Nature Astronomy

So the burst arrives smeared, a chirp, and the size of the smear counts the electrons along the line of sight.

Kriti Sharma, Vikram Ravi, Elizabeth Krause, and colleagues, Nature Astronomy on the 8th.

A prism made out of the entire intervening universe.

And the result.

And the new number is one in two.

Roughly one in two at birth.

Celsa Pardo-Araujo and Nanda Rea in Barcelona with Michele Ronchi and Vanessa Graber, Nature Astronomy on the 10th.

A population synthesis modeling every class of isolated neutron star as one family, evolving spin-down, magnetic, and thermal decay and galactic dynamics together.

So the picture has always been exotic, freakish, one in a hundred.

A new paper in Nature Astronomy says that picture is a counting error and the real figure is closer to one in two.

Half.

Half of all neutron stars.

You build the galaxy in a computer.

That's this work.

Celsa Pardo-Araujo and Nanda Rea at the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona with Michele Rahme at ASTRON in the Netherlands and Vanessa Graber at Royal Holloway in London published this week in Nature Astronomy.

It's a population synthesis.

A dispersion measure.

So the new work, published Tuesday the 8th of September in Nature Astronomy, led by Kriti Sharma at Caltech with Vikram Ravi, Liam Connor, and Elizabeth Krause at the University of Arizona among the co-authors.

109 fast radio bursts, each localized to a host galaxy so it has a redshift as well as a dispersion measure, out to a redshift of about 0.3.

Relatively local deliberately because that's where feedback effects are most measurable.

Astronomers have discovered a new type of molten planet beyond our solar system.

The findings, reported in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggest this strange exoplanet stores large amounts of sulfur deep within a permanent ocean of magma.

The exoplanet, known as L 98-59D, is about 1.6 times the size of the Earth and orbits a small red dwarf star about 35 light-years away.

Observations with NASA's Webb Space Telescope suggested something unusual.

So you're gonna be talking about, um, uh, biosignatures, and I actually saw that paper, um, and thought, "Wow, this would be an interesting paper to discuss on Stars, Cells, and God." [laughs] So I'm glad that you picked it up and you're gonna be sharing with us.

Well, it got published a few days ago in Nature Astronomy, and, uh, what intrigued me, the whole paper is about biochemistry.

And so, uh, in fact, I kind of read through this and said, "You know, this is really biochemistry for dummies, and that maybe astrobiologists are biochemical dummies, uh, so they need this." And it's like this seems so obvious, but it's taken literally-

Yeah

... of amino acids and lipids?" Now they didn't discuss things like nucleobases-

Right

... mainly because this is written in Nature Astronomy, making the point that astronomers, uh, using their infrared spectra, uh, the biomolecules that are gonna be the easiest to detect are the amino acids and the lipids.

Yeah.