J. C.-Y. Lai et al 2017 AJ 154 206
Vinyl cyanide, which can form cell membrane-like structures in liquid methane, has been spatially mapped in Titan’s atmosphere, appearing to be most abundant at altitudes above 200 km.
Uri Malamud and Hagai B. Perets 2017 ApJ 849 8
Icy minor planets are shown to typically retain some of their water through their host star’s evolution into a white dwarf, allowing them to potentially pollute the white dwarf’s atmosphere after a later collision.
Zheng Cai et al 2017 ApJL 849 L18
HST observations suggest that smaller galaxies are main sources of intergalactic C IV absorbers, and such small galaxies play a major role in the metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium at z ≥ 5.
Roberta M. Humphreys et al 2017 ApJ 848 86
New results on two supernova impostors in NGC 2403 suggest that both survivors are now hot supergiant stars, and their progenitors were evolved massive stars that experienced eruptions or high-mass-loss events.
Alexandra E. Truebenbach and Jeremy Darling 2017 ApJS 233 3
A new catalog of 713 extragalactic proper motions is presented and used to model the secular aberration drift, an observer-induced effect caused by the acceleration of the solar system around our galaxy’s center.
Souradeep Bhattacharya et al 2017 ApJ 847 138
Analysis of the morphological shape of Berkeley 17, the oldest known open cluster (~10 Gyr), reveals that most massive stars have sunk to the core of the cluster, leaving the lower-mass stars to be stripped away.