Volume 6 Issue 12, December 2022

At a Lorentz Center workshop, Chiara Caprini, Antoine Petiteau and Elena Maria Rossi gave a series of presentations about the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the instrument, and the associated science in cosmology and astrophysics.

A vital part of future planetary science missions will be the development of more inclusive teams. As NASA’s InSight mission comes to its end on Mars, we share some strategies that have helped us to work toward this goal.

Preliminary observations from the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer of a well-studied X-ray pulsar are discordant with theoretical expectations, prompting a reassessment of our understanding of the accretion process.

Elucidating the origin of recent tensions between probes of the early and late Universe could lead to a new understanding of gravity on the largest scales.

New analyses of data from NASA’s InSight mission show that the majority of marsquakes arise from warm rocks near a set of young volcanic fissures. This ongoing seismicity reveals that this region was recently volcanically active and may remain so today.

A fast-rising and rapidly evolving tidal disruption event in a dwarf galaxy could indicate the presence of an intermediate-mass black hole, and such nuclear transients in general could provide an opportunity to study these reclusive compact objects.

The theme of tensions in cosmology has become increasingly important in the cosmological community, proving capable of attracting new generations of scientists who want to be there and contribute to the next paradigm shift.

Upcoming X-ray microcalorimeter missions should deliver high spectral finesse, and allow detailed studies of accretion processes and feedback mechanisms in growing black holes.

The marsquakes dataset acquired by InSight shows that the Cerberus Fossae graben system is still actively opening, accounting for almost half of Mars’s seismic moment detected so far. This activity indicates the presence of a warm source located at 40 km depth, possibly due to local magmatic processes.

The residual magnetic field detected in some carbonaceous chondrite meteorites is a remanent of the primordial field of the early solar nebula, preserved via aqueous alteration processes that happened in large planetesimals formed around 4 Myr after CAI formation and just before the dissipation of the solar nebula.

Energetic neutral atom fluxes measured at 1 au by the IBEX spacecraft between 2014 and 2019 are used as proxy to map the heliosphere at high resolution. Persistent ripples that corrugate the heliospheric boundary and induce variations by up to ~10 au are observed, with marked north–south asymmetry.

Spectroscopic and photometric analyses show the B-type-star γ Columbae to be the exposed stellar core of a massive progenitor star that has just finished central hydrogen fusion.

JWST observations of the planetary nebula NGC 3132 reveal a rich molecular environment containing evidence of multiple stellar interactions on a variety of scales.

X-ray polarimetry observations with the Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer constrain the accretion geometry in an X-ray pulsar and provide evidence for a misalignment of the spin, magnetic and orbital axes in Her X-1.

Using Gaia and XMM-Newton to constrain the distance to and properties of the central compact object of a supernova remnant, an extremely light (\(0.7{7}_{-0.17}^{+0.20}\) solar masses) neutron star has been found. This mass is twice as light as normally found for these kinds of object, and places limits on the allowed equations of state of neutron star matter.

The rapid rise in brightness of a tidal disruption event is attributed to the destruction of a main sequence star by a black hole of intermediate mass in a dwarf galaxy. Such events are rare, and non-accreting intermediate-mass black holes are challenging to find.

Multiple gas disks, both misaligned with the stellar disk, are reported in two galaxies, providing evidence for multiple gas acquisition events, challenging the traditional picture of galaxy accretion and suggesting a new trigger mechanism for star formation.

An analysis of several models provides astrophysical constraints on the Universe at redshift ~20, corresponding to ~200 million years after the Big Bang, using upper limits on the sky-averaged 21-cm signal measured by the SARAS 3 radiometer.

A simultaneous reconstruction of three functions describing the expansion of the Universe and gravitational effects on light and matter shows the extent to which modified gravity can address tensions between the standard cosmological model and a large body of observations.

The GHOST spectrograph will shortly be available on the Gemini South Telescope for studies of stellar and galactic abundances and, in time, exoplanets.