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The Andromeda galaxy’s stellar halo and disk show signs of an active recent merger history. Recent work suggests that most of the disturbances in Andromeda’s disk and the inner halo may be due to a single merger event.
Dark matter is deemed essential for describing galaxy dynamics. A prominent alternative theory can make the same predictions without dark matter, by introducing a universal acceleration constant. Recent high-quality observations of galaxies are used to investigate whether this constant is really a constant.
A magnetic reconnection event within Saturn’s magnetosphere, captured by Cassini at an unexpected site, may reshape our views on how internally produced plasma is circulated in giant planet magnetospheres.
A new model predicts locations on the surface of radiation-blasted Europa, the ocean moon of Jupiter, where biochemical signatures of life emergent from the subsurface ocean might survive long enough for detection on the moon’s changing surface.
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.
An exoplanet as hot as a star challenges our understanding of how planets evolve under extreme conditions. Observations with the CARMENES spectrograph provide clues about the atmospheric properties of this outstanding planet.
Recent polarization measurements of the stellar-mass black hole in Cygnus X-1 reveal an extended corona in the inner parts of the accretion flow and open the path for a new era in high-energy astrophysics.
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.
Supermassive binary black holes are thought to lie at the centres of merging galaxies. The blazar OJ 287 is the poster child of such systems, showing strong and periodic variability across the electromagnetic spectrum. A new study questions the physical origin of this variability.
Observations of two sequences of blue stragglers in a young, sparse star cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud re-opens the debate about the dominant formation mechanism of these anomalous stars.
Recently, large integral-field spectroscopic studies of galaxies have greatly increased our knowledge of their structure and evolution. A new analysis of such data reveals a relationship between the age and the intrinsic — three-dimensional — shape of galaxies.
Hydrogen sulfide gas is detected above Uranus’s main cloud deck, confirming the prevalence of H2S ice particles as the main cloud component and a strongly unbalanced nitrogen/sulfur ratio in the planet's deep atmosphere.
The discovery of a prominent spectral absorption line in X-rays in an ultra-luminous X-ray source is perhaps indicative of the presence of very intense magnetic fields and hints to a magnetar as its power source.
Gravitational lensing is becoming increasingly important to the study of distant galaxies and dark matter. Two groups have recently detected transient events emanating from far-away lensed galaxies, apparently due to extreme magnification of individual stars.
