Spirou often runs into fantastic adventures with his courageous, and sharp pet squirrel Spip. Their next adventure: a radial velocity spectrograph. What sophisticated technology is this? How does it work? What can it help us find?
Some variable stars seem to be “golden”, but is this property fundamental or just chance?
Astronomy & astrophysics is certainly an exciting field of research, but imagine there is a lot of research in other fields as well. How has research across different disciplines evolved in the past and how will astrophysics & astronomy do in terms of interdisciplinarity in the future?
How to form clumps in the intermediate ranges of massive protoplanetary disks? Could these later be planets?
A model that needs fewest parameters to explain a scenario is favourable. The fact that mm-size dust grains (chondrules) are present in the entire solar system brings rise to the question, whether all bigger solid objects are a collection of chondrules.
Earth’s atmosphere is about 100 times less massive than Venus’ atmosphere. This gave rise to the idea that Earth had a more massive atmosphere, which got then depleted by impacts. This Astrobite discusses what would have been the optimal impactor size.