Highlights from AAS Nova: 19 April - 2 May 2020

AAS Nova provides brief highlights of recently published articles from the AAS journals, i.e., The Astronomical Journal (AJ), The Astrophysical Journal (ApJ), ApJ Letters, ApJ Supplements, The Planetary Science Journal, and Research Notes of the AAS. The website's 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.

1 May 2020
Challenging a Plasma Assumption
A recent study calls into question a fundamental assumption used to model space plasmas.

29 April 2020
Spins Point to How Black Hole Binaries Formed
New research uses clues from black hole spins to explore how binary black holes came to be paired together in the first place.

28 April 2020
Double-Peak and Destroy: Accretion in a Tidal Disruption Event Reveals Itself
Astrobites reports on the first confident detection of an accretion disk that formed after a supermassive black hole tore apart a hapless star.

27 April 2020
Searching Pulsars for Planets
A new study explores whether there are any exoplanets orbiting the well-observed NANOGrav pulsars.

24 April 2020
A Stellar Method of Catalog Creation
Getting star catalogs out of telescope images is a tricky affair. But a recent technique promises improvements on existing catalogs, and it could be widely applicable as large-scale astronomical surveys begin.

22 April 2020
Rescuing an Overlooked Planet
Sometimes real exoplanet detections are accidentally discarded by the automated vetting pipeline. One such error was just discovered: a habitable-zone Earth-like planet candidate.

21 April 2020
How to Grow a Giant Galaxy
Astrobites reports on how the universe can grow a giant galaxy by a redshift of z ~ 2.

20 April 2020
Featured Image: Formation of the First Binaries
When primordial gas clouds collapse and fragment in the early universe, the resulting massive stars may form with friends.