Highlights from AAS Nova: 24 October – 6 November 2021

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 web page for more posts.

5 November 2021
Making Heavy Metals with High-Energy Collisions
What do gold and europium have in common? They both form when compact objects like neutron stars and black holes collide.

3 November 2021
Mapping Planet-Forming Disks with ALMA
A new special issue takes a deep dive into the chemistry of protoplanetary disks around five young, nearby stars.

1 November 2021
Featured Image: A Charon-Lit View of Pluto
As New Horizons zipped past Pluto, it caught a glimpse of Pluto’s long-shadowed southern hemisphere.

29 October 2021
Sizing the Sun from a Solar Eclipse
A team of amateur astronomers from around the world have measured the diameter of the Sun during a total solar eclipse, a measurement that hasn’t been updated in nearly a century.

27 October 2021
The Case for an Active Volcano on Venus
Using data from Venus’s superheated surface and super-thick atmosphere, researchers find that a volcano in Venus’s Imdr Regio might be active today.

26 October 2021
A Recipe for Growing Black Holes in Small Galaxies
Astrobites reports on new predictions of the fraction of dwarf galaxies with active black holes lurking at their centers.

25 October 2021
Another Kind of Tatooine: Can Planets Form Perpendicular to a Binary System?
Astronomers use N-body simulations to explore how planets form around double stars that have eccentric orbits.