Features

Monthly Roundup (Halloween Edition): Graveyards of Shredded Stars

Researchers have identified dozens of stars tidally disrupted by black holes, and upcoming surveys may discover 1,000 of these rare events each year. Today’s Monthly Roundup introduces three studies that have advanced our understanding of shredded stars.

Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope

Astrobites reports on tests of cosmological models using measurements of nearly 2,000 supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey and other sources.

simulation snapshot showing neutron stars about to merge
Features

Monster Shocks from Collapsing Magnetars

The collapse of a magnetar into a black hole may power the strongest shocks in the universe and produce brief, bright flashes of gamma rays.

galaxies of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field

Space is filled with structures that we can’t see directly. How do astronomers trace the underlying dark-matter distribution of the universe?

A data-driven approach identifies stars with interesting infrared emission without relying on computationally expensive modeling.

Infrared images of the exoplanet HIP 65426 b from JWST

Astrobites reports on an analysis of the orbital architecture of JWST’s first directly imaged exoplanet using time-series photometry data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite.

19 spiral galaxies photographed by JWST

Nineteen nearby spiral galaxies surveyed by JWST are presented in one grand ensemble along with a customized image-processing pipeline.

Artist's rendition of white dwarf merger

While Type Ia supernovae have been used to determine cosmological distances and study the expansion of the universe, their origins are still under investigation. Recent simulations point to a double-detonation scenario being the catalyst for some of these extremely energetic events.

brown dwarf Gliese 229 B as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope

New observations show that Gliese 229 B is two brown dwarfs rather than one, resolving the mismatch between its measured mass and predictions of evolutionary models.