograph using the four-Unit-Telescope mode of the VLT, this milestone has now been reached. After extensive... A Wolf-Rayet star at the origin of the Solar System We know the way many structures in the universe evolved following their origin, but in many cases we have not yet understood which phenomenon produced the origin itself. This is the case with our Solar System, for which the dominant thinking is that it was born because of a shock wave from a supernova... Researchers catch supermassive black hole burping−twice Astronomers have caught a supermassive black hole in a distant galaxy snacking on gas and then “burp- ing” — not once, but twice. The galaxy under study, called SDSS J1354+1327 (J1354 for short), is about 800 million light-years from Earth. The team used observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope... Giant bubbles on red giant star’s surface Located 530 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Grus (The Crane), π 1 Gruis is a cool red giant. It has about the same mass as our Sun, but is 350 times larger and several thousand times as bright. Our Sun will swell to become a similar red giant star in about five billion years. An international team... ExTrA goes into action A strategic instrument has become operative in the search for Earth-like planets orbiting red dwarf stars located at relatively short distances from us. Its name is ExTrA. From the ground, it will be able to dis- cover planets as small as other telescopes can detect from space, and it will help to compile a list of... The archaeology of our Milky Way’s ancient hub probed by Hubble For many years, astronomers had a simple view of our Milky Way’s central hub, or bulge, as a quiescent place composed of old stars, the earliest homesteaders of our galaxy. However, because the inner Milky Way is such a crowded environment, it has always been a challenge to disentangle stellar motions... First ELT main mirror segments successfully cast The 39-metre-diameter primary mirror of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope will be by far the largest ever made for an optical-infrared telescope. Such a giant is much too large to be made from a single piece of glass, so it will consist of 798 individual hexagonal segments, each measuring 1.4 metres across and... SMBHs−host galaxies co-evolution deepened by ALMA Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe an active galaxy with a strong ionized gas outflow from the galactic center, astronomers have obtained a result making themselves even more puzzled: an unambiguous detection of carbon monoxide (CO) gas associated with the... Keck Observatory achieves first light with NIRES Astronomers at W. M. Keck Observatory have successfully met a major milestone after capturing the very first science data from Keck Observatory’s newest instrument, the Caltech-built Near-Infrared Echel- lette Spectrometer (NIRES). The Keck Observatory-Caltech NIRES team just completed the instrument’s... 34 38 46 48 50