Volume 6 Issue 6, June 2022

The Black In Astro Community formed through a need for support and community among predominantly early-career Black people working in astronomy. In just two years, Black In Astro has grown to have members across the globe. Its founder and organizers explain how it came about.

Eugene Parker, the father of heliophysics, passed away on 15 March 2022. Through his discovery of the solar wind, Parker built the foundation for our understanding of the Sun and its influence on and beyond the Solar System.

The Sun’s surface hosts varying magnetic activities and rotation rates (from equator to pole), and unique solar weather. Now, a combination of ground and space observations has unveiled a previously undetected magnetized plasma current.

Accretion is the process that dictates the mass, and therefore final fate, of a forming star. Now, it seems that the number of stars forming in a system can affect and even induce accretion throughout the star-formation process.

The Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko found unexpectedly high concentrations of molecular oxygen in its atmosphere. New results show that these concentrations are enhanced by a cycle of trapping and releasing of molecular oxygen just below the comet’s surface.

Recent advances in plasma turbulence theory have led to a new way of explaining the heating of the solar corona and many of the observed features of the solar wind.

A protoplanet seen forming at some distance from its star provides evidence for planet formation via gravitational instability, a mechanism previously invoked for being responsible for the fully formed gas giant planets at large separations seen by direct imaging.

As the population of Earth’s orbital environment and human exploration of space intensifies, it is critical to have a strong ethical framework in place so that mistakes of the past are learned from and not repeated.

RS Ophiuchi is the first nova to be detected in the very-high-energy range. Its gamma-ray emission provides evidence of proton acceleration following the thermonuclear outburst. These observations offer new insight into the origin of cosmic rays.

Many interplanetary dust particles collected in Earth’s stratosphere spent millions of years exposed to solar radiation during their journey from sources beyond Neptune, namely the distant Kuiper belt. These Kuiper belt particles are a previously unrecognized population contributing to the zodiacal cloud and to the mass of dust accreted annually by Earth.

This Perspective summarizes the latest observational evidence for star formation feedback and the important role of external ionizing radiation for the smallest galaxies, showing how this feedback directly impacts their properties, including their dark matter distribution.

This article reviews the properties of the dwarf galaxies of the Local Group from the point of view of their stellar dynamics and dark matter content and distribution, as inferred from the combination of observed data and dynamical models.

Using asteroseismology to analyse 7,000 helium-burning red giants observed by NASA’s Kepler mission results in the separation of two classes of stars that must have undergone considerable mass loss, presumably due to stripping in binary interactions.

Spectroscopic and astrometric characterization of a quadruple star system composed of a pair of binary stars shows that the components will eventually merge to form white dwarfs, before potentially generating a sub-Chandrasekhar type Ia supernova.

Detection of the 2021 outburst of the nova RS Oph in very-high-energy gamma rays by the MAGIC telescopes is reported. Investigation of the gamma-ray emission provides evidence for acceleration of protons within the nova shock, which then propagate outwards to create bubbles of enhanced cosmic ray density.

Well-observed gamma-ray binary system LS I +61° 303 consists of a high-mass star and a compact object whose nature is unknown. Here, transient radio pulsations detected with the sensitive FAST telescope suggest that the compact object is a rotating neutron star.

Using a binary population synthesis model, the population of millisecond pulsars resulting from the accretion-induced collapse of O–Ne white dwarfs in the Galactic bulge is shown to reproduce characteristics of the Galactic Centre gamma-ray excess.

The discovery of high-frequency inertial waves in the near-surface layers of the Sun—travelling much faster than hydrodynamics alone would allow—points to hidden dynamics of unknown nature below the surface of the Sun.

The helicity barrier mechanism causes transfer of Alfvénic turbulent energy into ion-cyclotron waves in the solar atmosphere, playing a key role in solar-wind heating and in generating the observed differences between slow and fast solar wind.

Seasonal changes in the correlation between O₂ and H₂O in comet 67P’s coma are indicative of two reservoirs of molecular oxygen in the nucleus, a deeper primordial one and a surficial one, suggesting that the observed high abundance of O₂ and its association with H₂O are not reflective of the original accretion source.

A laboratory analysis of track-rich interplanetary dust grains collected from our stratosphere reveals their origin in the distant Kuiper belt, which allows researchers to probe the chemical properties of Kuiper belt objects and our debris disk.

TOI-500 hosts at least four planets, the innermost of which is an Earth-sized ultra-short-period body with a density similar to Earth. The architecture of the TOI-500 system can be explained by a slow, secular, low-eccentricity migration scenario.

Images from the Subaru Telescope and the Hubble Space Telescope reveal an embedded protoplanet at a wide separation around the star AB Aurigae. The system provides evidence for a long-considered alternative mechanism for forming Jupiter-like planets.