This year, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is celebrating its 20-year legacy. Dr. Ryan Hickox of Dartmouth College will explain how the resulting discoveries have shaped our view of the high-energy universe in his plenary talk at #AAS233.
The redshifts of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) can help us piece together the universe’s evolutionary timeline. Unfortunately, measuring these redshifts can be pretty tricky. In today’s astrobite, we look at a trick for estimating and constraining the redshifts of AGNs that are – ironically enough – partially obscured from our view.
Pulsars are weird in the first place, but PSR J1023+0038 is just a bit weirder.
Measuring stellar ages is difficult, so sometimes we need to resort to using indirect estimates. In today’s paper, we will see how to calibrate a cosmic clock for cool stars and, as a bonus, discover that the activity of these stars may decline faster than we previously thought.
Fomalhaut (a.k.a. the Eye of Sauron) has a dusty disk around it and an intriguing speck of light near the edge of the disk. But we don’t exactly know the nature of this object: Could it be… a neutron star?
X-ray studies of galaxy clusters tell us how the extremely hot gas is distributed within these gigantic structures. Looking at these clusters across different redshifts, what does one find?