7 December 2015

Highlights from AAS Nova: 22 November - 5 December 2015

Susanna Kohler

Susanna Kohler American Astronomical Society (AAS)

AAS Nova is a new website that provides brief highlights of recently published articles from the AAS journals. Its intent is to gain broader exposure for AAS authors and to provide astronomy researchers and enthusiasts with summaries of recent, interesting research across a wide range of astronomical fields.

The following are the AAS Nova highlights from the past two weeks; follow the links to read more, or visit the AAS Nova webpage for more posts.

4 December 2015
Preferred Hosts for Short-Period Exoplanets
How did short-period super-Earths come to exist so close to their host stars? To address this question, a new study examines what the preferred hosts are for short-period exoplanets.

2 December 2015
Mystery of a Dimming White Dwarf
An isolated white dwarf was recently discovered to dim periodically, prompting a search for the cause of its variability.

30 November 2015
Watching the Sun to Improve Exoplanet Detection
Looking for “wobbling” stars is a useful way to detect exoplanets, but stellar noise prevents us from reaching the precision needed to find Earth-twin planets. The key to solving this problem may be to examine our own star.

25 November 2015
The Hunt for Missing Dwarf Galaxies
The recent discovery of 158 previously undetected dwarf galaxies in the Fornax cluster may help to solve a long-standing puzzle in galaxy formation and evolution.

23 November 2015
Featured Image: Spitzer Galaxies
Spitzer has recently taken beautiful infrared images of 2,352 nearby galaxies, as a part of the Spitzer Survey of Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G).