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Visible and near-infrared spectra of the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua indicate the presence of inhomogeneities in surface composition, which are dominated by organic-rich material after long-term exposure to cosmic rays. An ice-rich interior is not ruled out.
During reconfinement in unmagnetized relativistic jets, a centrifugal instability develops that leads to a turbulent state. This instability likely lies behind the division of active galactic nuclei jets into the two Fanaroff–Riley classes.
A global flow model of Europa’s icy crust coupled with the underlying ocean shows the presence of a meridional ice flow. Convection and ocean heat transport can affect the direction and intensity of the flow and the gradients in ice thickness.
Similar physical processes regulate the angular momentum of gas-giant planets and planetary-mass brown dwarfs. These processes are active mostly during the early phase of planetary evolution as rotation rates do not change after the first 2–300 Myr.
A novel unsupervised autoencoding recurrent neural network produces state-of-the-art supervised classification models. This network can continue to learn from new unlabelled observations and may be used in other unsupervised tasks.
Precise proper motions of Sculptor’s stars based on Gaia and the Hubble Space Telescope show that Sculptor moves on a high-inclination elongated orbit around the Milky Way and require abandoning conventional models for Sculptor’s mass distribution.
Black hole masses derived from the properties of the accretion disk and virial mass estimates differ by a factor that is inversely proportional to the width of the broad emission lines. An inclined planar gas distribution may account for this effect.
The extremely bright GRB 160625B, consisting of three sub-bursts separated by quiescent intervals, shows a transition from thermal to non-thermal radiation that indicates a change of jet composition from a fireball to a Poynting-flux-dominated jet.
The discovery of the most energetic transient event to date is reported. Its spectroscopic properties and temporal evolution imply it is powered by shock interaction between expanding material and large quantities of surrounding dense matter.
A galaxy at z ~ 1 is multiply imaged by strong lensing with different spatial resolutions. The properties of the giant stellar clumps within the galaxy depend on the resolution of the images. This observational effect must be considered in galactic models of star formation.
Sensitive X-ray polarization measurements of the Crab pulsar by the Indian AstroSat satellite confirm earlier indications of strongly polarized off-pulse emission but also reveal variations in polarization properties within the off-pulse region.
This paper reports the detection of a high-redshift galaxy that may be more representative of ‘normal’ star-forming galaxies formed in the first billion years of the Universe than the extreme starbursts discovered to date.
Tidal forcing within a very porous (unconsolidated) core can generate enough energy to drive all the observed global features of Enceladus. This activity can be sustained up to several billion years.
The atmosphere of evolved star W Hya has been resolved with ALMA and shown to be shock heated. These observations provide important empirical constraints for the understanding of circumstellar structure, convection, chemistry and pulsation.
Saturn’s proton radiation belts are quite an isolated system and can be used as a laboratory for endogenous impacts on planetary radiation belts. Their evolution over a solar cycle shows variations associated with changes in magnetospheric radial diffusion.
A delay between rapid optical and X-ray flux variations from an accreting black-hole binary is reported together with a brightening radio jet, indicating a characteristic elevation of the radiative jet base of 0.1 light-seconds above the black hole.
The authors discover that Jupiter's southern X-ray aurora is concentrated into a hot spot (until now only the north pole was known to have one), which behaves completely differently in brightness and timing pulsation from its northern counterpart.
The 2010–2011 storm that appeared at Saturn’s northern mid-latitudes significantly altered the wind structure and atmospheric temperature even far away from the storm, by disrupting the quasi-periodic atmospheric oscillations at the equator for more than 3 years.
A double neutron star merger gave rise to the gravitational-wave event GW 170817, with counterpart electromagnetic radiation in the optical and gamma-ray spectra. Polarization measurements of the optical emission reveal a lanthanide-rich macronova.
The authors detect hard X-ray emission produced by plasma heated at ≥10 million kelvin from a quiescent active region of the Sun, providing clear observational evidence of plasma heating by nanoflares, and hinting at their important role in coronal heating.