Search Publications
A tidal disruption event coincident with a high-energy neutrino
Kilpatrick, Charles D.; Foley, Ryan J.; Cenko, S. Bradley +55 more
Cosmic neutrinos provide a unique window into the otherwise hidden mechanism of particle acceleration in astrophysical objects. The IceCube Collaboration recently reported the likely association of one high-energy neutrino with a flare from the relativistic jet of an active galaxy pointed towards the Earth. However a combined analysis of many simi…
Internal mixing of rotating stars inferred from dipole gravity modes
Bowman, Dominic M.; Aerts, Conny; Gebruers, Sarah +7 more
During most of their life, stars fuse hydrogen into helium in their cores. The mixing of chemical elements in the radiative envelope of stars with a convective core is able to replenish the core with extra fuel. If effective, such deep mixing allows stars to live longer and change their evolutionary path. Yet localized observations to constrain in…
Chronologically dating the early assembly of the Milky Way
Chaplin, William J.; Davies, Guy R.; Chiappini, Cristina +16 more
The standard cosmological model predicts that galaxies are built through hierarchical assembly on cosmological timescales1,2. The Milky Way, like other disk galaxies, underwent violent mergers and accretion of small satellite galaxies in its early history. Owing to Gaia Data Release 23 and spectroscopic surveys4, t…
Discovery and confirmation of the shortest gamma-ray burst from a collapsar
Kulkarni, S. R.; Chandra, Poonam; Cenko, S. Bradley +54 more
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are among the brightest and most energetic events in the Universe. The duration and hardness distribution of GRBs has two clusters1, now understood to reflect (at least) two different progenitors2. Short-hard GRBs (SGRBs; T90 < 2 s) arise from compact binary mergers, and long-soft GRBs (L…
Detection of the Milky Way reflex motion due to the Large Magellanic Cloud infall
Peñarrubia, Jorge; Petersen, Michael S.
The Large Magellanic Cloud is the most massive satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, with an estimated mass exceeding a tenth of the mass of the Milky Way1-5. Just past its closest approach of about 50 kpc, and flying past the Milky Way at an astonishing speed of 327 km s−1 (ref. 6), the Large Magellanic Cloud can aff…
An extended halo around an ancient dwarf galaxy
Erkal, Denis; Jerjen, Helmut; Frebel, Anna +7 more
The Milky Way is surrounded by dozens of ultrafaint (<105 L⊙) dwarf satellite galaxies1-3. They are the remnants of the earliest galaxies4, as confirmed by their ancient5 and chemically primitive6,7 stars. Simulations8-10 suggest that these systems formed within extend…
The population of M dwarfs observed at low radio frequencies
Callingham, J. R.; Shimwell, T. W.; Vedantham, H. K. +12 more
Coherent low-frequency (≲200 MHz) radio emission from stars encodes the conditions of the outer corona, mass-ejection events and space weather1-5. Previous low-frequency searches for radio-emitting stellar systems have lacked the sensitivity to detect the general population, instead largely focusing on targeted studies of anomalously ac…
A hidden population of high-redshift double quasars unveiled by astrometry
Shen, Yue; Oguri, Masamune; Lazio, Joseph +6 more
Galaxy mergers occur frequently in the early Universe1 and bring multiple supermassive black holes (SMBHs) into the nucleus, where they may eventually coalesce. Identifying post-merger-scale (that is, less than around a few kpc) dual SMBHs is a critical pathway to understanding their dynamical evolution and successive mergers2
A hot subdwarf-white dwarf super-Chandrasekhar candidate supernova Ia progenitor
Geier, S.; Heber, U.; Irrgang, A. +8 more
Supernovae Ia are bright explosive events that can be used to estimate cosmological distances, allowing us to study the expansion of the Universe. They are understood to result from a thermonuclear detonation in a white dwarf that formed from the exhausted core of a star more massive than the Sun. However, the possible progenitor channels leading …
Most lithium-rich low-mass evolved stars revealed as red clump stars by asteroseismology and spectroscopy
Zhao, Gang; Zhao, Jing-Kun; Li, Yaguang +19 more
Lithium has confused scientists for decades at almost every scale of the universe. Lithium-rich giants are peculiar stars with lithium abundances greater than model prediction. A large fraction of lithium-rich low-mass evolved stars are traditionally supposed to be red giant branch (RGB) stars. Recent studies, however, report that red clump (RC) s…