Looking through the eccentricity pinhole
Only a tiny fraction of black hole binaries produce gravitational waves with measurable eccentricity. What does the eccentricity distribution tell us about how these binaries formed?
Hunting for Exomoons Around a Lonely Planet
Moons are abundant within our own solar system, but astronomers have historically struggled to find moons (exomoons) within other systems beyond our own. Yet, today’s authors suggest that the James Webb Space Telescope may be the key for solving this missing exomoon problem.
Guest: A Pricey Path to Habitable Planets: Expanding the VLTI to Directly Probe Exoplanets
Today’s authors propose upgrades to the VLTI that will allow us to search for signs of life on distant worlds.
Looking at Ultrahigh-Energy Cosmic Rays From Many Angles (Specifically, 0 ≤ θ ≤ 80° and -90° ≤ δ ≤ 44.8°)
If you have a cosmic mystery on your hands, surely it helps to examine it from as many angles as possible? Today’s authors do that, literally, while investigating the highest-energy particles in the universe.
Guest: The closest look into the largest nearby cosmic structures: a foray into the Fornax galaxy cluster
Galaxy clusters are collections of galaxies that are bound together by gravity. They are the largest structures that exist in our Universe, and their mass is dominated by the hot gas that lies between galaxies called the intracluster medium. One of the closest galaxy clusters is Fornax, and it was recently studied in detail using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa. This bite dives deep into a study of the magnetic field of this cluster and the implications the results have of our understanding of clusters of galaxies.
FIREstorms in early galaxies: Simulating the brief, blazing lives of giant clumps
What do a galaxy’s stellar clumps tell us about how it formed? Today’s guest author Michelle Park explores interesting properties of clumps from the FIRE simulations.