Detailed atmospheric models reveal that planets can be habitable much closer to their host star than previously thought, provided they have desert-like climates. This expanded definition of the habitable zone increases the number of planets that could support life by a factor of 2-3.
The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment has found signatures in its data consistent with a dark matter Weakly Interacting Massive Particle. While not confident enough to declare a dark matter discovery, they estimate that there is only a 0.2% chance that these signatures are caused by random chance.
The authors present the discovery of a new hot carbon-atmosphere white dwarf with a strong magnetic field. This discovery might help illuminate the origins of a recently found class of white dwarfs.
It’s big, it’s active, and it’s only 20 million lightyears away– it is the Whirlpool galaxy, and astronomers are getting a brand new view. Using the Plateau de Bure interferometer, this paper examines the gas in this nearby grand-design spiral galaxy on arcsecond scales, resolving for the first time its individual molecular clouds. What does this tell us about star formation in this galaxy? Stay tuned!
In 2010 the Fermi-LAT reported a surprising discovery: detection of a gamma ray transient that appeared to come from a nova, V407 Cyg. Since V407 Cyg is a special type of nova, however, it was considered a one-off event. Now two other classical novae have also been found in gamma rays.
Huang et al. dig up evidence that distant “red nugget” galaxies grew into the massive ellipticals we see today by consuming smaller, gas-poor galaxies.