Meet the AAS 248 Plenary Speakers: Ian Roederer
Where do the elements on the periodic table come from? Tune into Dr. Ian Roederer’s Plenary Lecture at #AAS248 to find out!
![[Guest] The Walking Dead: Warm Worlds Around Dead Stars](https://astrobites.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/IMG_8429-320x260.jpeg)
[Guest] The Walking Dead: Warm Worlds Around Dead Stars
For today’s bite guest author, Savaria Parrish, explores the prospects for habitability on planets around a class of stellar remnants known as white dwarfs!
Little Red (Dot), what a red, old, compact galaxy you are. All the better to confuse you with!
This guest post was written by Aylin Garcia Soto, a graduating Ph.D. student from Dartmouth University studying M dwarf variability. She will start a postdoc at Boise State University working with Dr. Brian Jackson on tidal decay in exostellar systems. Outside of research, she enjoys reading, watching K dramas (and other dramas), playing guitar, and writing creative stories. Title: Exploring the Active Galactic Nucleus Fraction of a Sample of JWST’s Little Red Dots at 4 < z < 8: Overmassive Black Holes Are Strong Flavored Authors: Emmanuel Durodola, Fabio Pacucci, Ryan C. Hickox First Author’s Institution: Department of Physics & Astronomy, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA Status: Published in ApJ [open access] The Little Red Dot Once upon a time there was an object called Little Red Dot. It lived a long long long (over 12 billion years) ago with a big big big (x10) ol’ black hole wrapped in a large dusty blanket. One day, a gentle-telescope named JWST took its camera to visit its universe, and on its way, it bumped into Little Red. Oh my, what a red, old, compact galaxy you are. All the better to confuse you with, my dear scientist. What strange spectral energy distribution you present. All the better to keep you guessing (what I am). The Little Red Dots and Modern AGNs Much of what we know about Little Red Dots (LRDs) arose after 2024 thanks to data from the JWST space telescope. These red objects represent emitted light from high-redshift or distant objects that formed about 1.5 billion years after the big-bang (13.8 billion years ago). To measure the...
The Universe’s Most Wanted Black Holes Finally Have an Alibi
GW231123 defies our best models of stellar collapse, hosting two black holes that shouldn’t exist. A new paper proposes a radical solution: these monsters may have been born in the early universe as primordial black holes, quietly feeding for billions of years until they became the record-breakers we detected today.
EXCELlent Work, Detectives! Solving the Murder of Star Formation in Galaxies with JWST
Who killed star formation in massive elliptical galaxies 8 billion years ago? The EXCELS survey uses JWST to find out!
![[Guest post] The Secret Life of sub-Neptunes and super-Earths](https://astrobites.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/subneptune-320x260.png)
[Guest post] The Secret Life of sub-Neptunes and super-Earths
There’s a puzzling gap in the distribution of exoplanet sizes. Today’s paper explores the role of photoevaporation and core composition on the formation of the radius valley.