An X-ray shell with a likely age of 20–30 thousand years has been discovered around a compact object; the progenitor star was likely more than 25 times the mass of the Sun.
The wind streaming off the accretion disk of Hercules X-1 is ionized by pulses from the neutron star, and the speed at which the wind reacts to these pulses can be used to measure the density of the wind.
For just the second time, researchers have observed an Earth-impacting meteroroid in multiple passbands prior to the object impacting Earth; this provides a wealth of data about this small near-Earth object.
Ramiz Aktar et al 2024 ApJ 972 18
An examination of the magnetically arrested disk (MAD) and standard and normal evolution (SANE) states of an accretion flow around a black hole demonstrates the luminosity and energy spectra of the two models.
After three decades of searching without success, researchers have at last detected emission from molecular gas — carbon monoxide, specifically — in the largest spiral galaxy known.
Data for 4,726 galaxies with redshifts between 0.6 and 1 allow for a determination of the ultraviolet luminosity function, which illuminates the sources of ionizing radiation during that period of the universe’s history.