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Millihertz oscillations near the innermost orbit of a supermassive black hole
Ingram, Adam; Fabian, Andrew C.; Remillard, Ronald A. +22 more
Recent discoveries from time-domain surveys are defying our expectations for how matter accretes onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs). The increased rate of short-timescale, repetitive events around SMBHs, including the recently discovered quasi-periodic eruptions1, 2, 3, 4–5, are garnering further interest in stellar-mass companions a…
A pulsar-like polarization angle swing from a nearby fast radio burst
Kilpatrick, Charles D.; Prochaska, J. Xavier; Kaspi, Victoria M. +41 more
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) last for milliseconds and arrive at Earth from cosmological distances. Although their origins and emission mechanisms are unknown, their signals bear similarities with the much less luminous radio emission generated by pulsars within our Miky Way Galaxy1, with properties suggesting neutron star origins2,3
Hydrogen escaping from a pair of exoplanets smaller than Neptune
Schreyer, Ethan; Owen, James E.; Loyd, R. O. Parke +18 more
Exoplanet surveys have shown a class of abundant exoplanets smaller than Neptune on close, <100-day orbits1, 2, 3–4. These planets form two populations separated by a natural division at about 1.8 R⊕ termed the radius valley. It is uncertain whether these populations arose from separate dry versus water-rich formation chan…
A small and vigorous black hole in the early Universe
Charlot, Stéphane; Chevallard, Jacopo; Maseda, Michael V. +36 more
Several theories have been proposed to describe the formation of black hole seeds in the early Universe and to explain the emergence of very massive black holes observed in the first thousand million years after the Big Bang1-3. Models consider different seeding and accretion scenarios4-7, which require the detection and char…
Heavy-element production in a compact object merger observed by JWST
Fruchter, Andrew S.; Barclay, Thomas; Izzo, Luca +82 more
The mergers of binary compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes are of central interest to several areas of astrophysics, including as the progenitors of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs)1, sources of high-frequency gravitational waves (GWs)2 and likely production sites for heavy-element nucleosynthesis by means of rapid ne…
Spectroscopic confirmation of two luminous galaxies at a redshift of 14
Pérez-González, Pablo G.; Charlot, Stéphane; Chevallard, Jacopo +42 more
The first observations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revolutionized our understanding of the Universe by identifying galaxies at redshift z ≈ 13 (refs. 1, 2–3). In addition, the discovery of many luminous galaxies at Cosmic Dawn (z > 10) has suggested that galaxies developed rapidly, in apparent tension with many stan…
A high black-hole-to-host mass ratio in a lensed AGN in the early Universe
Charlot, Stéphane; Glazebrook, Karl; Labbé, Ivo +35 more
Early JWST observations have uncovered a population of red sources that might represent a previously overlooked phase of supermassive black hole growth1-3. One of the most intriguing examples is an extremely red, point-like object that was found to be triply imaged by the strong lensing cluster Abell 2744 (ref. 4). Here we pr…
Most of the photons that reionized the Universe came from dwarf galaxies
Papovich, Casey; Maseda, Michael V.; Muzzin, Adam +30 more
The identification of sources driving cosmic reionization, a major phase transition from neutral hydrogen to ionized plasma around 600-800 Myr after the Big Bang1-3, has been a matter of debate4. Some models suggest that high ionizing emissivity and escape fractions (fesc) from quasars support their role in driving…
A recently quenched galaxy 700 million years after the Big Bang
Chevallard, Jacopo; Maseda, Michael V.; Carniani, Stefano +42 more
Local and low-redshift (z < 3) galaxies are known to broadly follow a bimodal distribution: actively star-forming galaxies with relatively stable star-formation rates and passive systems. These two populations are connected by galaxies in relatively slow transition. By contrast, theory predicts that star formation was stochastic at early cosmic…
Bound star clusters observed in a lensed galaxy 460 Myr after the Big Bang
Mahler, Guillaume; Fujimoto, Seiji; Inoue, Akio K. +25 more
The Cosmic Gems arc is among the brightest and highly magnified galaxies observed at redshift z ≈ 10.2 (ref. 1). However, it is an intrinsically ultraviolet faint galaxy, in the range of those now thought to drive the reionization of the Universe2–4. Hitherto the smallest features resolved in a galaxy at a comparable redshift…