Is that a planet?
Is it a comet or a planet?
Probing Dark Energy With WFIRST and Euclid
Two upcoming space telescope missions, WFIRST and Euclid, will be able to shed light on the nature of the mysterious dark energy.
The feeding habits of supermassive black holes
One possible way to directly infer black hole properties is by observing the sort of event discussed in today’s paper: the tidal disruption of an individual star after a close approach to a supermassive black hole.
New measurements of star formation at intermediate redshift
Astronomers in Leiden have measured star formation rates across a large range in redshift with H-alpha spectroscopy for the first time, which is a huge leap forward in our ability to compare the local Universe with high-redshift.
The Lensing Galaxy Cluster That Shouldn’t Exist
The authors discover a strong lensing arc behind an unusually massive galaxy cluster at high redshift. The existence of such a lensing system at high redshift is found to be inconsistent with the standard cosmological model.
How to count stars you can’t see: the stellar IMF in distant galaxies
Van Dokkum & Conroy examane the variation of the stellar initial mass function by observing the integrated light from early-type galaxies.