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Orbiting supermassive black holes in the centres of nearby galaxies contribute to a gravitational-wave background over the whole sky. Networks of millisecond pulsars are sensitive to this signal. Creating maps of this background using information from known galaxies can help us to project when (and how) we may observe it.
More than 20 GW of power are necessary to balance the heat emitted by Enceladus and avoid the freezing of its internal ocean. A very porous core undergoing tidal heating can generate the required power to maintain a liquid ocean and drive hydrothermal activity.
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.
The tropical stratospheric temperature and wind field of several planets oscillate quasi-periodically. Recent Cassini observations show that Saturn’s oscillations were disturbed for more than three years by the year-long giant storm that appeared in 2010.
The first detection of electromagnetic emission from a gravitational wave source bridges the gap between one of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe and their dark, difficult to detect progenitors.
The discovery of Jupiter’s southern X-ray aurora reveals that it is tellingly different from the northern one, providing important clues to how Jupiter’s polar aurorae are generated.
The detection of bright, rapid optical pulsations from pulsar PSR J1023+0038 have provided a surprise for researchers working on neutron stars. This discovery poses more questions than it answers and will spur on future work and instrumentation.
The first extraterrestrial detections of a member of the organohalogen family of molecules have been made towards comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko and low-mass protostar IRAS 16293-2422. Chloromethane, considered to be a biomarker, can form efficiently abiotically.
Although predicted 50 years ago, the polarization of light from a rotationally distorted stellar atmosphere has only recently been detected, thanks to polarimetry measurements with precision at the parts-per-million level.
