Search Publications
Detection of the elusive dangling OH ice features at ~2.7 µm in Chamaeleon I with JWST NIRCam
Sun, F.; Egami, E.; Rocha, W. R. M. +31 more
Ascertaining the morphology and composition of the icy mantles covering dust grains in dense, cold regions of the interstellar medium is essential to developing accurate astrochemical models, determining conditions for ice formation, constraining chemical interactions in and on icy grains and understanding how ices withstand space radiation. The w…
Evidence for morning-to-evening limb asymmetry on the cool low-density exoplanet WASP-107 b
Fortney, Jonathan J.; Bell, Taylor J.; Line, Michael R. +8 more
The atmospheric properties of hot exoplanets are expected to be different between the morning and the evening limbs due to their global atmospheric circulation. Ground-based observations at high spectral resolution have detected this limb asymmetry in several ultra-hot (>2,000 K) exoplanets, but the prevalence of the phenomenon in the broader e…
Atmospheric carbon depletion as a tracer of water oceans and biomass on temperate terrestrial exoplanets
Triaud, Amaury H. M. J.; Seager, Sara; Rackham, Benjamin V. +9 more
The conventional observables to identify a habitable or inhabited environment in exoplanets, such as an ocean glint or abundant atmospheric O2, will be challenging to detect with present or upcoming observatories. Here we suggest a new signature. A low carbon abundance in the atmosphere of a temperate rocky planet, relative to other pla…
The accretion of a solar mass per day by a 17-billion solar mass black hole
Wolf, Christian; Lai, Samuel; Bian, Fuyan +5 more
Around a million quasars have been catalogued in the Universe by probing deeper and using new methods for discovery. However, the hardest ones to find seem to be the rarest and brightest specimens. Here we study the properties of the most luminous of all quasars found so far. These have been overlooked until recently, which demonstrates that moder…
A magnetized Galactic halo from inner Galaxy outflows
Morris, Mark R.; Zhang, Yi; Carretti, Ettore +12 more
Magnetic halos of galaxies are crucial for understanding galaxy evolution, galactic-scale outflows and feedback from star formation activity. Identifying the magnetized halo of the Milky Way is challenging because of the potential contamination from foreground emission arising in local spiral arms. In addition, it is unclear how our magnetic halo …
An emission map of the disk-circumgalactic medium transition in starburst IRAS 08339+6517
Kacprzak, Glenn G.; Sandstrom, Karin M.; Chisholm, John +5 more
Most of a galaxy's mass is located beyond its stellar component, spread out to hundreds of kiloparsecs. This diffuse reservoir of gas, the circumgalactic medium, acts as the interface between a galaxy and the cosmic web that connects galaxies. We present kiloparsec-scale-resolution integral field spectroscopy of emission lines that trace cool ioni…
Large exomoons unlikely around Kepler-1625 b and Kepler-1708 b
Heller, René; Hippke, Michael
There are more than 200 moons in our Solar System, but their relatively small radii make similarly sized extrasolar moons very hard to detect with current instruments. The best exomoon candidates so far are two nearly Neptune-sized bodies orbiting the Jupiter-sized transiting exoplanets Kepler-1625 b and Kepler-1708 b, but their existence has been…
Effects of density and temperature variations on the metallicity of Mrk 71
Kreckel, Kathryn; Esteban, César; García-Rojas, Jorge +2 more
In a very recent work, [1] claim that the scenario of temperature inhomogeneities proposed by [2] ($t2$ > 0) is not able to explain the O$^{2+}$/H$^{+}$ abundance discrepancy observed between the calculations based on the optical [OIII] collisional excited lines (CELs) and the OII recombination lines (RLs) in the star forming galaxy Mrk71. In t…
Detection of an Earth-sized exoplanet orbiting the nearby ultracool dwarf star SPECULOOS-3
Ikuta, Kai; Triaud, Amaury H. M. J.; Tamura, Motohide +82 more
Located at the bottom of the main sequence, ultracool dwarf stars are widespread in the solar neighbourhood. Nevertheless, their extremely low luminosity has left their planetary population largely unexplored, and only one of them, TRAPPIST-1, has so far been found to host a transiting planetary system. In this context, we present the SPECULOOS pr…
Magnetic origin of the discrepancy between stellar limb-darkening models and observations
Solanki, Sami K.; Seager, Sara; Shapiro, Alexander I. +8 more
Stars appear darker at their limbs than at their disk centres because at the limb we are viewing the higher and cooler layers of stellar photospheres. Yet, limb darkening derived from state-of-the-art stellar atmosphere models systematically fails to reproduce recent transiting exoplanet light curves from the Kepler, TESS and JWST telescopes—stell…