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First the neutrinos arrived, then the burst of light: messengers of a cataclysmic event in the galaxy next door. Alak Ray recounts IAUS 331, a conference that celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the supernova of a lifetime, SN1987A, and explored the critical role of asymmetry in the explosions, surroundings and initial conditions.
The biggest black holes in the Universe were in place soon after the Big Bang. Explaining how they formed so rapidly is a daunting challenge, but the latest simulations give clues to how this may have occurred.
The Sun is a magnetically active rotating star. Simultaneous observations with the STEREO and SDO space missions reveal solar analogues of planetary Rossby waves that will help forecast space weather.
Black holes grow by accreting mass, but the process is messy and redistributes gas and energy into their environments. New evidence shows that magnetic processes mediate both the accretion and ejection of matter.
The destruction of stars by supermassive black holes appears to be rarer than predicted. A candidate stellar disruption in a kind of galaxy that is usually obscured may explain why.
Spectroscopic and imaging data for low metallicity galaxies observed during the peak epoch of star formation offer detailed insights into the most distant galaxies discovered to date.
From the first hints of unseen matter in the Universe to the present body of evidence for dark matter, James Peebles outlines the significant developments in observation and theory in the 1970s in this Insight Perspective.
The acceptance of dark matter came slowly despite its abundance. Jaco de Swart and colleagues reconstruct the history of how dark matter brought astronomers to cosmology in their Review Article, which is part of the Insight on dark matter.
Measurements now show that the distribution of meteorite compositions arriving to Earth was significantly different in the past and that the flux changes on short timescales.
The discovery of groups of dwarf galaxies in extremely isolated environments provides direct observational evidence of hierarchical assembly at small galactic scales.
The motion of the Local Group is due to the gravitational pull of nearby concentrations of galaxies and clusters — superclusters — but the push from a giant underdense region may be just as important.
