Nature Astronomy’s posts

May 12, 2022

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Jan 14, 2019

Are you bored of planets orbiting always in the same orientation? Check this out: Kennedy et al. have broken the monotony, finding a disk of planetesimals orbiting perpendicularly to the orbit of its binary star system. PERPENDICULARLY. nature.com/articles/s4155

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Jul 30, 2018

Sorry #terraforming fans, but Mars doesn't have enough CO2 reserves that could be mobilised with present or realistic future technology to create a significant enough greenhouse effect. Jakosky & Edwards: rdcu.be/3KBY

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Jun 13, 2022

As we look forward to #BlackSpaceWeek/#BlackInAstroWeek next week, we talked to

@That_Astro_Chic

and other members of the Black In Astro Community about their experiences: nature.com/articles/s4155

@BlackInAstro

#AAS240

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Sep 14, 2020

Phosphine is to Venus as methane is to Mars? 20 parts-per-billion of phosphine have been detected in the temperate clouds of Venus, and its source is not evident. Greaves et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Nov 4, 2019

Published in Nature Astronomy today, five papers reporting the measurements from Voyager 2 as it crossed from the heliosphere into interstellar space. For an overview, a good place to start is the News & Views from Du Toit Strauss: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Oct 26, 2020

A full mapping -- down to 1 cm in size -- of the areas that can retain water ice on the Moon shows that "micro cold traps" are the most numerous. In total, ~40,000 km2 of the lunar surface can hold water. Hayne et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Apr 23, 2018

Detection of H2S gas over Uranus' main cloud deck gives insight into cloud composition as well as the sulphur/nitrogen ratio of the interior, by Patrick Irwin et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155 with N&Vs by Imke de Pater: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Sep 11, 2019

K2-18 b is a planet with a mass between Earth and Neptune in the habitable zone of its star. Its atmosphere is likely to be rich in water. Tsiaras et al.: rdcu.be/bQSJO (free to read link)

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Oct 27, 2022

Mars' Cerberus Fossae fault region is the source of half of the whole planet's seismic moment, indicating that it is still actively opening and that there is a warm source at ~40 km depth below it.

@exoseismologist

,

@AnnaPlanetMars

, et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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May 30, 2022

Betelgeuse dimmed drastically to a historical minimum in February 2020. This "Great Dimming" was serendipitously caught by a meteorological satellite:

@DTaniguchiAstro

et al. had the inspired idea to collect the observations and use them for astronomy! nature.com/articles/s4155

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.

has detected molecular water at lunar high latitudes, with abundances between 100-400 ppm. The oft-used 3 µm band can't distinguish between water and mineral-bound hydroxyl (OH) so here Honniball et al. use the 6µm water band: nature.com/articles/s4155

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A first look at the

samples brought back from #Ryugu (1/2): ~5.5 grams of very dark and brittle material, with a lower density than meteorites... suggesting high porosity down to the micro-scale. Yada et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Jul 19, 2021

The Event Horizon Telescope reveals a highly-collimated, asymmetrically edge-brightened jet at millimetre wavelengths in the active galaxy Centaurus A. Janssen et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

Event Horizon 'Scope

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Replying to

Every time our neighbouring galaxy Sagittarius swings by, our Milky Way makes baby stars. Ruiz-Lara et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155 (Image credit: ESA)

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Jan 13, 2022

#Exomoon candidate alert: one planet in a survey of 70 exhibited an intriguing signature, but it's a good one: 4.8-sigma significance after an intensive barrage of tests. And yes, it's a huge body, a moon of ~2.6 Earth radii.

@david_kipping

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Jun 12

The quantization of spacetime would lead to a correction to a particle's speed. Neutrinos detected by IceCube show hints of slowing down...

@AmelinoCamelia

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Arimatsu et al. have detected a kilometre-sized Kuiper Belt Object for the first time, using an occultation technique with a pair of amateur telescopes: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Brant Robertson and 2 others

Apr 4

The JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey has identified the farthest and therefore earliest galaxies. NIRCam observations reveal bright galaxies that formed earlier than expected, when the Universe was 300-500 million years old. Read it for free: rdcu.be/c87JZ

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Under the south pole of Mars there is a complex system of liquid ponds around the bigger lake area that was detected in 2018. This underground lake region probably contains salty brines. Lauro, Pettinelli, et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Feb 21

Our February issue is now available to read! The cover image shows a representation of the complex web in the Sun's middle corona and is connected to the Chitta et al. paper in the issue. nature.com/natastron/volu

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Congratulations to

on being named one of the BBC's 100 Women of the year! (Full list:bbc.co.uk/news/resources)

@BBC100women

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May 7, 2017

Newsweek, mate, if you want to get into this 'fake news' thing, you've got to start off subtle. twitter.com/newsweek/statu

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Feb 20

There is a group of large dark asteroids in the Outer Main Belt that shares properties and history with Ceres: they accreted late (1.5-3.5 Myr after SS formation) and come from the outer Solar System.

@drisstakir

,

@astromaterials

,

@sraymond_astro

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Using a sample of 1,300+ Classical Cepheids, Chen et al. have probed the extent and the warp of the Galaxy's stellar disk, finding that it follows Brigg's Law for spiral galaxies. nature.com/articles/s4155

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Jan 3, 2022

The planetary architecture of the Solar System can be successfully reproduced in a 'rings and gaps' model of the proto-Solar disk, resembling the forming planetary systems seen around other stars.

@izidoro_astro

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Nov 29, 2017

It's important to note that while the effective size of the dog can be arbitrarily large, it's not any more of a good dog than the two original dogs, Brent.

Quote

XKCD Comic

@xkcdComic

Nov 29, 2017

Interferometry xkcd.com/1922/ m.xkcd.com/1922/

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Aug 16, 2021

Saturn's rings as a seismograph to look at the planet's interior: latest results reveal that Saturn's core, like Jupiter's, is dilute. It is also convectively stable and contains 17 Earth masses of ice and rock. Mankovich (

@chkvch

) & Fuller: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Feb 2, 2017

Nature Astronomy issue 2 is now live, and free to read: go.nature.com/2kWx4sv

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May 19

We are happy to share with you our May 2023 issue, adorned with IXPE polarimetry observations of the Crab nebula and pulsar (courtesy of Bucciantini et al.): nature.com/natastron/volu

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JWST images of planetary nebula NGC3132 show that it hosts at least four stars rather than two! A dusty central disk hides a close binary interaction while there is evidence for two more stars within the nebula.

@OrsolaDemarco1

Astro-Qster (Quentin Parker) and 9 others

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Dec 12, 2022

A 2 kg rocky meteoroid observed in February 2021 is shown to be coming directly from the Oort cloud, indicative of a high ice/rock ratio there (1-20%) and supportive of a massive proto-asteroid belt scenario. Vida (

@meteordoc

) et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Nov 11, 2022

Our November issue is here! The cover, of course, is that now-famous JWST image of WR binary system WR 140, courtesy of Ryan Lau and colleagues. nature.com/natastron/volu

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has measured the O/H ratio at Jupiter: 1.1-5.1 times the Solar value. This value, obtained at the equator, implies that the planetesimals that formed Jupiter were unlikely to have been water-rich. Li et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Apr 13, 2020

A planetary body --a km-sized planetesimal or a rocky super-Earth-- flew by too close to its star and was deformed and torn apart by tidal forces. One of its fragments was then ejected and became famous as 'Oumuamua. Zhang & Lin: nature.com/articles/s4155 or rdcu.be/b3xKZ

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Aug 13, 2021

Our August issue is now here for you to read: nature.com/natastron/volu The cover image is connected to the Voyager 1 paper in the issue (Ocker et al.), and was created by Jack Madden.

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: nature.com/articles/s4155

Oct 27, 2022

You can do seismology with a single station & get meaningful results for planetary interiors (example here is Mars). This technique is useful in planetary science where deployment of a full network is unaffordable.

@SWang_like_cats

&

@hrvojetkalcic

ANU Earth Sciences

and 5 others

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Geraint F. Lewis and 2 others

Jul 3

A Bayesian-based analysis of 190 cosmologically distant quasars, photometrically observed over two decades, has revealed the long-expected presence of cosmic time dilation due to the expansion of space imprinted on their variability. Lewis & Brewer: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Winner of #NAstroCoverComp 2021… a fantastic image of Centaurus A from

@Enloro

et al! Another winning

@SOFIAtelescope

result. Congratulations to everyone involved. 🏆

Leslie Proudfit

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Feb 10, 2020

Outstanding images from VLT/SPHERE of the third-largest asteroid Pallas show a highly cratered world (because of its orbit, say the authors), a density between Ceres and Vesta and an intriguing bright spot... Marsset et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Apr 10

New results from the IXPE satellite present the X-ray polarisation of the Crab nebula and pulsar. Significant polarisation is found only in the core of the main peak. A global toroidal magnetic field is revealed in the nebula. Bucciantini et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Our January issue currently seems to be a little delayed, but it should appear here at some point: nature.com/natastron/volu The fab cover image once again features Cen A, and comes courtesy of

@Benjy_man

and colleagues:

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Feb 3, 2022

Aléon et al. have measured the hydrogen isotope composition of the early Solar System from CAIs in primitive meteorites, finding that D/H in the Earth's and Mars' mantle was set by interstellar material rather than disk processing: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Feb 12, 2020

Our February 2020 issue is now live! The beautiful cover illustration was created by secondary school pupils in Padova, Italy. nature.com/natastron/volu

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Dec 13, 2021

Our final issue of 2021 is here, and we come bearing the festive gift of a Collection on dwarf galaxies... nature.com/natastron/volu

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Replying to

The authors are now giving a video conference online: youtube.com/watch?v=y1u-jl

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Aug 23, 2017

The most detailed image of a star (RSG Antares) to date: bit.ly/2wmQ380 based on Nature paper: go.nature.com/2wn8No9

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Jul 16, 2021

Our July issue is now available to read! The cover image shows our nearest star at extreme UV wavelengths, and is connected to the paper of Astrid Veronig et al. nature.com/natastron/volu

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Mar 29, 2021

A gravitationally lensed gamma-ray burst has been detected, with the inferred lens mass indicating that the lens is an intermediate-mass black hole. James Paynter, Rachel Webster & Eric Thrane: nature.com/articles/s4155

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May 10, 2021

The detection of methanol in a warm protoplanetary disk is a sign that complex organics can be inherited intact from the interstellar medium & transported to planet-forming regions. Work from

++ using

: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Jan 4, 2022

Happy birthday to us! Nature Astronomy is five years old today! (And happy new year to all 35K of you!)

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Dec 16, 2022

The winner of #NAstroCoverComp 2022 is… the wonderful image of Centaurus A from

@Benjy_man

et al.! Another winning image of Cen A, to add to the 2021 winner; this time with

@mwatelescope

. Congratulations to everyone involved!🏆 (Read the paper here: rdcu.be/c1KFx)

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Just published

: 'A galaxy lacking dark matter', by Pieter van Dokkum et al.: nature.com/articles/natur

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Jul 27, 2020

Observations of the powerful solar flare of 10 September 2017 show that the relativistic electrons are confined and/or accelerated at the bottom of the current sheet, not at the reconnection X point. Chen et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Mar 12, 2020

Our March issue is now available at: nature.com/natastron/volu ! The cover image comes from the paper of Jani et al. and depicts the gravitational waveform from a general relativistic simulation of a binary black hole system.

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Dec 12, 2022

Our final issue of 2022 (and volume 6 of Nature Astronomy) is now here! The cover image is provided by JWST and the efforts of Orsola De Marco and team: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Sep 13, 2021

Α multiply imaged, likely Type Ia, supernova is predicted to have a new image appear in the year 2037, making it a useful cosmological probe. Rodney, Brammer et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

Kate Whitaker

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Jul 1, 2019

Evidence of thrust-fault activity on the icy dwarf planet Ceres suggests the possibility of large-scale contraction during its history. Such geological features are normally associated with larger silicate bodies such as Mercury or Mars. Ruiz et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Jan 23

With JWST, the molecules seen in planetary atmospheres can be traced back to their cold origins in ices formed in dense interstellar clouds, prior to the onset of star formation. Chemical diversity and complexity are achieved early! McClure et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Molten iron-rich material can erupt to the surface of asteroids while they are cooling from the outside in: "ferrovolcanism". #Ferrovolcanism could have produced pallasite meteorites and substantially altered Psyche's surface. Johnson et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155 #epscdps2019

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Jul 6, 2020

Time for a paradigm shift: low-mass stars somehow produce lithium between the red giant and red clump phases, and all RC stars are lithium-enhanced. A surprise for stellar modellers! Kumar et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Emma Curtis Lake and 3 others

Jun 21

Our June issue is here! The cover image shows a complex pattern of gravitational lensing caustics, taken from the work of Amruth et al. in the issue. nature.com/natastron/volu

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Our August issue is here! The cover image is a beautiful creation by Dawei Li (Xiamen University), connected to the Fang et al. paper on MHD winds in the issue. nature.com/natastron/volu

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With the first JWST high-redshift observations came excitement beyond measure. With NIRSpec that excitement became measurable, with the highest confirmed z ~ 13.2 galaxy reaching back to an infant Universe at 2% of its current age. Read it for free: rdcu.be/c87Jx

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JWST detects surprisingly abundant hydrocarbons (including benzene) in a very low-mass star’s disk, likely due to the destruction of carbon grains. The resulting high gaseous C/O ratio may have a profound impact on growing exoplanets. Tabone et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

IAS - Orsay and 9 others

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Solar-like differential rotation reproduced in high-res simulations reveals the impact of a small-scale dynamo on thermal convection and the Solar cycle. Hotta & Kusano: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Jan 14, 2021

Our January issue is now available, breaking ground on Volume 5 of Nature Astronomy. The cover image this month depicts the surface of Ryugu, and comes from the paper of Tatsumi et al.: nature.com/natastron/volu

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A first look at the

samples brought back from #Ryugu (2/2): the MicrOmega hyperspectral microscope finds widespread hydrated material and organics, but compositional dishomogeneities start appearing at the sub-mm scale... Pilorget et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Oct 8, 2019

Astronomy gets awarded the Physics Nobel once again...!

Quote

The Nobel Prize

@NobelPrize

Oct 8, 2019

BREAKING NEWS: The 2019 #NobelPrize in Physics has been awarded with one half to James Peebles “for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology” and the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz “for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star.”

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May 4, 2020

E. coli and yeast can survive and grow under a 100% hydrogen atmosphere. This lab experiment opens interesting perspectives for the biospheres of exoplanets with hydrogen-dominated atmospheres. Seager et al.: rdcu.be/b3WDj or nature.com/articles/s4155

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Feb 17, 2020

Low-frequency radio emission from a quiescent red dwarf star cannot come from the star itself, but resemblance to planetary auroral emissions suggests the presence of a close-in exoplanet, say Vedantham et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Dec 22, 2021

Neutral oxygen detected in the atmosphere of the ultrahot exoplanet KELT-9 b, thanks to the high resolution of

@CARMENES_exopl

, shows the presence of non-LTE processes. Borsa (

@france51_

) et al. nature.com/articles/s4155

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Aug 19, 2019

β pic b is not alone anymore! 15 years of radial velocity measurements reveal evidence of β pic c, another massive gas giant (~9 M_Jup) orbiting at 2.4 au, close to the snow line of the star. Lagrange et al.: rdcu.be/bO6ga #ExSS4

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observations of active star HR 9024 show plasma motions indicative of a flare-induced coronal mass ejection, the first exo-CME seen. Characteristics are different to solar CMEs. Argiroffi et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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: nature.com/articles/s4156 #BennuRevealed #LPSC2019

Mar 19, 2019

Be sure to check out the awesome Sketch-Up from

@jtuttlekeane

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Two

transits of Earth-sized (0.99 ± 0.05 R⊕) warm exoplanet LHS 475 b demonstrate that JWST is sensitive to molecular features smaller than 50 ppm --- very promising for atmospheric characterisation! Lustig-Yaeger, Fu et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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A sensitive

survey of M dwarfs has resulted in multiple detections of coherent low-frequency radio emission, potentially connected to auroral emission generated by orbiting planets.

@astroJoeC

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Sep 16, 2019

What weighs 2.14 solar masses and smells of neutrons? You got it... the most massive neutron star ever, millisecond pulsar J0740+6620. Good work

@HannahThankful

and colleagues (including the

@NANOGrav

team). rdcu.be/bRdQh or

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: nature.com/articles/s4155

Jun 15, 2021

Our June issue is now available, at nature.com/natastron/volu! The cover image featuring Centaurus A and

@SOFIAtelescope

observations is connected to the paper of Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez.

SOFIA Telescope

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and collaborators demonstrate sub-arcsecond widefield imaging of the sky at the low frequency of 144 MHz using

@LOFAR

Universiteit Leiden

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Jan 3, 2018

It's job season in the academic world, but there are alternatives to the quest for tenure. We have commissioned a collection of articles from a host of ex-tronomers who thoroughly reassure you that there are fulfilling careers beyond academia: go.nature.com/2CJ1bNe #AAS231

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Jun 12

The TOI-1338 binary star (a.k.a. BEBOP-1) joins the few known to host a circumbinary multiplanetary system, with the radial velocity detection of a 65 Earth mass small giant that joins the already known smaller planet.

@standingMatthew

Uni of Birmingham

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Strong X-ray emission from (~50) radio jets is consistent with synchrotron emission by a secondary population of electrons boosted to TeV energies within a small volume of the (SMBH) jet.

@Dr_Eileen_Meyer

UMBC and 2 others

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Pluto time: Olkin, Ennico & Spencer review "The Pluto system after the New Horizons flyby": go.nature.com/2fM5YmN @NewHorizons2015

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Oct 13, 2021

Our October issue is now available to read. The cover shows

@ehtelescope

observations of Cen A, and is linked to the Janssen et al. paper in the issue: nature.com/natastron/volu

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Feb 10, 2022

An efficient route towards the formation of peptides under interstellar conditions has been identified. This experimentally verified process also formed polypeptides, biopolymers thought to be important for the origin of life. Krasnokutski et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Mar 26, 2018

An exoplanet (K2-229b) with Mercury's internal structure (70% core-30% mantle) and Earth's size sheds light on how Mercury-like planets form and evolve. Santerne et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Ben Stappers and 3 others

May 30, 2022

Astronomers have discovered a neutron star with an ultra-long spin period of 76s, using MeerKAT. Though it resides in the NS graveyard, it emits radio waves and challenges our understanding of NS evolution.

@ManishaCaleb

, Ian Heywood et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Sep 5, 2017

Our September issue is now live! 13 scientists pick their favourite images from the Cassini mission... and more: go.nature.com/2iWtUI4

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Jan 17, 2019

In our sister journal

@nature

this week: a nice feature on how

@ESAGaia

has been allowing astronomers to deepen their understanding of the Milky Way:

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Jul 20

Impacts on Venus at the end of its accretion phase had a higher mean velocity than those on Earth. Simulations show that this may have highly heated Venus' core, contributing to its young surface age, & affected its magnetic field intensity. Marchi et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155

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The Galileo spacecraft did observe signatures of a plume on #Europa! Results from Magnetometer and Plasma wave instrument during flyby E12: nature.com/articles/s4155

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Sep 30, 2019

Models of gravity modes in hot sub-dwarfs predict that

@NASA_TESS

will be able to observe signs of the never-before-seen helium core flash. Miller-Bertolami et al.:

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May 8

JWST mid-IR images of Fomalhaut reveal a system of dusty rings and disks, created as debris from planetesimal collisions. These structures suggest the presence of a likely dynamically active planetary system.

@AndrasGaspar

et al.: nature.com/articles/s4155 / rdcu.be/dbD7j

Dr. Marie Ygouf

and Kim W-D

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Cole Miller and Nicolás Yunes review the 'new frontier of gravitational waves' in this week's

@Nature

: nature.com/articles/s4158 (part of Nature's 150th anniversary celebrations)

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Sep 10, 2020

This month, Nature Astronomy is addressing the topic of climate change. We know astronomers generally fly a lot, but quantitative estimates of the impact of astronomy on climate change are rare.

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