What’s Next For Kepler?
NASA is looking for a new mission for the damaged Kepler space telescope. Here are some ideas.
Chandra Observes Sgr A* Rejecting Material
Sgr A* – the supermassive black hole sitting in the center of the Milky Way – is often referred to as a ‘starved’ black hole, meaning that it swallows very little of the nearby cosmic gas and dust. The authors of this paper observed Sgr A* with the Chandra X-ray telescope for 3 mega seconds, throughout which only 1% of the gas available to Sgr A* actually accreted onto the black hole. It swallows cold gas, while rejecting hot gas – ejecting the matter back into space.
Kepler’s view on the gravity of stars
A study of Kepler data reveals a correlation between brightness fluctuations and surface gravity of stars.
Data to the Extreme
Lots and lots more data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
Another hungry black hole devours a star
Maksym et al. investigate a possible tidal flare event in Abell 1795.
(Not) Detecting Planets around Brown Dwarfs with Radio Waves
Forbich, Berger, and Reid attempt to use a large radio array to detect stellar wobbles induced by orbiting planets at larger separations than are usually probed