Astrobites

Can Arid Planets Keep Their Cool?

Astrobites reports on why dry planets may be missing the critical thermostat of the geologic carbon cycle, which has helped to stabilize Earth’s climate over billions of years.

close-up image of the Sun showing a solar flare

When a powerful solar flare saturates a detector, the information about the flare is lost — or is it? New research validates a technique for extracting knowledge from saturated images of solar flares.

An oblique-angle photograph of a deep crater half in shadow.

How do you pick a landing site before you know how you’re going to land? The scientists behind NASA’s latest Moon missions are working on just that.

star-forming cloud OMC-2

Do all clusters form stars with the same distribution of masses? Researchers have demonstrated that the initial mass function, often assumed to be universal, varies across Milky Way clusters.

distant starburst galaxies

Astrobites reports on whether some of the most massive galaxies in the early universe are truly quenched, or if they’re just hiding their star formation behind dust.

Bullet Cluster with mass countours

Using data from JWST and the Dark Energy Camera, researchers have revisited a long-standing issue with measurements of the famous Bullet Cluster.

TESS in space

A recent study has leveraged TESS’s full-sky coverage to build a catalog of stellar rotation periods for over a million stars.

little red dots seen with JWST
Features

Two More Thoughts on Little Red Dots

What’s behind the population of compact, reddish objects spotted by JWST? Two recent research articles have explored theories involving young globular clusters and little red dots with little blue companions.

disk of hot gas swirling around a black hole

Astrobites reports on the first case of a supermassive black hole discovered away from its galaxy’s center, exposed when it tore apart a star in a tidal disruption event.