Astronomers have known for a while that GRBs are sign-posts to galaxies which are forming lots of stars. But today’s paper used radio observations of the gas to connect that star formation to a recent merger.
For the very first time astronomers have used the SOFIA spacecraft to do precise measurements of a transiting exoplanet!
Do you own a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera? The authors of today’s paper do. They used it for astronomy. They used it for science.
In today’s paper, the authors use Cepheid distance moduli to study the structure of the SMC.
The authors of today’s paper created simulated galaxies, for which true properties are known. They then used synthetic observations to compare the true answers to the values observers would expect to recover.
Often science is a competition. Being first is sometimes important to get the well deserved credit for your work. Circumplanetary disks are currently a topic, in which you can still be first, since none has been detected so far. But is the current generation of telescopes already good enough to do that?