Category Astronomy/Space

The coloured region is the previously known Galactic disk. The present work has extended its limits much farther away: there is a probability 99.7 percent or 95.4 percent respectively that there are disk stars in the regions outside the dashed/dotted circles. Yellow dot is the position of the Sun. Background Milky Way image from ‘A Roadmap to the Milky Way’. Credit: R. Hurt, SSC-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech

A team of researchers suggests that if we could travel at the speed of light it would take us 200,000 years to cross the disc of our Galaxy. Spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way have discs which are really thin, in which the major fraction of their stars are found. These discs are limited in size, so that beyond certain radius there are very few stars left.

In our Galaxy we were not aware...

In this image of heart tissue, a single cardiac B cell lymphocyte is visible (blue surrounded by bright red). This type of immune cell triggers damaging inflammation after a heart attack, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. Their study also shows that the drug pirfenidone

Existing drug dials down inflammation in mice. Scientists have zeroed in on a culprit that spurs damaging inflammation in the heart following a heart attack. The guilty party is a type of immune cell that tries to heal the injured heart but instead triggers inflammation that leads to even more damage.

Further, the researchers have found that an already approved drug effectively tamps down such inflammation in mice, protecting the heart from the progressive damage that often o...

This is an artistic simulation of WASP 127b orbiting a star. Credit: Gabriel Pérez, SMM (IAC).

Scientists have observed a rare gaseous planet, with partly clear skies, and strong signatures of alkali metals in its atmosphere. The extrasolar planet WASP-127b is one of the least dense exoplanets ever found. It has a radius 1.4 times greater than Jupiter, but only 20% of its mass. Such a planet has no analogue in the solar system and is rare even within the exoplanet diversity. It takes just over four days to complete an orbit around its parent star and its surface temperature is around 1400 K (1127 ° C).

The observations of WASP-127b reveal the presence of a large concentration of alkali metals in its atmosphere, allowing simultaneous detections of Sodium, Potassium and Lithium, for the fi...

Artistic simulation of a planetary system composed by three rocky planets with the same size of the Earth. Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC)

Today marks the discovery of two new planetary systems, one of them hosting three planets with the same size of the Earth. The information about these new exoplanets has been obtained from the data collected by the K2 mission of NASA’s Kepler satellite, which started in November 2013. The work, which will be published in the Monthly Notices of the magazine Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), reveals the existence of two new planetary systems detected from the eclipses they produce in the stellar light of their respective stars...