Search Publications
A continuum from clear to cloudy hot-Jupiter exoplanets without primordial water depletion
Deming, Drake; Nikolov, Nikolay; Fortney, Jonathan J. +18 more
Thousands of transiting exoplanets have been discovered, but spectral analysis of their atmospheres has so far been dominated by a small number of exoplanets and data spanning relatively narrow wavelength ranges (such as 1.1-1.7 micrometres). Recent studies show that some hot-Jupiter exoplanets have much weaker water absorption features in their n…
Eight per cent leakage of Lyman continuum photons from a compact, star-forming dwarf galaxy
Schaerer, D.; Thuan, T. X.; Izotov, Y. I. +4 more
One of the key questions in observational cosmology is the identification of the sources responsible for ionization of the Universe after the cosmic ‘Dark Ages’, when the baryonic matter was neutral. The currently identified distant galaxies are insufficient to fully reionize the Universe by redshift z ≈ 6 (refs 1, 2, 3), but low-mass, star-formin…
A combined transmission spectrum of the Earth-sized exoplanets TRAPPIST-1 b and c
Triaud, Amaury H. M. J.; Valenti, Jeff A.; Wakeford, Hannah R. +11 more
Three Earth-sized exoplanets were recently discovered close to the habitable zone of the nearby ultracool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 (ref. 3). The nature of these planets has yet to be determined, as their masses remain unmeasured and no observational constraint is available for the planetary population surrounding ultracool dwarfs, of which the TRAPPI…
A radio-pulsing white dwarf binary star
Gänsicke, B. T.; Dhillon, V. S.; Pala, A. F. +23 more
White dwarfs are compact stars, similar in size to Earth but approximately 200,000 times more massive. Isolated white dwarfs emit most of their power from ultraviolet to near-infrared wavelengths, but when in close orbits with less dense stars, white dwarfs can strip material from their companions and the resulting mass transfer can generate atomi…
Cold, clumpy accretion onto an active supermassive black hole
Baum, Stefi A.; O'Dea, Christopher P.; McNamara, Brian R. +22 more
Supermassive black holes in galaxy centres can grow by the accretion of gas, liberating energy that might regulate star formation on galaxy-wide scales. The nature of the gaseous fuel reservoirs that power black hole growth is nevertheless largely unconstrained by observations, and is instead routinely simplified as a smooth, spherical inflow of v…
A 17-billion-solar-mass black hole in a group galaxy with a diffuse core
Ma, Chung-Pei; Greene, Jenny E.; Blakeslee, John P. +3 more
Quasars are associated with and powered by the accretion of material onto massive black holes; the detection of highly luminous quasars with redshifts greater than z = 6 suggests that black holes of up to ten billion solar masses already existed 13 billion years ago. Two possible present-day ‘dormant’ descendants of this population of ‘active’ bla…
A massive, quiescent, population II galaxy at a redshift of 2.1
Siana, Brian; van Dokkum, Pieter G.; Choi, Jieun +7 more
Unlike spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way, the majority of the stars in massive elliptical galaxies were formed in a short period early in the history of the Universe. The duration of this formation period can be measured using the ratio of magnesium to iron abundance ([Mg/Fe]) in spectra, which reflects the relative enrichment by core-collapse…
Formation of new stellar populations from gas accreted by massive young star clusters
Faucher-Giguère, Claude-André; Deng, Licai; de Grijs, Richard +4 more
Stars in clusters are thought to form in a single burst from a common progenitor cloud of molecular gas. However, massive, old ‘globular’ clusters—those with ages greater than ten billion years and masses several hundred thousand times that of the Sun—often harbour multiple stellar populations, indicating that more than one star-forming event occu…