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The stunning discovery image of the spiral dust plumes enshrouding a Wolf–Rayet binary system dubbed Apep provides new trails of evidence that may bring us closer to resolving outstanding questions on the evolution and death of massive stars.
A model of the optical light detected following the merger of two neutron stars reveals polarization to be a unique probe of the geometry of the kilonova explosion that accompanied the gravitational waves.
Chariklo, Haumea and potentially Chiron are the only known ringed Solar System objects that are not giant planets. The rings of these minor bodies are relatively further from their hosts than those around giant planets; this increase is shown to be due to resonances driven by modest topographic features or elongations.
A model of optical polarization provides a framework for studying the composition and dynamical evolution of the ejecta from the kilonova explosion accompanying the gravitational-wave event GW 170817, as well as future kilonovae.
A serpentine plume of dust around a Wolf–Rayet binary indicates the presence of an anisotropic colliding-wind system in which one of the components is likely to be rapidly rotating. Spun-up Wolf–Rayet stars are thought to be long gamma-ray burst sources.
Information on stellar populations of the grand-design spiral galaxy UGC 3825 is exploited to measure the offset between young stars of a known age and the spiral arm in which they formed. The measured offset is consistent with a quasi-stationary density wave.
A network of parallel ridges on the northwestern border of Sputnik Planitia on Pluto are the traces of debris material deposited by a glaciation of icy nitrogen that happened early in Pluto’s history, and left there once the N2 ice disappeared by sublimation.
With a lepto-hadronic jet model and recent multi-messenger data, it is shown that a moderate enhancement in cosmic rays during a blazar flare can yield an increased neutrino flux, which is limited by co-produced hard X-rays and TeV gamma rays.
An ultrahigh-energy neutrino event detected with the IceCube detector in Antarctica, simultaneous and co-spatial with a multi-wavelength outburst of a blazar about 3 billion light years away, points unambiguously to lepto-hadronic cooling mechanisms in jetted active galactic nuclei.
Dust accretion onto a white dwarf follows a broken power-law decay, assuming the dust source is mainly delivered via dynamically falling asteroids perturbed by a Jovian planet. Dust disks are present in the early stage of the metal pollution process.
Direct measurement of stellar rotational velocities in a Galactic open star cluster, combined with a simulation, show that rapidly rotating stars can appear redder, thus broadening the main sequence turn-off. Multiple populations of cluster stars are not required to reproduce the observations.
The field of gamma-ray burst astronomy arguably went through three decades of growing pains before reaching maturity. What development lessons can be learned for the adolescent field of fast radio burst astronomy?
Contrary to usual assumptions, new astronomical observations suggest that dark matter may be self-interacting. If true this would rule out most popular dark matter particle candidates, including supersymmetric neutralinos, axions and sterile neutrinos, as well as black holes.