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An aMACEing set of radio galaxy flares
The brand new MACE gamma-ray telescope detects two mysterious flares from a radio galaxy!
Tuning Black Hole Data for LISA to Hear
In today’s Astrobite, the authors create a mock massive black hole data set to test whether their LISA analysis pipeline can recover their mock data.
20,000 stars later they didn’t find a single planet (and that’s cool too!)
Hot stars seem to host fewer small planets than their cold star cousins.
Unmasking the little red dots: AGN or not?
Did we figure out what is behind the little red dot mask ? Find out in today’s bite.
Them’s the (Balmer) breaks
Little Red Dots have been puzzling astronomers, learn more about what might be powering these strange, young galaxies.
Fresh Eyes on the Orion Molecular Cloud Complex
Today’s paper gives us the first glimpse of the rich data taken with the new Local Volume Mapper project.
Beyond astro-ph
Astronomy beyond the research
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Navigating careers in astronomy
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Running your first SPH simulation
Today’s astrobite will be a sequel to a post I wrote a few months ago on using the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) code Gadget-2. In the first post, I went over how to install Gadget and showed how to run one of the test cases included in the Gadget distribution. Today, I’d like to show how to set up, run, and analyze a simple hydrodynamics test problem of your own. Perhaps one of the oldest topics in astrophysics is the study of binary stars. In 1767, the British natural philosopher John Michell used an early form of statistical analysis to show that the number of closely separated pairs of stars in the night sky is far higher than what one might expect from a randomly distributed field of stars. How do these binary pairs form? Modern astrophysics offers several answers, and in today’s post, we will focus on one possible mechanism: the direct formation of a binary star pair by the collapse of a rotating isothermal sphere of gas. We will approach this problem using a formulation first proposed by Alan Boss and Peter Bodenheimer in 1979 and later modified by Andreas Burkert and Peter Bodenheimer in 1993. The so-called standard isothermal test case models the gravitational collapse of a one solar mass, spherical, rigidly rotating molecular cloud with a small-amplitude m = 2 density perturbation. If we wish to simulate the collapse, we first need to set up the initial conditions for the simulation. You can obtain initial conditions files from the following url: http://ngoldbaum.net/astrobites/SICtest.tgz. You can also generate your own initial conditions using the supplied codes. To summarize, the…
AAS #218: Boston or bust
Over the past three and a half days, I joined astronomers from all over the world for the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The AAS holds two major meetings every year, one in the winter and one in the summer. This year’s summer conference in Boston just wrapped up and in this astrobite I’ll report on two of the talks I attended.
Jonathan Fortney: Scientific Temperament
Today I have the pleasure to introduce one of our faculty members here at UC Santa Cruz to the Astrobites community. Jonathan Fortney is an expert on the atmospheres and interiors of giant planets and has a unique perspective on the process of science in a newly emerging field. Instead of a specific scientific topic, Jonathan wanted to impart some wisdom on the criteria he uses to choose a research topic to work on.“For my scientific temperament I needed a field that was more controversial, more open-ended and new, where quick was useful and sloppy did not matter too much because it would all change soon anyway.” –Ed Salpeter (ARAA, 2002, 40:1–25)When scientists write about their own work and their careers, you can learn a lot from their experience. Given all the writing that scientists do, it is unfortunately rare for someone to actually write about the science they do, rather than just reporting results and ramifications. There is precious little written about why a certain problem was chosen or why the astronomer found it interesting in the first place.From time to time I like to read through what I call the “looking back on my career” article in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. There is one of these every year. They get a famous astronomer to write about the highs (and lows?) of their careers. I’ve read a several of these, from giants in the field like Ed Salpeter and Al Cameron. You get a good feel for what the exciting questions were at various points of their careers, and how that changed the focus of…
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