Volume 4 Issue 6, June 2020

No confirmed counterparts during LIGO and Virgo’s third observing run bring more questions than answers to the active multi-messenger community, which is adapting collaboratively and technically as expectations evolve and more data are taken.

Microwave measurements of water vapour from the Juno spacecraft show that Jupiter is enhanced in oxygen by roughly three times the solar abundance at the equator. The water abundance is important in understanding the formation of Jupiter, the structure of its deep interior, and the nature of its clouds and weather.

The discovery of four bright fast radio bursts with accurate localization on the sky and association with nearby galaxies enabled a statistical estimate of the baryon content in the intergalactic medium and intervening galaxy halos by measuring the amount of ionized gas towards these sources.

A radio detection of an old red dwarf might reveal the presence of a planetary system, and open up the search for exoplanets to a new technique.

The cosmic origin of the heaviest elements in the periodic table remains a mystery. Estimates of the physical locations of element-producing events within small galaxies that formed in the early Universe are now providing new clues.

Key questions about ice on the red planet, its climate record and its potential for habitability were the subject of the seventh edition of the International Conference on Mars Polar Science and Exploration, held for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere.

High-resolution observations of the third largest asteroid, (2) Pallas, from SPHERE unveil a heavily cratered surface, probably due to Pallas’s inclined and eccentric orbit, a density almost equal to carbonaceous chondrites and hint at surficial salt-enriched spots.

Low-frequency radio emission from a normally quiescent M dwarf star suggests a radio aurora generated by the interaction between the stellar corona and an undetected Earth-sized planet.

Keen observations of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant have identified a circumstellar clump that lies outside the supernova shock front. This unprocessed material from the supernova progenitor contains iron in the gas phase, and is consistent with an origin within a blue supergiant star.

Our Galaxy’s disk is warped, and that warp is dynamic. Here, Poggio et al. measure the rate of precession of the Galaxy’s warp using a large sample of giant stars. Rather than primordial, the rate of precession indicates that the Milky Way acquired its warp during a recent or even ongoing encounter with another galaxy.

Relativistic modelling of long X-ray observations of a highly variable active galaxy reveals that the height of its X-ray corona increases with increasing luminosity. X-ray reverberation is shown to be a powerful technique to measure black hole masses.

Using two independent laser frequency combs to calibrate an astronomical spectrometer, researchers demonstrate a stability of ~1 cm s^–1, which is required for detecting low-mass rocky exoplanets around Sun-like stars.

Juno’s microwave radiometer data could measure the water concentration in the deep atmosphere of Jupiter (0.7 to 30 bar) at the equator: \(2.7^{+2.4}_{-1.7}\) times the solar O/H abundance, with a thermal vertical structure compatible with a moist adiabat.

A commonly held view is that presolar grains could not survive the high temperatures of the protoplanetary disk close to the Sun, where calcium–aluminium-rich inclusions (CAI) formed. Yet a detailed noble gas isotopic composition analysis of a CAI shows evidence of presolar SiC incorporated in it that could withstand high-temperature processing.

The combination of electromagnetic and gravitational-wave observations of binary neutron-star merger GW170817 with systematic sets of neutron-star equations of state has produced a tightly constrained radius of 11 km for a 1.4 M_⊙ neutron star. This constraint suggests that a neutron star–black hole merger is unlikely to produce an electromagnetic counterpart.