The (not so) Sordid History of the Small Magellanic Cloud
The authors of today’s paper find out just what kind of star formation history lies in the Milky Way’s next meal: The Small Magellanic Cloud. After all, they say you are what you eat.
Characterizing Planets with BEER
Faigler et al. apply their BEER algorithm to a collection of stars in the Kepler field and find a hot Jupiter missed by the Kepler Science Team, showing a new way to find and characterize planets without follow-up observations.
The Whirlpool Galaxy Like You’ve Never Seen it Before
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!
Digging up “red nuggets” in local elliptical galaxies
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.
AAS Summer meeting in Indianapolis: The abstract deadline is approaching!
Astrobites will be at the 222nd AAS meeting in Indianapolis, IN from June 2-6, 2013! Will you? Although the regular abstract deadline has passed, you can still present a poster. The late deadline for the meeting is coming up soon: April 18 at 9:00 pm ET. Also, the regular registration deadline is even sooner: April 11. After this date the registration cost increases slightly. It is worth noting that junior AAS members (i.e. students that join AAS) pay a fraction of the normal registration cost, making it easy to convince your advisor to send you to meetings! See the AAS website here for more details on submitting your abstract and registering for the meeting.For our undergraduate readers that have not yet had a chance to attend a AAS meeting, let me take a moment to convince you to go. Attending a AAS meeting is a wonderful opportunity to become involved in the US’s largest professional astronomy society. The summer meeting provides many of the same types of events as the better-known winter meeting, but it is a bit less crowded and thus can often feel more personal. Some of the exciting activities include: the exhibit hall (with lots of free giveaways from astronomy organizations, observatories, universities and astro-related companies) plenary talks from award-winning scientists oral sessions on specialized topics in astronomy press releases (everyone is invited to attend, not just the media) several receptions and town hall meetings that are great to sit in on and hear about the state of the field poster sessions (including yours?) Perhaps most importantly, attending a AAS meeting lets you start building your astronomy network. You...
Going Big with LOFAR
Check out these cool new results from LOFAR which is boldly going to some of the longest wavelengths astronomers have ever observed! An active galaxy has a less active past than we might expect, pulsating neutron stars are behaving strangely, and even at wavelengths as long as meters, there are still spectral lines from extremely low-energy atomic transitions.