An optical flare is thought to be the result of the secondary supermassive black hole in OJ 287 impacting the accretion disk of the primary black hole; this potentially repeating occurrence has never been seen before.
A 10-day campaign tested the capabilities of global defense systems to respond to a potential near-Earth asteroid impactor, launching into efforts to characterize and track the object.
A recent search for planets around a 23-million-year-old star finds no planetary companions but does constrain the properties of the debris disk, including its inclination and dust grain size.
Yuanyuan Yang et al 2024 ApJ 965 111
Modeling investigates the fate of cosmic rays from blazars; these high-energy particles must survive long journeys through the plasma of the intergalactic and interstellar media to reach our detectors.
New work shows that the population of novae in the Milky Way and in Andromeda are similar and, despite some expectations to the contrary, are unlikely to be good extragalactic distance indicators.
Though black holes themselves don’t emit light, material trapped in orbit around them certainly can; new theoretical work shows how a black hole could be accompanied by pulsed emission like a pulsar.