The Crab Nebula has long been used as a standard candle in order to calibrate high-energy instruments … but it turns out it’s had us fooled all along! This paper gives an overview of what we’ve been missing from the Crab Nebula, and what this could mean for our understanding of high-energy astrophysics.
What prevents newly-formed stars from spinning so fast that they break apart? This paper explores the effectiveness of gravitational torque as a braking force.
White papers are how scientists share their ideas for projects with the scientific community. This recent example, submitted to the Heliophysics Decadal Survey, proposes building a radio telescope on the Moon.
What happens when a normally-dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy tears apart a passing star and burps it back out again in the form of a jet? The authors of this paper think that the Swift satellite has recently witnessed exactly this!
The interaction of jets from SS433 with the supernova remnant W50 should create a very different nebula shape than what we observe. Could changes in SS433’s past be the cause of this?