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On the 50th anniversary of the discovery of pulsars Jocelyn Bell Burnell reflects on their detection, our current understanding of these stars and the new era of discovery ushered in by next-generation radio observatories.
Orbiting supermassive black holes in the centres of nearby galaxies contribute to a gravitational-wave background over the whole sky. Networks of millisecond pulsars are sensitive to this signal. Creating maps of this background using information from known galaxies can help us to project when (and how) we may observe it.
The Lovell Telescope at the Jodrell Bank Observatory has played a fundamental role in pulsar astronomy from the discovery of pulsars until the present day. This Perspective reviews the telescope’s accomplished history in astronomy and the early space race.
More than 20 GW of power are necessary to balance the heat emitted by Enceladus and avoid the freezing of its internal ocean. A very porous core undergoing tidal heating can generate the required power to maintain a liquid ocean and drive hydrothermal activity.
IAU Symposium 337 was held at Jodrell Bank Observatory in September 2017 to celebrate the past fifty years of pulsar astrophysics and to look forward to the next fifty.
Black holes absorb everything and emit nothing, yet relativistic jets of plasma are observed to emanate from systems hosting accreting black holes. We now know exactly how far from the black hole these processes take place.
The tropical stratospheric temperature and wind field of several planets oscillate quasi-periodically. Recent Cassini observations show that Saturn’s oscillations were disturbed for more than three years by the year-long giant storm that appeared in 2010.
How do you build a (distance) ladder from the closest stars to the far-away supernovae and all the way back to the last scattering surface of the Universe? Jeremy Mould summarizes some of the highlights of the Stellar Populations and the Distance Scale conference.
The first detection of electromagnetic emission from a gravitational wave source bridges the gap between one of the most energetic phenomena in the Universe and their dark, difficult to detect progenitors.
The discovery of Jupiter’s southern X-ray aurora reveals that it is tellingly different from the northern one, providing important clues to how Jupiter’s polar aurorae are generated.
The detection of bright, rapid optical pulsations from pulsar PSR J1023+0038 have provided a surprise for researchers working on neutron stars. This discovery poses more questions than it answers and will spur on future work and instrumentation.
The first extraterrestrial detections of a member of the organohalogen family of molecules have been made towards comet Churyumov–Gerasimenko and low-mass protostar IRAS 16293-2422. Chloromethane, considered to be a biomarker, can form efficiently abiotically.
The New Horizons spacecraft performed a flyby of Pluto and its system in July 2015, providing more than 50 Gb of high-resolution images and data that transformed our view and understanding of the dwarf planet. This Review summarizes its main discoveries.
The material surrounding accreting supermassive black holes connects them with their hosts. From studies in the infrared and X-rays, the structure of this material is found to be complex, clumpy and dynamic.
