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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.
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.
Early observations of the flaring object ASASSN-15lh led astronomers to cast it as the most luminous supernova ever. Now, convincing evidence indicates that this object is not as it seemed. In fact, fitting it into any known box is a challenge.
The detection of a tailed radio galaxy in a galaxy cluster conjoined to a region of diffuse radio emission confirms that radio galaxies provide the energetic electrons needed to explain the origin of this enigmatic emission.