An illustration showing a binary star circled by a warped circumbinary disk. Once every orbit, one of the stars in the binary passes behind the disk and its light is blocked from our view. Image credit: Poon, Zhu, Zanazzi, University of Toronto; Sahl Rowther et al., Warwick University.An international team led by Tsinghua astronomer Prof. Wei Zhu has identified only the second and third example...
阅读更多...The red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 is home to the largest number (which is seven) of Earth-sized planets ever found in a single planet system. Three of these planets may be suitable to harbor liquid water or even life and will be prime targets for the recently-launched JWST spacecraft. Different from the terrestrial planets in our solar system, scientists have determined that it is likely that the T...
阅读更多...Image credit: Law et al. 2021, MAPS IIIIt is commonly believed that planets form in disks surrounding young stars, but how exactly this happens remains an outstanding question. In recent years, astronomers have made great strides in directly observing protoplanetary disks using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), located in the Atacama Desert of Northern Chile. By observing...
阅读更多...On 2022 January 1, Hua Feng and his collaborators reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters a significant detection of X-ray polarization in Sco X-1 with the space mission PolarLight, which has been operating on-orbit for more than three years since its launch in 2018 October. The results help place stringent constraints on the geometry of the hot corona, and mark Sco X-1 as the second astr...
阅读更多...Massive Galaxies May be Crucial for the Enrichment of Cosmic Metal in the Early Universe 27 Sep 2021 What are the sources of early metals and how did they enrich t...
阅读更多...DoA faculty reviews the statistical distribution of exoplanets 09 Sep 2021 How do planetary systems form and evolve? It is a scientific question that astronomers h...
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