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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.
How do you build a (distance) ladder from the closest stars to the far-away supernovae and all the way back to the last scattering surface of the Universe? Jeremy Mould summarizes some of the highlights of the Stellar Populations and the Distance Scale conference.
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.
The New Horizons spacecraft performed a flyby of Pluto and its system in July 2015, providing more than 50 Gb of high-resolution images and data that transformed our view and understanding of the dwarf planet. This Review summarizes its main discoveries.
The material surrounding accreting supermassive black holes connects them with their hosts. From studies in the infrared and X-rays, the structure of this material is found to be complex, clumpy and dynamic.
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.
Radio astronomy will be transformed by future surveys that will study tens of millions of radio sources, providing new insights into a broad range of open questions in astronomy. This transformation, and the lead-up to it, is summarized in this Review.
