Monthly Roundup: The Supermassive Black Hole of Messier 87
The massive nearby elliptical galaxy Messier 87 hosts one of the most-studied supermassive black holes in the universe. What have researchers recently learned about this black hole’s spin, jets, and flares?
The “Rhythm” of the Interstellar Medium
Astrobites reports on the interplay between the interstellar medium and star formation in simulated galaxies.
What powers the prominent helium emission from Hebe, a gas clump seen just 450 million years after the Big Bang?
Noble Gases Along for the Ride
How did neon end up inside Earth’s mantle, and what does that tell us about how our planet formed?
Hydrocarbons keep turning up in surprising places. This time, they’ve been found near a pair of accreting supermassive black holes 3 billion years after the Big Bang.
What if Mars Were a Stranger (Thing)?
Astrobites reports on whether we’d even know what we were looking at if our familiar red neighbor were a stranger light-years away.
The galaxies FCC 224 and FCC 240 appear to be a rare example of a dark-matter-poor, globular-cluster-rich pair formed via colliding dwarf galaxies.
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 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.