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Volume 1 Issue 8, August 2017

Comment & Opinion

  • Giovanni Fabrizio Bignami, ‘Nanni’ to his friends, suddenly passed away on 25 May 2017. A pioneer in the field of gamma-ray astrophysics, he identified Geminga: a mysterious, radio quiet, gamma-ray pulsar. He was an undisputed leader, manager, maestro, colleague and friend.

    • Pietro Ubertini
    Obituary

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  • Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are empirically divided into ‘radio-loud’ and ‘radio-quiet’. These 50-year-old labels are obsolete, misleading and wrong. I argue that AGNs should be classified as ‘jetted’ and ‘non-jetted’ based on a physical difference — the presence (or lack) of strong relativistic jets.

    • Paolo Padovani

    Insight:

    Comment
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Books & Arts

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Research Highlights

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News & Views

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Reviews

  • Total solar eclipses are a unique opportunity to study the lower solar corona where the solar wind originates. This review presents the recent advancements in coronal science from eclipses and the scientific and outreach plans for this year's totality.

    • Jay M. Pasachoff
    Review Article
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Research

  • Low-mass black holes that accrete stars from locally dense environments grow over the Hubble time above a minimal mass of 105 solar masses, independently of their initial mass. This explains why there are no convincing cases of intermediate-mass black holes to date.

    • Tal Alexander
    • Ben Bar-Or

    Insight:

    Letter
  • Combining studies of star formation rates with studies of cloud–magnetic field alignment has revealed that magnetic fields are a primary regulator of star formation. Perpendicular alignment inhibits star formation, whereas parallel alignment facilitates it.

    • Hua-bai Li
    • Hangjin Jiang
    • Yapeng Zhang
    Letter
  • Multiple stars are thought to form either through disk fragmentation or turbulent fragmentation, but the latter has had no clear observational confirmation. Here the authors report misaligned disks around a wide-binary pair, a sign of turbulent fragmentation.

    • Jeong-Eun Lee
    • Seokho Lee
    • Neal J. Evans
    Letter
  • Most of the Mars Trojans — asteroids co-orbiting the planet — are dynamically related; thus, they have a common origin. Joint information from spectral observations and dynamical modelling suggests that they were ejected from Mars itself after an impact.

    • D. Polishook
    • S. A. Jacobson
    • O. Aharonson
    Letter
  • M dwarfs harbour stellar dynamos driven by convective motions in their interiors. Previously, the magnetic field strengths generated by these dynamos were thought to saturate at 4 kG, but this limit has now been busted by four stars with dipole dynamo states.

    • D. Shulyak
    • A. Reiners
    • O. Kochukhov
    Letter
  • Some star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud have extended main-sequence turnoffs, suggesting that the component stars have different ages. However, if the blue main-sequence stars were initially spinning rapidly, and experienced braking, the apparent age difference disappears.

    • Francesca D’Antona
    • Antonino P. Milone
    • Marcella Di Criscienzo
    Letter
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Mission Control

  • NASA's New Horizons mission to the outer Solar System has revolutionized our understanding of the Pluto–Charon system. But, Richard P. Binzel explains, this is only half the story of this intrepid spacecraft, as it voyages even further through the Kuiper Belt.

    • Richard P. Binzel
    Mission Control
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