Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2019

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’ November-December 2019 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 18 20 22 K2-18 b and the “streetlamp” paradox Discovering water vapor in the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet is not a novelty and it is not even too surprising, but it is an important step. This is especially true if water is discovered on a planet that could have a rocky surface, even if its greater mass and its overall atmosphere make it completely inhospitable... Construction of the ELT dome foundations begins Construction is now underway of the foundation of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) in the remote Chilean Atacama Desert. Once complete, the telescope will be the largest ground-based telescope in operation, weighing in at 3400 tonnes. The ELT is a reflecting, fully-steerable telescope. The design... Hubble observes first confirmed interstellar comet On 12 October 2019, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provided astronomers with their best look yet at an interstellar visitor — Comet 2I/Borisov — which is believed to have arrived here from another planetary system elsewhere in our galaxy. This observation is the sharpest view ever of the interstellar... Where the aliens don’t come from The messy movement of people and opinions that is ufology does not need assistance in appearing laughable. The congeries of anecdotal experiences that compose all evidence within the field deprive ufology of actual credibility. And yet, a minimum of scientific rigor and a legitimate vision capable of... First identification of a heavy element born from neutron star collision In 2017, following the detection of gravitational waves passing the Earth, ESO pointed its telescopes in Chile, including the VLT, to the source: a neutron star merger named GW170817. Astronomers sus- pected that, if heavier elements did form in neutron star collisions, signatures of those elements... A cosmic pretzel Astronomers using ALMA have obtained an extremely high-resolution image showing two disks in which young stars are growing, fed by a complex pretzel-shaped network of filaments of gas and dust. Observing this remarkable phenomenon sheds new light on the earliest phases of the lives of stars and... VISTA unveils a new image of the Large Magellanic Cloud The Large Magellanic Cloud, or LMC, is one of our nearest galactic neighbors, at only 163,000 light-years from Earth. With its sibling the Small Magellanic Cloud, these are among the nearest dwarf satellite gal- axies to the Milky Way. The LMC is also the home of various stellar conglomerates and is an ideal... A flexible concept of the habitability of other worlds Science fiction has described uncountable possible extraterrestrial environments and imaginable forms of alien life. But there is also the unimaginable, that is, all that is not conditioned by our knowledge. When we think of a habitable world, we inevitably transfer to it a few things familiar to us, but some... Enigmatic radio burst illuminates a galaxy’s tranquil halo Using one cosmic mystery to probe another, astronomers analysed the signal from a fast radio burst to shed light on the diffuse gas in the halo of a massive galaxy. In November 2018 the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope pinpointed a fast radio burst, named FRB 181112... 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz have been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the first exoplanet around a Sun-like star. Mayor, Professor Emeritus at Geneva University in Switzerland, and Queloz, Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK, share the prize “for... 30 34 36 38 48