Volume 3 Issue 2, February 2019

Harry Cliff, a particle physicist, a Fellow of Modern Science at the Science Museum in London and the main curator of The Sun: Living with our Star, discusses the exhibition with Nature Astronomy.

Scientific outreach involving people with disabilities does not require specific techniques for specific conditions. An inclusive approach involving complementary senses not only helps those with disabilities but everyone else as well.

The surface of Mars has been well mapped and characterized, yet the subsurface — the most likely place to find signs of extant or extinct life and a repository of useful resources for human exploration — remains unexplored. In the near future this is set to change.

Canadian astronomers and facilities have had a significant impact in wide-field astronomy. With community planning exercises underway this looks set to continue, with new capabilities and international collaborations in the near future.

Recent observations with the Gaia satellite have confirmed that the cores of cooling white dwarf stars undergo crystallization, as predicted half a century ago.

Astronomers around the world are keen and confident public communicators, with academic leaders in senior positions being the most active. They enjoy engaging with the public, with no rewards expected.

Since the discovery of the first repeating fast radio burst in 2016, debate has raged over whether it represented a distinct population. With the recent detection of a second repeater using CHIME, the debate is closer to being settled.

Microphotonic frequency combs are chip-based light sources, until now confined to optics laboratories. Improved stabilities usher these devices out of the lab and into high-resolution astronomic spectrometer systems.

Infrared and neutron spectroscopic observations by Dawn give contrasting results on the elemental composition of Ceres’s surface, which can be reconciled by assuming that Ceres’s surface contains ~20 wt% of carbon, coming from impacts by carbonaceous asteroids and/or generated by extensive aqueous alteration.

Chariklo, Haumea and potentially Chiron are the only known ringed Solar System objects that are not giant planets. The rings of these minor bodies are relatively further from their hosts than those around giant planets; this increase is shown to be due to resonances driven by modest topographic features or elongations.

Using Voyager 1 as a unique probe of the interstellar medium, Lee and Lee have measured the interstellar turbulence spectrum from au scales down to metre scales, complementing the longer wavelength measurements from the scintillation of pulsar emission.

A state-of-the-art magnetohydrodynamic simulation of a solar flare from emergence to eruption is able to reproduce observations at visible, UV and X-ray wavelengths, and suggests that non-thermal particles at high energy may play a less prominent role than usually assumed in flare models.

Moving shadows have been seen on the circumbinary disk around V4046 Sgr, cast by eclipses of the central binary system. Using geometrical arguments, the degree of flaring of the disk and the distance to the system have been calculated.

Accretion onto the surface of a white dwarf typically generates supersoft X-ray emission and broad emission lines due to nuclear fusion. ASASSN-16oh exhibits no visible broad lines, implying there is no surface fusion, and instead, a belt around the dwarf called a spreading layer is the source of the supersoft X-ray emission.

Information on stellar populations of the grand-design spiral galaxy UGC 3825 is exploited to measure the offset between young stars of a known age and the spiral arm in which they formed. The measured offset is consistent with a quasi-stationary density wave.

The largest survey of n = 2,587 professional astronomers reveals regional variations and the drivers behind the most actively engaged communicators.

Until now, radio astronomers had to choose between sensitivity or field of view. The new Apertif system provides both, enabling studies of low-mass galaxies, galaxy interactions and fast radio bursts, write Betsey Adams and Joeri van Leeuwen.