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A giant comet-like cloud of hydrogen escaping the warm Neptune-mass exoplanet GJ 436b
Sing, David K.; Wheatley, Peter J.; Désert, Jean-Michel +8 more
Exoplanets orbiting close to their parent stars may lose some fraction of their atmospheres because of the extreme irradiation. Atmospheric mass loss primarily affects low-mass exoplanets, leading to the suggestion that hot rocky planets might have begun as Neptune-like, but subsequently lost all of their atmospheres; however, no confident measure…
Flows of X-ray gas reveal the disruption of a star by a massive black hole
Ramirez-Ruiz, Enrico; Cenko, S. Bradley; Drake, Jeremy J. +18 more
Tidal forces close to massive black holes can violently disrupt stars that make a close approach. These extreme events are discovered via bright X-ray and optical/ultraviolet flares in galactic centres. Prior studies based on modelling decaying flux trends have been able to estimate broad properties, such as the mass accretion rate. Here we report…
Warm-hot baryons comprise 5-10 per cent of filaments in the cosmic web
Richard, Johan; Massey, Richard; Kneib, Jean-Paul +8 more
Observations of the cosmic microwave background indicate that baryons account for 5 per cent of the Universe’s total energy content. In the local Universe, the census of all observed baryons falls short of this estimate by a factor of two. Cosmological simulations indicate that the missing baryons have not condensed into virialized haloes, but res…
Extended hard-X-ray emission in the inner few parsecs of the Galaxy
Hailey, Charles J.; Mori, Kaya; Bauer, Franz E. +19 more
The Galactic Centre hosts a puzzling stellar population in its inner few parsecs, with a high abundance of surprisingly young, relatively massive stars bound within the deep potential well of the central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A* (ref. 1). Previous studies suggest that the population of objects emitting soft X-rays (less than 10 kilo…