Volume 2 Issue 12, December 2018

There are efforts to establish a modern astronomical observatory on Timor Island, East Nusa Tenggara in Indonesia. This future observatory aims to answer fundamental astronomical questions and to strengthen the nation through education, research, science and technology.

Volcanic domes are common in our Solar System but so far only one has been identified on dwarf planet Ceres. New research suggests that numerous volcanic domes may have formed throughout Ceres’s history, indicating that cryovolcanism may have once been more common on the dwarf planet.

The positions and motions of galaxies are dictated by the laws of gravity. A new technique to measure the anisotropy in the three-dimensional redshift distribution of galaxies seriously challenges attempts to go beyond Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

The study of the early stages of galaxy cluster formation and their evolutionary path is critical for testing our structure-formation models and cosmological paradigm. Recent observations have pushed the detection of ‘protoclusters’ further back in time.

The identification and dating of ~30 cryovolcanic domes on Ceres from Dawn data shows that cryovolcanism has been continuous on the dwarf planet at least for the last 2.5 Gyr, but not at rates comparable with standard volcanism on terrestrial planets.

The IRIS spectrograph observed upward ‘pseudo-shocks’ (shocks exhibiting a discontinuity only in plasma density) over an active region of the Sun. Modelling shows that such pseudo-shocks contribute significantly to coronal heating and mass transport.

The primordial abundance of helium, set minutes after the Big Bang, is typically measured in star-forming regions in local metal-poor galaxies. Here the helium abundance of an intergalactic gas cloud is calculated using the light of a background quasar instead.

A giant protocluster of galaxies at redshift z ≈ 5.7 is found within a large overdense region containing at least 41 spectroscopically confirmed Lyα-emitting galaxies. It will collapse into one of the most massive clusters known to date.

Predictions for the clustering of galaxies based on general relativity (GR) and on one of its more compelling variants are contrasted with observations. The former agree impressively well with the data, providing strong confirmation of GR on cosmological scales.

Small polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are thought to be nucleation sites for the growth of Titan’s haze layers. Using laboratory experiments and electronic structure calculations, Zhao et al. show that small PAHs can by synthesized by rapid, barrierless reactions in Titan’s low-temperature environments.

Blue supergiant stars (BSGs) can undergo core collapse, resulting in a type II supernova explosion. Here, Tobias Fischer et al. identify a novel phase transition from nuclear matter to a quark–gluon plasma for particularly massive BSGs (>50 M_☉) that explains their explosion.

The James Webb Space Telescope may detect and distinguish a young galaxy that hosts a direct-collapse black hole and nearby massive metal-free star formation at redshift 15 with as little as a 20,000-second total exposure time across four filters.

A former ALMA prototype antenna has a new lease of life in the harsh conditions of Greenland, where it will play a key role in very-long-baseline interferometry observations of supermassive black holes, explain Nimesh Patel and Paul Ho.