Quasar PSO J334.2028+01.4075 has a very healthy heart rate of 6.7 beats per decade, or once every 542 days. One explanation is that this guy hosts a pair of supermassive black holes. If true, then the astonishing interpretation of this quasar’s heart rate is that its black holes are only a few orbits away from merging!
Today’s paper introduces a project called astroEDU. They’re aiming to make astronomy learning resources, like those you can find on Wikiversity, easier to find and of higher quality. To do this, the authors introduce a peer-review structure for education materials modeled on the one widely-accepted for scholarly research.
In today’s paper, Rezzolla and Kumar present a solution to the x-ray afterglow problem for the short gamma ray burst model. They show that x-rays can glow steadily for hours after the initial gamma ray emission due to the interactions of a slow and a fast wind.
What kind of lens is a BBH merger? These authors present the first pictures of light sources lensed by numerical models of BBH mergers.
Our local “basin of attraction” is the region containing all the galaxies that would contract to a single point, if we were to neglect the dominant expansion. The authors define this region as our home supercluster, Laniakea.