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The Earth is a rocky planet in the so-called classical habitable zone (HZ), with a surface ocean taking up just ~10–4 of its total mass. A study suggests that 5–10% of Earth-sized planets in the HZ around red dwarfs are ‘Earth-like’: rocky, with a small but non-zero amount of water on their surface.
The sound community has developed many methods for listening to the Universe and not just looking at it. With their help, astronomers can increase the diversity of sonification tools, uses and users.
Solar wind observations from the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission reveal bursty, turbulent properties within a reconnection diffusion region, in contrast with the usual quasi-steady state of solar wind reconnection. Between October 2017 and May 2019 75 other similar events were identified, indicating the relevance of turbulent reconnection in the solar wind.
The rapid rise in brightness of a tidal disruption event is attributed to the destruction of a main sequence star by a black hole of intermediate mass in a dwarf galaxy. Such events are rare, and non-accreting intermediate-mass black holes are challenging to find.
The 2019 carbon footprint of the W. M. Keck Observatory is estimated at 3.0 tonnes of CO2 equivalent per science night and that figure will move towards net zero over the next decade or so by decarbonizing the Observatory’s vehicle fleet, aviation footprint reductions and other measures.
The development and use of research infrastructures accounts for more than 70% of the carbon footprint of the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology. Our community needs to rethink this crucial facet of astronomical research to engage in effective and perennial reduction strategies.
Spectroscopic and photometric analyses show the B-type-star γ Columbae to be the exposed stellar core of a massive progenitor star that has just finished central hydrogen fusion.
The coda correlation wavefield technique provides a powerful tool for surveying planetary interiors using only data from a single station. Its application to the SEIS seismometer on the InSight lander, which has been providing unique data on the interior of Mars since 2018, is a promising example of what it can bring to planetary seismology studies.
A method that uses intersource correlograms measured by a single-station seismograph to constrain planetary interiors is presented. Applied to Mars, it measures a core radius of 1,812 ± 20 km, consistent with InSight direct-seismic-wave measurements. Such a method is useful in planetary exploration where the deployment of a full network of seismographs is unlikely.
The marsquakes dataset acquired by InSight shows that the Cerberus Fossae graben system is still actively opening, accounting for almost half of Mars’s seismic moment detected so far. This activity indicates the presence of a warm source located at 40 km depth, possibly due to local magmatic processes.
A simultaneous reconstruction of three functions describing the expansion of the Universe and gravitational effects on light and matter shows the extent to which modified gravity can address tensions between the standard cosmological model and a large body of observations.
Preliminary observations from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer of a well-studied X-ray pulsar are discordant with theoretical expectations, prompting a reassessment of our understanding of the accretion process.
X-ray polarimetry observations with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer constrain the accretion geometry in an X-ray pulsar and provide evidence for a misalignment of the spin, magnetic and orbital axes in Her X-1.
Using Gaia and XMM-Newton to constrain the distance to and properties of the central compact object of a supernova remnant, an extremely light (\(0.7{7}_{-0.17}^{+0.20}\) solar masses) neutron star has been found. This mass is twice as light as normally found for these kinds of object, and places limits on the allowed equations of state of neutron star matter.
A convolutional neural network trained with mock galaxy cluster maps is applied to real maps from the Planck satellite, successfully predicting the masses of over 1,000 observed clusters and finding a 15% bias in masses measured directly from Planck.
