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The Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer (NICER) is looking for neutron stars and pulsars from its perch on the International Space Station. Keith Gendreau and Zaven Arzoumanian provide an overview of its capabilities.
Black holes absorb everything and emit nothing, yet relativistic jets of plasma are observed to emanate from systems hosting accreting black holes. We now know exactly how far from the black hole these processes take place.
A novel unsupervised autoencoding recurrent neural network produces state-of-the-art supervised classification models. This network can continue to learn from new unlabelled observations and may be used in other unsupervised tasks.
The nuclear region of NGC 1097 is found to be dominated by non-thermal pressure. An anti-correlation between the star formation efficiency of molecular clouds and the magnetic field strength indicates that the formation of massive stars is quenched.
Precise proper motions of Sculptor’s stars based on Gaia and the Hubble Space Telescope show that Sculptor moves on a high-inclination elongated orbit around the Milky Way and require abandoning conventional models for Sculptor’s mass distribution.
Black hole masses derived from the properties of the accretion disk and virial mass estimates differ by a factor that is inversely proportional to the width of the broad emission lines. An inclined planar gas distribution may account for this effect.
The extremely bright GRB 160625B, consisting of three sub-bursts separated by quiescent intervals, shows a transition from thermal to non-thermal radiation that indicates a change of jet composition from a fireball to a Poynting-flux-dominated jet.
The discovery of the most energetic transient event to date is reported. Its spectroscopic properties and temporal evolution imply it is powered by shock interaction between expanding material and large quantities of surrounding dense matter.
A galaxy at z ~ 1 is multiply imaged by strong lensing with different spatial resolutions. The properties of the giant stellar clumps within the galaxy depend on the resolution of the images. This observational effect must be considered in galactic models of star formation.
We calculate the continuous nanohertz gravitational-wave emission from individual supermassive black hole binaries and the gravitational-wave background they generate, which will be observable with pulsar timing arrays.
Sensitive X-ray polarization measurements of the Crab pulsar by the Indian AstroSat satellite confirm earlier indications of strongly polarized off-pulse emission but also reveal variations in polarization properties within the off-pulse region.
This paper reports the detection of a high-redshift galaxy that may be more representative of ‘normal’ star-forming galaxies formed in the first billion years of the Universe than the extreme starbursts discovered to date.
The authors present a photon detector suitable for terahertz astronomy, with very high sensitivity, low power consumption and the ability to be configured into arrays. This device is demonstrably able to count individual far-infrared photons.
Tidal forcing within a very porous (unconsolidated) core can generate enough energy to drive all the observed global features of Enceladus. This activity can be sustained up to several billion years.