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Environments where stars are abundantly formed are more conducive to stellar tidal disruption events, as evidenced by the detection of the remains of a star being accreted by a supermassive black hole within a starburst galaxy.
A binary system containing a ‘polluted’ white dwarf must host a stable, rocky, circumbinary debris disk, argue Farihi and colleagues. Therefore large planetesimal formation, and potentially terrestrial planet formation, must be robust and common in such systems.
An uncharacteristically long stellar disruption from a supermassive black hole has been unravelling over the last decade. Spectral information implies very efficient accretion but recent observations hint at a transition to a less extreme accretion mode.
The authors present evidence that the lunar soil contains oxygen ions from Earth that escape our atmosphere and reach the Moon through the Earth’s magnetospheric wind. The lunar surface possibly contains clues about the history of Earth’s atmosphere.
The presence of a large underdensity, the dipole repeller, is predicted based on a study of the velocity field of our Local Group of galaxies. The combined effects of this super-void and the Shapley concentration control the local cosmic flow.
Isotopic analyses of stardust have yet to single out a specific stellar origin for it. A revision of the proton-capture rate of 17O has helped to identify intermediate mass stars (4–8 solar masses) as the source of a large fraction of meteoritic stardust.
The New Horizons spacecraft revealed a large dark reddish area along Pluto’s equatorial region, probably made up by organics. Here the authors show that it could be formed by the very same giant impact that created Pluto’s biggest satellite, Charon.
Periodic pulsations of polarized emission and a strong magnetic field were found in a white-dwarf double system. These findings confirm a pulsar-like emission mechanism for the system that has so far been associated only with neutron stars.
Heck et al. provide the first experimental evidence that the composition of meteorites falling on the Earth changes with time. The distribution of meteorites 470 million years ago is significantly different from today — an effect linked to events happening in the asteroid belt.
Our currently accepted model of a hierarchically growing, dark-matter dominated Universe predicts rare isolated groups of dwarf galaxies. The discovery of seven such systems may point to the building blocks of present-day intermediate-mass galaxies.
Multi-wavelength data from a cluster–cluster merger reveals that relativistic electrons ejected from near an actively accreting black hole are efficiently re-accelerated at a cluster shock to produce characteristically diffuse radio emission.
