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Twenty-five years ago, the detection of the first extrasolar planets opened up an area of research that has fascinated both researchers and the general public alike.
The scientific aims of the European Space Agency's International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory are considerably extended because of its unique capability to identify electromagnetic counterparts to sources of gravitational waves and ultra-high-energy neutrinos.
Can the recent Discovery mission selections be used as tea leaves to understand the future directions of NASA? In an age of many programmes being used to advance administrative and programmatic goals, Discovery appears to be driven almost entirely by science and by NASA's goal of cheaper missions.
Dante Lauretta, Principal Investigator of the NASA OSIRIS-REx mission, discusses his experience with designing Xtronaut, a space-themed board game for the whole family.
Neil Gehrels passed away on 6 February 2017. A pioneer of observational high-energy astrophysics, he was an exceptional leader, scholar, colleague and friend.
Black holes grow by accreting mass, but the process is messy and redistributes gas and energy into their environments. New evidence shows that magnetic processes mediate both the accretion and ejection of matter.
The Sun is a magnetically active rotating star. Simultaneous observations with the STEREO and SDO space missions reveal solar analogues of planetary Rossby waves that will help forecast space weather.
First the neutrinos arrived, then the burst of light: messengers of a cataclysmic event in the galaxy next door. Alak Ray recounts IAUS 331, a conference that celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the supernova of a lifetime, SN1987A, and explored the critical role of asymmetry in the explosions, surroundings and initial conditions.
The biggest black holes in the Universe were in place soon after the Big Bang. Explaining how they formed so rapidly is a daunting challenge, but the latest simulations give clues to how this may have occurred.
A magnetohydrodynamic model for outflows around supermassive black holes can also reproduce the X-ray properties of an outflow around a stellar black hole. This indicates that magnetic forces have a universal role to play in driving these winds.
Cassini’s RADAR has surveyed a region close to Enceladus’s ‘tiger stripes’. It finds a temperate subsurface with warm cracks, indicating that the moon’s icy crust is only a few kilometres thick at these points. A dormant crack hints at episodic geological activity.
Using asteroseismology to measure the spin axes of stars in two old open star clusters, Corsaro et al. find alignment between significant numbers of stars. It is thought that this is an imprint of the original angular momentum of the parent molecular cloud.
The key ingredients for a massive cloud of gas to collapse and directly form a black hole without fragmenting and forming stars are a strong ionizing background emission and a closely timed burst of star formation in its vicinity.
The abundance of Be and V isotopes in calcium–aluminium-rich inclusions (CAIs), the oldest solids in the Solar System, shows that CAIs were irradiated by a gradual flux of radiation from solar flares when the Sun was young and more energetic, for a short time (300 yr) and at close distance (≈0.1 au).
Global-scale Rossby waves develop in planets’ atmospheres and influence their weather. Now, similar waves, driven by magnetism, are unambiguously detected on the Sun. They can possibly help the forecasting of solar activity and related space weather.
The discovery of several Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) with anomalous properties (they are blue-coloured, whereas KBOs of the same type are red, and they are all binaries) gives constraints on formation processes in the outermost region of the Solar System.
It's not often that an astronomical object gets its own dedicated observatory, but as the planet Beta Pictoris b moves in front of its host star, its every move will be watched by bRing, eager to discover more about the planet's Hill sphere, explains Matthew Kenworthy.
