Volume 2 Issue 10, October 2018

The detection of biosignatures on extrasolar planets would allow us to explore the predictability of evolution. What could we learn without directly obtaining a sample of life?

Observations with a continent-wide array of radio telescopes show that the merger of two neutron stars, which produced gravitational waves, successfully launched a very fast and highly collimated jet.

The European Astronomical Society (EAS) awarded its most prestigious prizes during its annual meeting, the European Week of Astronomy and Space Science (EWASS), held in Liverpool from 3 April to 6 April 2018.

Gender equity across the globe is improving thanks to dedicated efforts, policies, monitoring, training and assessment. However, progress is slow and more needs to be done. Numbers don’t tell the whole story, but quantitative surveys are helping to gauge the situation.

A dark, ribbon-like structure at Jupiter’s magnetic equator marks a depletion of ionospheric H₃⁺ caused by a lack of photoelectrons. These photoelectrons, which collide with molecular hydrogen to form H₃⁺, are deviated away by magnetic field lines.

Thirty years after an initial, tentative detection, the molecule ²⁶AlF has now been firmly detected in space, by the observation of four different rotational transitions towards stellar merger remnant CK Vul. Curiously, CK Vul and similar objects are unlikely to be major sources of Galactic ²⁶Al.

Double-shell planetary nebula HuBi 1 has an inner shell that emits in low ionization potential species, and an outer shell that emits in high-ionization species. This is the inverse of the usual case. The cause is the nebula’s rapidly fading central star that went through a ‘born-again’ event.

Star TYC 429-2097-1 contains the most lithium of any giant star, but lithium is too fragile to survive in the deep layers of a stellar atmosphere. How does the enrichment arise? Yan et al. rule out external sources (engulfment, accretion), favouring an internal process called ‘extra mixing’.

The X-ray-induced photodesorption of water from astrophysical ices, intact, has been little studied. However, it could be a key process in producing the cold water vapour that is seen in these regions. Here, the yield of such a mechanism is experimentally quantified.

The MAVEN spacecraft observed brightening in the Lyman-α line correlated with solar wind activity, which can be attributed to auroral activity by solar wind protons interacting with the Martian neutral hydrogen corona. Proton aurorae are normally seen at Earth only.

The shock breakout (SBO) is the first electromagnetic signature of a supernova (SN) explosion. Förster et al. find that in nearly all type II SNe they survey that the SBO occurs on a timescale of days, indicating that the progenitors were surrounded by thick circumstellar matter when they exploded.

An image-template analysis of eight years of Fermi-LAT data shows that the anomalous emission of gigaelectronvolt energies close to the centre of our Galaxy is better fitted with a boxy-shaped bulge generated by stars — possibly millisecond pulsars — than with a dark matter signal.

After 60 years of technological and materials development, in August this year the Parker Solar Probe set off on its journey to skim the atmosphere of the Sun. Mission Scientist Adam Szabo summarizes this ambitious adventure.