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Peer-reviewed astrophysics journal publishing rapid, short papers on new or significant astronomical findings, companion to The Astrophysical Journal.
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ASU-led astronomers stacked hundreds of jet galaxies and found hydrogen glowing along the jets for hundreds of thousands of light-years. The glow fits one explanation for why gas-rich galaxies stop making stars, though what was measured is ionized gas, not star formation.
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UC San Diego physicists compared eight Planck polarization maps against each other and recovered the same 0.37-degree twist as the standard analysis. The agreement gives cosmologists a second way to ask whether the rotation is in the sky or in the instrument, though the authors stress it does not confirm the twist is real.
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ASU and RRI astronomers found hydrogen glow concentrated along black hole jets after stacking the spectra of hundreds of galaxies. It places jet energy in the halo gas that feeds new stars, though any drop in star formation is still inferred.
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Simulations strand Earth outside the heliosphere three times in 14 million years, and dust in sediment cores agrees. The cadence, roughly one encounter every 4.5 million years, limits what it explains.
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UC San Diego physicists cross-checked eight Planck polarization maps and found their relative calibration matches the standard analysis. The test cancels any rotation all detectors share, so the hinted 0.37-degree twist still needs an absolute angle reference.
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Physicists at HKU and Beijing Normal University derived lensing predictions straight from a three-dimensional wave simulation. On one well-studied quasar, the image positions came out closer to the data than the models they compared against.
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Yale-led work in The Astrophysical Journal Letters ran the ASTRID simulation without fixing black holes to galactic centres. Mergers left them off-centre for billions of years, most often in the smallest galaxies.
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A RIKEN group simulated water ice chemistry at 10 kelvin and found that a single property of a metal-poor birth cloud can produce both of the strange isotope ratios measured in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS.
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An August paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters brings a 100- and a 130-solar-mass black hole back inside theory by assuming a foreground lens of 190 to 850 solar masses, in a lensing regime nobody has yet detected.
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Redshifts of double quasars can be wrong about depth by as much as 10 million light-years, because the black hole's own outflows spoil the velocity. Huanqing Chen's team tested reading the separation from lit-up gas.
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Elias 2-24 b sits in a disk gap 55 times Earth's distance from its star, where formation models ask for at least five million years to build a Jupiter. Keck coronagraph images from 2018 and 2020 put it under a million years old.
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Two years after the same team stopped at three to four Jupiter masses in this cloud, deeper Webb imaging and spectroscopy reached 0.19 percent of a solar mass, below where models of cloud collapse sit comfortably.
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For the first time, the Earth-Theia collision has been simulated with temperature-dependent rock strength. Some runs still make the familiar debris disk; the hottest assemble an intact Moon in about five hours.
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PSR J1637-4642 spent about nine years of its archival record doing nothing unusual, then jumped its spin rate by 2.7 parts per million in 2018 and twice more since. That says something about baselines as well as neutron stars.
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Fit as a magnified and diffracted signal, GW231123's 190 to 265 solar masses drop to 100 to 180, which matters less for that one event than for every heavy merger in the catalogue nobody has lens-checked.
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Since 2001, giant-impact models have treated Earth and Theia as strengthless fluid because geology looked irrelevant at those energies. Restoring temperature-dependent strength changes whether the Moon condenses out of debris or arrives whole.
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A new model says molten surfaces meter outgassing slowly enough to match escape losses for billions of years, which reshuffles the target list for follow-up spectroscopy of hot rocky planets.
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A paper accepted by Astrophysical Journal Letters puts the spill from Reflect Orbital's beams at 80 kilometers. The FCC approved the demonstration satellite in July.
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ALMA's compact array found ten molecules around HD 87643, six of them sulfur-bearing, where only carbon monoxide had been seen. One isotope ratio does not fit standard nuclear physics.
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An accepted ApJL paper models Reflect Orbital's 18-metre pilot and its proposed 50,000-satellite constellation, handing regulators a number instead of a pitch.
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Science · August 16, 2026 · 1 publisher