The Shape of Shade
Direct imaging of exoplanets is a tricky business, but with a well-designed starshade blocking the light of the exoplanet’s parent star, it could be much easier! But how do you choose the right design?
Searching for Pandora
Habitable exomoons appear all over science fiction, but could they exist in real life? Could we detect them if they did?
The young stellar population in 30 Doradus
Paper title: Star Formation in 30 Doradus Authors: Guide De Marchi et al. First author’s affiliation: European Space Agency, Space Sciences Department The 30 Doradus star forming region, located 50 kpc away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is home to the closest super star cluster, R136. Containing about 2400 OB stars, the star cluster emits about 80 million times more radiation than the sun, with a large fraction of the radiative power coming out as ionizing photons. The star cluster has carved out a bubble of ionized gas, the HII region NGC 2070, and is associated with several supernova remnants, the product of previous generations of massive star formation.While much is known about the properties of the massive stars in the region, relatively little is known about the low-mass pre-main-sequence population. Assuming the IMF is well-sampled, the vast majority of the stellar mass should in fact be associated with stars about as massive as the sun. Although these stars should be numerous, they are hard to see directly as they are intrinsically faint and relatively distant. Fortunately, the Hubble Space Telescope recently received an upgrade, making it capable of carrying out the necessary observations.The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) is Hubble’s new panchromatic camera. WFC3 can do accurate photometry at high spatial resolution over a large field of view and is very sensitive in the near UV and IR. This paper focuses on observations in three visual passbands, V-band (centered at 550 nm), I-band (centered at 880 nm), and a narrow-band filter centered on the Hα line. The authors identify all the stars that occur in all three images and that...
What makes more stars: bars or mergers?
Star formation at the center of galaxies can be triggered by both internal and external processes. In their new work, Ellison et al. argue that the internal processes may be more important.
Playing the quiet game with CCDs
Charge Coupled Devices (CCDs) are workhorses of observational astronomy. These chips are commonly used as imaging detectors in telescopes, but they have wide applications from spectroscopy to drug discovery. This paper presents read-out results from Skipper CCDs recently developed at Berkeley Labs which feature low readout noise.
Looking back in time with DASCH
How do stars vary on a hundred year time scale? The DASCH (Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard) Team has been looking back at data taken over the last century in order to answer this question. This paper reports the most recent DASCH discovery, which concerns the star KU Cyg. This is an eclipsing binary system in which a more massive F star is gaining mass from a red giant. The authors noticed a 0.5 magnitude drop in the brightness of the star around 1900 that lasts for five years.