Search Publications

A kilonova as the electromagnetic counterpart to a gravitational-wave source

Della Valle, M.; Greiner, J.; Sollerman, J. +119 more

Gravitational waves were discovered with the detection of binary black-hole mergers and they should also be detectable from lower-mass neutron-star mergers. These are predicted to eject material rich in heavy radioactive isotopes that can power an electromagnetic signal. This signal is luminous at optical and infrared wavelengths and is called a k…

The X-ray counterpart to the gravitational-wave event GW170817

Troja, E.; Piro, L.; van Eerten, H. +31 more

A long-standing paradigm in astrophysics is that collisions—or mergers—of two neutron stars form highly relativistic and collimated outflows (jets) that power γ-ray bursts of short (less than two seconds) duration. The observational support for this model, however, is only indirect. A hitherto outstanding prediction is that gravitational-wave even…

Strongly baryon-dominated disk galaxies at the peak of galaxy formation ten billion years ago

Lutz, D.; Wuyts, S.; Förster Schreiber, N. M. +28 more

In the cold dark matter cosmology, the baryonic components of galaxies—stars and gas—are thought to be mixed with and embedded in non-baryonic and non-relativistic dark matter, which dominates the total mass of the galaxy and its dark-matter halo. In the local (low-redshift) Universe, the mass of dark matter within a galactic disk increases with d…

An ultrahot gas-giant exoplanet with a stratosphere

Deming, Drake; Knutson, Heather; Nikolov, Nikolay +24 more

Infrared radiation emitted from a planet contains information about the chemical composition and vertical temperature profile of its atmosphere. If upper layers are cooler than lower layers, molecular gases will produce absorption features in the planetary thermal spectrum. Conversely, if there is a stratosphere—where temperature increases with al…

Star formation inside a galactic outflow

Maiolino, R.; Sturm, E.; Colina, L. +13 more

Recent observations have revealed massive galactic molecular outflows that may have the physical conditions (high gas densities) required to form stars. Indeed, several recent models predict that such massive outflows may ignite star formation within the outflow itself. This star-formation mode, in which stars form with high radial velocities, cou…

A massive, dead disk galaxy in the early Universe

Richard, Johan; Gallazzi, Anna; Zibetti, Stefano +10 more

At redshift z = 2, when the Universe was just three billion years old, half of the most massive galaxies were extremely compact and had already exhausted their fuel for star formation. It is believed that they were formed in intense nuclear starbursts and that they ultimately grew into the most massive local elliptical galaxies seen today, through…