Features

Dating the Dawn of the Milky Way Disk

A recent study used the kinematics, chemical composition, and ages of thousands of stars to determine when the Milky Way settled into the spiral disk we know it as today.

white dwarf with debris disk

White dwarfs with metals in their spectra preserve a record of planets that once orbited them. New research examines these spectra for signs that the metals underwent technological processing.

side-by-side images of Venus's surface today and an imagining of what its surface might have looked like in the past
Astrobites

Can Arid Planets Keep Their Cool?

Astrobites reports on why dry planets may be missing the critical thermostat of the geologic carbon cycle, which has helped to stabilize Earth’s climate over billions of years.

close-up image of the Sun showing a solar flare

When a powerful solar flare saturates a detector, the information about the flare is lost — or is it? New research validates a technique for extracting knowledge from saturated images of solar flares.

An oblique-angle photograph of a deep crater half in shadow.

How do you pick a landing site before you know how you’re going to land? The scientists behind NASA’s latest Moon missions are working on just that.

star-forming cloud OMC-2

Do all clusters form stars with the same distribution of masses? Researchers have demonstrated that the initial mass function, often assumed to be universal, varies across Milky Way clusters.

distant starburst galaxies

Astrobites reports on whether some of the most massive galaxies in the early universe are truly quenched, or if they’re just hiding their star formation behind dust.

Bullet Cluster with mass countours

Using data from JWST and the Dark Energy Camera, researchers have revisited a long-standing issue with measurements of the famous Bullet Cluster.

TESS in space

A recent study has leveraged TESS’s full-sky coverage to build a catalog of stellar rotation periods for over a million stars.