Hubert Reeves, a most renowned astrophysicist for both his scientific accomplishments and outstanding outreach efforts, passed away on 13 October 2023.

In academia, we ignore the whole person to the detriment of the growth of the scientist and the community. Trauma is a black hole eating away at the health of individual scientists.

The determination of the Hubble constant (H0) using the stellar distance ladder relies substantially on accurately measuring the apparent magnitude of Cepheid stars, largely using HST. As demonstrated by Adam Riess and colleagues, the source-separation abilities of JWST enable a stringent test of HST-derived distances, through a more tightly constrained period–luminosity relation for Cepheids. The

The most recent development in planetary defence to hit the news was the success of the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which demonstrated the viability of altering the orbits of near-Earth objects (NEOs) through targeted collisions with spacecraft. Prospects for the successful deflection of such objects and the prevention of potentially destructive impacts with Earth depend crucially

Inside the Star Factory: The Creation of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s Largest and Most Powerful Space Observatory Chris Gunn & Christopher WanjekThe MIT Press: 2023. 188pp. $44.95

At a distance of 321 pc, HH211 is a class 0 protostar. It is also the youngest and nearest protostellar outflow, ideal for high-resolution infrared observations. The JWST image reveals a narrow bipolar jet from HH211 with a series of bow shocks produced due to the slow-moving outflows in the northwest (upper right) and southeast (lower left) directions from the central protostar. The three-colour (blue

The method by which this simulation is realized involves calculating the radiation field in five bands; magnetic field; gravitational field; turbulence; chemical abundances; dust destruction and heating/cooling balance in each gas cell. FIRE was designed to simulate galaxies, while STARFORGE was created to study clouds within the interstellar medium. However, in terms of physics, the codes diverge

Charles Gammie and colleagues wrote the HARM code to tackle the extreme physics close to a spinning black hole. Twenty years later, it is performing a similar task in three dimensions in 1/10,000th of the time.

It is frustrating that M-dwarfs, which offer our best chance to characterize rocky exoplanets in the classical ‘habitable zone’, are also very active. This activity, in addition to impacting the atmosphere itself and its long-term evolution, is the source of frequent flares that affect the shape of the transit lightcurves and thus our ability to identify and quantify atmospheric molecules. Ward Howard

Dwarf galaxies in a high-density environment can quench star formation due to environmental processes such a ram pressure stripping; however, for dwarf galaxies in isolation, internal processes such as active galactic nuclei (AGN) feedback can also have a significant impact on the quenching of star formation. Ray Sharma and co-authors now analyse the characteristics of isolated, quiescent dwarf galaxies

The current naming conventions for planetary features exacerbate the underrepresentation in space science of women and marginalized groups.

Astronomy has always been a direct way to bring science to the public. From planetariums to books and initiatives to bring the night sky to all corners of the world, our only limit is creativity (and funding).

MIRI is a mapping spectrometer that acquires 3D ‘tiles’, where two dimensions are spatial and the third is spectral, covering the wavelengths between 4.9 µm and 27.9 µm at a spectral resolution R ≈ 3,500. The figure pictured here shows a composition of four tiles obtained on 13 and 14 November 2022. Three of them cover a vertical strip across Saturn’s disk, going from the north pole down to the equator

From previous works using simulations, it is evident that in highly magnetized plasma the particle acceleration is caused by magnetic reconnection in the turbulent flow. For instance, it is believed that in relativistic jets within active galactic nuclei (AGN), the particles get accelerated to extreme speeds via Fermi-type acceleration, predominantly along the magnetic field lines. Medina-Torrejón

The team used observatories around the world — from Chile, the USA, Mexico, New Zealand, the Netherlands to Morocco — to measure the reflective brightness of BW3 in low-Earth orbit at different geometries. Once the satellite unfolded to its operating configuration, its brightness reached magnitude +0.4 — comparable to the brightest stars in the sky. It is at its brightest at higher elevations above

Of the two interstellar objects (ISOs) that we detected while they were passing by our Solar System, 1I/‘Oumuamua resembled a bare asteroid whereas 2I/Borisov had a more cometary appearance. However, ‘Oumuamua’s nongravitational acceleration close to perihelion could also be explained by some form of outgassing, despite the lack of coma detection. Samuel Cabot and colleagues suggest that looking at

A cluster of more than 100 stars in the Galactic Centre called the ‘S stars’ move visibly along their trajectories on human timescales. Predicting their movements with a high degree of accuracy is challenging due to a large number of close encounters, which induce perturbations that cause abrupt changes in orbital energies. Simon Portegies Zwart and colleagues have performed a suite of high-precision