A new tool to investigate a century old mystery
The current and next generation of large scale spectroscopic surveys could provide new clues in the hunt for the carriers producing mysterious interstellar absorption features.
Lessons from Lithium
Is there a link between lithium abundance, galactic chemical evolution, and exoplanets? Ramirez et al. examine metallicities, lithium abundances, and stellar characteristics of 1381 Sun-like stars to find out.
How Common Are Long-Period Jupiters Around Massive Stars?
What fraction of massive stars host gas giants? Vigan et al. observe a sample of A and F stars to find out.
How to count stars you can’t see: the stellar IMF in distant galaxies
Van Dokkum & Conroy examane the variation of the stellar initial mass function by observing the integrated light from early-type galaxies.
This star lives in exciting times, or, How did Betelgeuse make that funny shape?
Sometimes we see strange shapes when we look through our fancy telescopes and we’re left wondering how they formed. How did the rings and “pearls” of SN1987A form? Or the hexagonal cloud pattern on Saturn? The star Betelgeuse – famous for being Orion’s left shoulder – presents another unusual geometric appearance.
How common is Common Envelope evolution?
It’s a fact of the universe that most stars are members of a binary system. However, our knowledge of stellar evolution has most thoroughly treated the case of a single, isolated star evolving according to its own schedule, dictated by the well-understood equations of stellar structure. What happens when the binary stars have tight enough orbits to influence each other?