Volume 2 Issue 7, July 2018

The Development in Africa with Radio Astronomy (DARA) project, a joint venture between the UK, South Africa and African partner nations, aims to provide development, education, training and careers advice to Africans through radio astronomy and related technical disciplines.

The development of astronomy and space science in Africa has grown significantly over the past few years. These advancements make the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals more achievable, and open up the possibility of new beneficial collaborations.

Since 2013, the International Astronomical Union’s Office of Astronomy for Development has been funding and nurturing astronomy-for-development projects across the globe. In Africa, these projects aim to use astronomy to stimulate educational, technological and socioeconomic development.

The Juno spacecraft has detected unprecedented numbers of ‘whistlers’ and ‘sferics’ in its orbits around Jupiter, both indications of high lightning flash rates in the atmosphere of the gas giant planet.

‘Why is there a black hole where women should be?’ asked Member of Parliament Chi Onwurah during her plenary talk on women in science at EWASS 2018. Gender equity was among a variety of topics discussed in a day-long Special Session.

A diverse group of science communicators from around the world came together in Fukuoka, Japan to discuss outreach strategies in a post-factual society, methods to improve inclusion, best practices for communicating within international collaborations and resources to benefit localized organizations.

New analyses show that most asteroids, nowadays residing in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, could have originated from collisional events that have broken apart a few large parent bodies.

Should science be taught differently? By emphasizing the process, not the acquisition of factual knowledge, students will learn how to solve problems and see science as relevant to their careers outside of research.

General relativity underwent a conceptual transformation after World War II that can be used to understand the hitherto vaguely defined ‘renaissance of general relativity’, which led to the prediction and eventual discovery of gravitational waves.

The Waves instrument on board the Juno spacecraft has detected ~1,600 lightning strokes in roughly 1 year of close approaches to Jupiter, indicated by low-dispersion rapid whistlers much shorter than those detected by Voyager 1 in Io’s plasma torus.

All inner main-belt asteroids, and not just those belonging to a specific family as previously thought, originate from the splintering of a few large asteroids. The history of such precursors determines the compositional variety we observe in asteroids and meteorites.

The suite of small moons orbiting close to Saturn exhibits a variety of shapes that provide clues to moon formation processes. A model shows that all of these shapes can be obtained with a single mechanism: merging collisions among similar-sized moonlets.

Images of 67P's nucleus from the Rosetta spacecraft, together with numerical simulations, show that the jet-like features of cometary comae can be produced by diffuse activity focused by the nucleus topography as well as non-uniform insolation over the surface.

Analysis of a six-year time series of SDO/HMI images of the solar photosphere reveals the existence of global-scale equatorial Rossby waves in the Sun, which contain a large fraction of the radial vorticity at these scales.

Supernova SN 2015bs is a hydrogen-rich type II supernova that appears to have been generated by a high-mass (>18 M_⊙) and low-metallicity (<0.1 Z_⊙) red supergiant progenitor.

Until recently, stellar evolution models had not been able to explain the presence of bright planetary nebulae in old stellar populations. Using the revised evolutionary tracks of Miller Bertolami (2016), it is now evident that lower-mass and longer-lived planetary nebulae can be bright.

The authors predict the ability of the Event Horizon Telescope (in its 2017 campaign) to distinguish between different theories of gravity based on images of Sagittarius A*; they suggest that it will not be possible.

The HESS array in Namibia waits for a split-second flash of blue light — Cherenkov radiation — that signals an atmospheric shower of charged particles caused by cosmic rays, explains Director Mathieu de Naurois.

A powerful new radio telescope will improve our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution, and other key questions in astrophysics, says Fernando Camilo, on behalf of the MeerKAT team.