Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

Volume 8 Issue 2, February 2024

Gazing at galaxies from the edge of space

SuperBIT is a wide-field, diffraction-limited optical and near-UV imager of the sky that was designed to travel via the seasonal winds at an altitude of 33 km. Suspended from a scientific balloon rather than a crane, its April 2023 mission took in views of merging galaxy clusters, galaxies, and massive star winds from the stratosphere.

See Massey et al.

Image: Barth Netterfield (University of Toronto). Cover design: Bethany Vukomanovic.

Editorial

  • Twenty years ago, the Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on Mars. Over the next 15 years, they showed us a planet that was warmer and wetter — and capable of sustaining life — that we now take as read.

    Editorial

    Advertisement

Top of page ⤴

Comment & Opinion

  • In academia, we ignore the whole person to the detriment of the growth of the scientist and the community. Trauma is a black hole eating away at the health of individual scientists.

    • Allison Kirkpatrick
    World View
  • The NANOGrav collaboration has found light-years long gravitational waves from, most likely, the mergers of millions of supermassive black holes. To keep watching this cosmic dance, we need sustained funding for black hole research.

    • C. M. F. Mingarelli
    World View
Top of page ⤴

Research Highlights

Top of page ⤴

News & Views

  • Kepler-1625b-I and Kepler-1708b-I are the most noteworthy exomoon candidates to date. A new analysis of the available data comes to a different conclusion.

    • Sascha Grziwa
    News & Views
  • In October 2023, astronomers, planetary scientists and biologists gathered in Kyiv for Ukraine’s first international astrobiology meeting, advancing science and crossing disciplinary borders in wartime.

    • Charles S. Cockell
    • Natalia O. Kozyrovska
    • Ganna V. Zubova
    Meeting Report
Top of page ⤴

Research Briefings

  • Periodic sub-structure in radio emission from magnetars provides an observational link not only between magnetars and fast radio bursts, but across all classes of radio-emitting rotating neutron stars. The correlation between sub-structure periodicity and neutron-star rotational period can be used to determine an underlying period for fast radio bursts.

    Research Briefing
  • The optical properties of the organic hazes that form in water-rich exoplanet atmospheres differ from those that form in nitrogen-rich atmospheres. This difference in optical properties can have an observable effect on spectral observations of exoplanets and could impact the interpretation of current and upcoming JWST observations.

    Research Briefing
Top of page ⤴

Research

Top of page ⤴

Access Code

  • Volker Springel created the original GADGET code more than 25 years ago. Now it supports some of the largest simulations in astrophysics, and is being developed to do vastly more.

    • Paul Woods
    Access Code
Top of page ⤴

Mission Control

  • The SuperBIT telescope spent more than a month being carried through the stratosphere by a scientific balloon, imaging space from above 99.5% of the Earth’s atmosphere.

    • Richard Massey
    • C. Barth Netterfield
    • William C. Jones
    Mission Control
Top of page ⤴

Search

Quick links