A Star Just Ate One of Its Planets

🍽️ A star that ate its own planet

💥 Supernova remnants putting on an unexpected show

🌊 Deep-sea clues to a rare ancient cosmic explosion

🔭 Chandra tracks M87's black hole jet in stunning detail

🌌 First direct detection of star-forming gas in early galaxies

Brooke Kotten of the University of Michigan led a team that found TOI-5882, a sun-like star 1,300 light-years away, likely consumed one of its own planets based on an unusual lithium signature.

The team compared TOI-5882 against 62 control stars matched by age, mass, and temperature. No matter how the data were sliced, TOI-5882 landed at least in the 97th percentile for lithium enrichment.

A brown dwarf orbiting TOI-5882, more than 20 Jupiter masses, may have gravitationally nudged the doomed planet inward, though confirming that theory will require a separate study.

Andrea Prestwich of the Catholic University of America led a study of 14 years of Chandra X-ray data on the galaxy M83, located about 15 million light-years from Earth, and found roughly half of 22 supernova remnants showed dramatic, unexpected brightness changes.

The most likely explanation is that these are stellar survivors, stars that outlived a companion's supernova, now feeding material onto the resulting black hole or neutron star, causing rapid X-ray variability.

One remnant brightened by a factor of several hundred over just a few years, making it one of the most extreme X-ray variables ever found in a supernova remnant population.

Dr. Dominik Koll and an international team detected plutonium-244, a radioactive isotope with an 80-million-year half-life, in a Pacific Ocean ferromanganese crust, pointing to a rare and violent cosmic explosion over 100 million years ago.

Iron-60 peaks at two specific depths indicated two nearby supernovae in the last ten million years, but the plutonium-244 was spread evenly throughout the sample, suggesting it came from a separate, older, and far more powerful event.

The team searched for curium-247, which has a 15.6-million-year half-life, but found none, ruling out at least four theoretical models for how the heaviest elements form through rapid neutron capture.

Camille Poitras of Laval University presented new Chandra X-ray observations of the jet launched by the supermassive black hole in M87, a galaxy located 55 million light-years from Earth, revealing fine substructures for the first time at X-ray wavelengths.

The team identified several substructures that appear to move at apparent speeds approaching five times the speed of light, an optical illusion known as superluminal motion produced when particles travel near light speed roughly toward Earth.

Significant brightness variations along the jet are consistent with synchrotron cooling, a process where highly energetic particles lose energy while interacting with magnetic fields, offering new clues about jet physics.

Fudamoto and colleagues used ALMA to detect [O I] 145 micrometer emission from four galaxies observed just 700 to 800 million years after the Big Bang, marking the first direct measurement of neutral gas in such early systems.

The weak or absent [N II] 205 micrometer emission indicates these galaxies have low metallicity, consistent with galaxies in the early stages of chemical enrichment that have not yet built up heavier elements.

Despite their youth, the galaxies show gas densities comparable to local starburst galaxies, paired with a moderately lower radiation field, suggesting intense but not extreme star formation was already underway.