Traditionally, models have proposed that Earth and its rocky neighbors formed gradually, through a series of chaotic collisions between Mars-size bodies and planetesimals, after the Solar System’s gas disk had dispersed. Recent observations of young exoplanets suggest a different story: many planets form early, while still embedded in their young gas disks. Due to orbital migration, proto-plan...
A study led by a team of researchers from Tsinghua University and Perimeter Institute, has shed new light on the intricate gravitational waves produced by merging black holes in their final stages. Their research calculates the nonlinear waves produced by black holes in their final stages after a merger. This work establishes a theory that describes wave-wave interactions around generic rotatin...
In a milestone of international astronomical collaboration, Prof. Di Li's team at Tsinghua University, along with institutions in Italy, Australia, and Germany, have completed a high-precision polarization census of pulsars in globular clusters, utilizing the combined power of the FAST radio telescope in China and the MeerKAT array in South Africa. This study marks the first in-depth cooperatio...
Super-Earth exoplanets—worlds slightly larger than Earth—are common in the outer regions of planetary systems, where gas giants like Jupiter are typically found. A new international study, published today in Science, adds an important piece to the puzzle of planetary system formation by highlighting a previously underexplored population of cold, rocky planets orbiting far from their stars.“W...
The Commensal Radio Astronomy FasT Survey (CRAFTS; Li et al. 2018) is one of the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) key projects. CRAFTS simultaneously records wide-band spectral line data, narrow-band spectral line data, and high temporal resolution time-domain data, enabling diverse scientific objectives. The wide-band spectral line data cover a spectral window in th...