BlueDOGs Might Evolve From Little Red Dots

One of the most difficult parts of astronomy is understanding how time affects it. The farther away you look in the universe, the farther back you look in time. One way this complicates things is how objects might change over time. For example, a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in the early universe might appear one way to our modern telescopes, but the same supermassive black hole might appear completely differently a few billion years later. Understanding the connection between the two objects would be difficult to say the least, but a new paper from researchers at the University of Science and Technology in South Korea describes one potential parallel, between the recently discovered “Little Red Dots” of the early universe and “BlueDOGs” of the slightly later universe.

Astronomers Use a Double-Lensing Technique to Study a Supermassive Black Hole

An international team of astronomers led by Matus Rybak (Leiden University, Netherlands) has proven, thanks to accidental double zoom, that millimetre radiation is generated close to the core of a supermassive black hole. Their findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The Butterfly Star And Its Planet-Forming Disk

The so-called Butterfly star gets its name from its edge-on appearance. The star's protoplanetary disk blocks out starlight revealing a nebula, or butterfly wing, on each side. Deeper JWST observations show the disk is tilted and asymmetrical, which affects how planets form.

Ionic Liquids Could Form Naturally And Replace Water As A Biological Solvent

Water is key to life as we know it. But that doesn’t mean its key to life everywhere. Despite the fact that the ability to house liquid water is one of the key characteristics we look for in potentially habitable exoplanets, there is nothing written in stone about the fact that life has to use water as a solvent as opposed to other liquid options. A new paper from researchers at MIT, including those who are developing missions to look for life on Venus, shows there might be an alternative - ionic liquids that can form and stay stable in really harsh conditions.

Red Galaxies Provide New Insights into the Birth of the Universe

Images taken with the MIRI infrared camera on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have made it possible to observe the first galaxies in long-wavelength infrared light for the first time. Alongside a recent study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, these images provide new insights into how the first galaxies formed over 13 billion years ago.

Chandra Peers Into A Supernova's Troubled Heart

NASA's Chandra Reveals Star's Inner Conflict Before Explosion - https://ift.tt/vV5hldX

Metals Are Critical To Life - We Should Screen Exoplanets For Them

Life is complicated, and not just in a philosophical sense. But one simple thing we know about life is that it requires energy, and to get that energy it needs certain fundamental elements. A new paper in preprint on arXiv from Giovanni Covone and Donato Giovannelli from the University of Naples discusses how we might use that constraint to narrow our search for stars and planets that could potentially harbor life. To put it simply, if it doesn’t have many of the constituent parts of the “building blocks” of life, then life probably doesn't exist there.