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A repeating fast radio burst source localized to a nearby spiral galaxy
Lazio, T. J. W.; Kirichenko, A. Yu.; Vanderlinde, K. +51 more
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are brief, bright, extragalactic radio flashes1,2. Their physical origin remains unknown, but dozens of possible models have been postulated3. Some FRB sources exhibit repeat bursts4-7. Although over a hundred FRB sources have been discovered8, only four have been localized and a…
Nightside condensation of iron in an ultrahot giant exoplanet
Martins, C. J. A. P.; Lendl, Monika; Udry, Stéphane +94 more
Ultrahot giant exoplanets receive thousands of times Earth's insolation1,2. Their high-temperature atmospheres (greater than 2,000 kelvin) are ideal laboratories for studying extreme planetary climates and chemistry3-5. Daysides are predicted to be cloud-free, dominated by atomic species6 and much hotter than night…
A planet within the debris disk around the pre-main-sequence star AU Microscopii
Barclay, Thomas; Vanderburg, Andrew; Hellier, Coel +84 more
AU Microscopii (AU Mic) is the second closest pre-main-sequence star, at a distance of 9.79 parsecs and with an age of 22 million years1. AU Mic possesses a relatively rare2 and spatially resolved3 edge-on debris disk extending from about 35 to 210 astronomical units from the star4, and with clumps exhib…
A Galactic-scale gas wave in the solar neighbourhood
Meingast, Stefan; Alves, João; Speagle, Joshua S. +6 more
For the past 150 years, the prevailing view of the local interstellar medium has been based on a peculiarity known as the Gould Belt1-4, an expanding ring of young stars, gas and dust, tilted about 20 degrees to the Galactic plane. However, the physical relationship between local gas clouds has remained unknown because the accuracy in d…
A cold, massive, rotating disk galaxy 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang
Prochaska, J. Xavier; Rafelski, Marc; Neeleman, Marcel +1 more
Massive disk galaxies like the Milky Way are expected to form at late times in traditional models of galaxy formation1,2, but recent numerical simulations suggest that such galaxies could form as early as a billion years after the Big Bang through the accretion of cold material and mergers3,4. Observationally, it has been dif…
Very regular high-frequency pulsation modes in young intermediate-mass stars
Smalley, Barry; Li, Yaguang; Li, Gang +33 more
Asteroseismology probes the internal structures of stars by using their natural pulsation frequencies1. It relies on identifying sequences of pulsation modes that can be compared with theoretical models, which has been done successfully for many classes of pulsators, including low-mass solar-type stars2, red giants3
A remnant planetary core in the hot-Neptune desert
Latham, David W.; Gandhi, Siddharth; Brogi, Matteo +92 more
The interiors of giant planets remain poorly understood. Even for the planets in the Solar System, difficulties in observation lead to large uncertainties in the properties of planetary cores. Exoplanets that have undergone rare evolutionary processes provide a route to understanding planetary interiors. Planets found in and near the typically bar…
Stellar clustering shapes the architecture of planetary systems
Kruijssen, J. M. Diederik; Longmore, Steven N.; Chevance, Mélanie +1 more
Planet formation is generally described in terms of a system containing the host star and a protoplanetary disk1-3, of which the internal properties (for example, mass and metallicity) determine the properties of the resulting planetary system4. However, (proto)planetary systems are predicted5,6 and observed7,…
The tidal remnant of an unusually metal-poor globular cluster
Lewis, Geraint F.; Casey, Andrew R.; Erkal, Denis +18 more
Globular clusters are some of the oldest bound stellar structures observed in the Universe1. They are ubiquitous in large galaxies and are believed to trace intense star-formation events and the hierarchical build-up of structure2,3. Observations of globular clusters in the Milky Way, and a wide variety of other galaxies, hav…
The Magellanic Corona as the key to the formation of the Magellanic Stream.
Bland-Hawthorn, J.; Lucchini, S.; D'Onghia, E. +3 more
The dominant gaseous structure in the Galactic halo is the Magellanic Stream, an extended network of neutral and ionized filaments surrounding the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC/SMC), the two most massive satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Recent observations indicate that the Clouds are on their first passage around our Galaxy, the Stre…