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SuperBIT is a wide-field, diffraction-limited optical and near-UV imager of the sky that was designed to travel via the seasonal winds at an altitude of 33 km. Suspended from a scientific balloon rather than a crane, its April 2023 mission took in views of merging galaxy clusters, galaxies, and massive star winds from the stratosphere.
Twenty years ago, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on Mars. Over the next 15 years, they showed us a planet that was warmer and wetter — and capable of sustaining life — that we now take as read.
In academia, we ignore the whole person to the detriment of the growth of the scientist and the community. Trauma is a black hole eating away at the health of individual scientists.
The NANOGrav collaboration has found light-years long gravitational waves from, most likely, the mergers of millions of supermassive black holes. To keep watching this cosmic dance, we need sustained funding for black hole research.
Kepler-1625b-I and Kepler-1708b-I are the most noteworthy exomoon candidates to date. A new analysis of the available data comes to a different conclusion.
In October 2023, astronomers, planetary scientists and biologists gathered in Kyiv for Ukraine’s first international astrobiology meeting, advancing science and crossing disciplinary borders in wartime.
Periodic sub-structure in radio emission from magnetars provides an observational link not only between magnetars and fast radio bursts, but across all classes of radio-emitting rotating neutron stars. The correlation between sub-structure periodicity and neutron-star rotational period can be used to determine an underlying period for fast radio bursts.
The optical properties of the organic hazes that form in water-rich exoplanet atmospheres differ from those that form in nitrogen-rich atmospheres. This difference in optical properties can have an observable effect on spectral observations of exoplanets and could impact the interpretation of current and upcoming JWST observations.
An information-theory-inspired re-analysis of Cassini mass spectrometry data reveals the presence of HCN and partially oxidized organics within the plume of Enceladus. Ongoing redox chemistry may create a habitable environment.
Experiments using high-intensity X-ray pulses incident on high-pressure hydrocarbons suggest that diamond formation can occur at shallower depths in icy planets and may play a role in the internal convection that generates their magnetic fields.
The reported optical properties of organic hazes produced in water-rich exoplanet atmospheres differ from those in nitrogen-rich atmospheres. Such differences have a detectable effect on the spectra, impacting interpretation of JWST observations.
A reanalysis of Kepler and Hubble data with Bayesian inference and a photodynamical model shows that the two exomoon candidates around Kepler-1625 b and Kepler-1708 b have a substantially lower probability to be actual detections than previous analyses suggest.
Iron nitride (Fe4N) is detected on magnetite particles within the Ryugu sample returned by Hayabusa2. It is probably the product of impacts of nitrogen-rich dust from the outer Solar System on the surface of Ryugu, indicative of a flux of N-rich dust in the inner Solar System.
This work finds a systematic offset of 5.5 ± 1.1 Myr between estimates of the ages of stars made with two popular techniques: isochronal fitting and dynamical traceback. This offset is proposed to represent the time a young star remains bound to its parental cloud before dispersing and could help to improve stellar evolutionary models.
Extremely low-mass stars, much less massive than the Sun, lack radiative cores—something that could affect their magnetic dynamos. This study reveals that these stars can have magnetic fields that are up to 30% stronger than those of Sun-like stars, implying fundamental differences in their internal magnetic structures.
This work identifies a period structure in the radio emission of magnetars that can be observed in all classes of radio-emitting rotating neutron stars, regardless of their evolutionary history, their power source or their magnetic field strength.
The observation by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory of high-energy neutrinos from the Galactic plane indicates that the Milky Way is deficient in neutrinos, most probably because it has not hosted an active source for the past few tens of kiloyears.
A supercomputer simulation shows that the strikingly varied distributions of different galaxy types across the Local Supercluster arise naturally in the standard models of cosmology and galaxy formation.
ALMA observations show the streams of molecular gas blown from the centre of a galaxy by the energy released by an active supermassive black hole are falling back onto the black hole, making sure it stays active.
Volker Springel created the original GADGET code more than 25 years ago. Now it supports some of the largest simulations in astrophysics, and is being developed to do vastly more.
The SuperBIT telescope spent more than a month being carried through the stratosphere by a scientific balloon, imaging space from above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere.