Articles in 2022

The Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory (ASO-S), which will focus on solar eruptions and their origins, is scheduled for launch in late 2022, explain Chief Scientist Weiqun Gan and assistants Li Feng and Yang Su.

Nature Astronomy turned five this month. We share some of our most popular covers and impactful papers, and look forward to more discoveries in 2022.

This Review examines gas dynamics in dwarf galaxies, such as rotation curves and mass models. Star-forming dwarfs extend the dynamical laws of spiral galaxies and show small scatter around them, implying a tight coupling between baryons and dark matter.

This Perspective discusses massive black holes in dwarf galaxies and presents new insights on the demographics of nearby dwarf galaxies to help constrain the black hole occupation/active fraction as a function of mass and dwarf galaxy type.

Massive black holes that are produced dynamically by black hole mergers are thought to involve eccentric orbits, whose imprint may remain in the gravitational waveform detected by the LIGO/Virgo Collaboration.

The combination of hydrogen and carbon dioxide in the ocean of Enceladus represents chemical energy that could support life — but should we expect to see any energy ‘left on the table’ if anything alive is actually there to use it?

A 4.8σ exomoon candidate is found around gas giant Kepler-1708 b, which orbits at 1.6 au around its star. It is the only candidate from a dedicated survey that analysed 70 cool giant exoplanets discovered by Kepler. Kepler-1708 b-i has a radius of 2.6 Earth radii and orbits its planet at 12 planetary radii.

The episodic but protracted delivery of foundering cold material (diapirs) to the lunar core during the first billion years activated vigorous core convection that generated peaks of high intensity in the magnetic field. This process can explain the magnetic record of lunar rocks.

The 2,000-au-long streamer of material from binary protostar Z CMa can be explained by the flyby of an object some 4,700 au away, now revealed through high-spatial-resolution ALMA and JVLA observations.

This Review summarizes what is known of the stellar and chemical properties of nearby (<20 Mpc) star-forming dwarf galaxies. These objects resemble the earliest formed galaxies and may thus represent a window on the distant, early Universe.

Through an analysis of broad absorption lines in a range of quasars, quasar outflows are shown to have a negative global feedback effect on star formation, demonstrated by the recovery of star formation rates after the outflows disappear.

Samples returned from the carbonaceous (C-type) asteroid 162173 Ryugu by the Hayabusa2 mission were preliminarily analysed in a non-destructive manner. Their dark spectral features, small densities and absence of a high-temperature component imply that they are most similar to primitive CI group chondrites, but show some differences to known planetary materials.

A Bayesian imaging method for reconstructing radio emission in spatial, temporal and spectral dimensions confirms the structures on the time-varying emission ring of M87* observed by the Event Horizon Telescope, and identifies additional features.