Galaxies of similar stellar mass to our own don’t all have the same bulge and black hole masses. So what determines how much mass will end up in the bulge and the black hole at the center of a Milky-Way-like galaxy? ...
Galaxies Grow Their Bulges and Black Holes in Diverse Ways - Eric F. Bell et al
On a cloudy but windless day in early summer 2013, a team of scientists gathered in Sweden to launch a balloon carrying the largest solar telescope to leave Earth. Now the team has published 13 papers describing what they learned from the spectacularly high-resolution ultraviolet observations of the Sun during the Sunrise II mission. ...
How many comets, asteroids, and planetary bodies are floating through interstellar space, not gravitationally bound to any solar system? A new study explores this question and what its answer means for our understanding of how solar systems form. ...
An Observational Upper Limit on the Interstellar Number Density of Asteroids and Comets - Toni Engelhardt et al
Earth is great place for life — but Venus definitely isn’t. Both planets have similar masses and densities. So why did one evolve to support life, while the other turned into a barren and inhospitable hothouse? This is a question we might be able to answer if we can gather observations of other planets similar to Earth and Venus. The recent discovery of an exo-Venus in our solar neighborhood brings us one step closer to this goal! ...
Kepler-1649b: An Exo-Venus in the Solar Neighborhood - Isabel Angelo et al
A team of scientists has used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to explore the host galaxy of the most distant quasar known. Their observations may help us to build a picture of how the first supermassive black holes in the universe formed and evolved. ...
The Compact, ~1 kpc Host Galaxy of a Quasar at a Redshift of 7.1 - Bram Venemans et al
Are planetary rings as common in our galaxy as they are in our solar system? A new study demonstrates how we might search for ringed exoplanets — and then possibly finds one! ...
Toward Detection of Exoplanetary Rings via Transit Photometry: Methodology and a Possible Candidate - Masataka Aizawa et al
Every year, astronomers submit over a thousand proposals requesting time on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Currently, humans must sort through each of these proposals by hand before sending them off for review. Could this burden be shifted to computers? ...
The Proposal Auto-Categorizer and Manager for Time
Allocation Review at Space Telescope Science Institute - Louis-Gregory Strolger et al
Quasars — active and luminous galactic centers — can be difficult to find at some high redshifts due to their camouflaging color. A team of scientists has now come up with a way to detect these distant monsters in spite of their disguise. ...
Discovery of 16 New z ~ 5.5 Quasars: Filling in the Redshift Gap of Quasar Color Selection - Jinyi Yang et al
The recent discovery of seven Earth-sized, terrestrial planets around an M dwarf star was met with excitement and optimism. But how habitable are these planets actually likely to be? A recent study of these planets’ likely climates may provide an answer to this question. ...
Assessing the Habitability of the TRAPPIST-1 System Using a 3D Climate Model - Eric T. Wolf
The young star Elias 2-27 is surrounded by a massive disk with spectacular spiral arms. A team of scientists from University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy has now examined what might cause this disk’s appearance. ...
On the Origin of the Spiral Morphology in the Elias 2–27 Circumstellar Disk - Farzana Meru et al
Submillimeter galaxies — i.e., galaxies that we detect in the submillimeter wavelength range — are mysterious creatures. It’s only within the last couple decades that we’ve had telescope technology capable of observing them, and we’re only now getting to the point where angular resolution limits allow us to examine them closely. A new study has taken advantage of new capabilities to explore the properties of a sample of 52 of these galaxies. ...
The SCUBA-2 Cosmology Legacy Survey: Multi-wavelength Properties
of ALMA-identified Submillimeter Galaxies in UKIDSS UDS - J. M. Simpson et al
Many of the exoplanets that we’ve discovered lie in compact systems with orbits very close to their host star. These systems are especially interesting in the case of cool stars where planets lie in the star’s habitable zone — as is the case, for instance, for the headline-making TRAPPIST-1 system.
But other factors go into determining potential habitability of a planet beyond the rough location where water can remain liquid. One possible consideration: whether the planets have moons. ...
Worlds without Moons: Exomoon Constraints for Compact Planetary Systems - Stephen R. Kane
What do we know about planet formation around stars that are so light that they can’t fuse hydrogen in their cores? The new discovery of an Earth-mass planet — orbiting what is likely a brown dwarf — may help us better understand this process. ...
An Earth-mass Planet in a 1 au Orbit around an Ultracool Dwarf - Y. Shvartzvald et al
In recent years, astronomers have developed many wide-field imaging surveys in which the same targets are observed again and again. This new form of observing has allowed us to discover optical and radio transients — explosive or irregular events with durations ranging from seconds to years. The dynamic infrared sky, however, has remained largely unexplored … until now. ...
SPIRITS: Uncovering Unusual Infrared Transients with Spitzer - Mansi M. Kasliwal et al
A team of scientists has observed the breakup of an asteroid as it orbits the Sun. In a new study, they reveal what they’ve learned from their ground- and space-based observations of this disintegration. ...
Anatomy of an Asteroid Breakup: The Case of P/2013 R3 - David Jewitt et al
An elliptical galaxy in the cluster Abell 2670 has been discovered with some unexpected features. What conditions led to this galaxy’s unusual morphology? ...
Discovery of Ram-pressure Stripped Gas around an Elliptical Galaxy in Abell 2670 - Yun-Kyeong Sheen et al
Plasma from the Sun known as the slow solar wind has been observed far away from where scientists thought it was produced. Now new simulations may have resolved the puzzle of where the slow solar wind comes from and how it escapes the Sun to travel through our solar system. ...
Formation of Heliospheric Arcs of Slow Solar Wind - A. K. Higginson et al
Major space-based observatories are imperative in astronomy, but they take a long time to plan, build, and launch — and they aren’t cheap. A new study examines an interesting compromise: a low-cost, space-based gamma-ray detector that we could use while we wait for the next big observatory to launch. ...
Scientific Performance of a Nano-satellite MeV Telescope - Giulio Lucchetta et al
The recent successes of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has raised hopes that several long-standing questions in black-hole physics will soon be answerable. Besides revealing how the black-hole binary pairs are built, could detections with LIGO also reveal how the black holes themselves form? ...
Are LIGO's Black Holes Made from Smaller Black Holes? - Maya Fishbach, Daniel E. Holz, Ben Farr
Sometimes important astronomical advances require the newest and fanciest observatories and technologies — but sometimes they just require decades of work and a lot of patience. Patience is finally paying off for a team of scientists who have been observing the Sirius star system for nearly 20 years. ...
The Sirius System and Its Astrophysical Puzzles:
Hubble Space Telescope and Ground-Based Astrometry - Howard E. Bond et al
Observations of the protoplanetary disks that surround young stars provide crucial information about the initial conditions for planet formation. In a recent study, a team of scientists has proposed a novel new approach for determining disk properties from observations. ...
Using Ice and Dust Lines to Constrain the Surface Densities of Protoplanetary Disks
A new telescope, the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), has joined the search for energetic and elusive fast radio bursts. And in just a few days of looking, it’s already had success! ...
The incredibly luminous massive star Eta Carinae has long posed a challenge for astronomers to model. New observations are now in … so were our models correct? ...
Resolving the Hα-emitting Region in the Wind of η Carinae - Ya-Lin Wu et al