Project
Wide-field optical time-domain survey on Palomar's 48-inch Samuel Oschin telescope, scanning the northern sky for transients and variable stars.
Astronomers led by Itai Sfaradi found a star torn apart by a massive black hole 1.08 kiloparsecs from its host galaxy's center. The team estimates its mass at roughly 1 million to 10 million suns and weighs two explanations for the offset.
Reality
MIT-led astronomers found a star about 300 light-years away slowly pulling material off a brown dwarf companion, a process that could last billions of years. One detection shows slow stripping happens, and working out how common it is will need a larger sample of such pairs.
Reality
Astronomers have watched a low-mass star strip a brown dwarf for the first time, in ZTF J0440+2325 about 300 light-years away, space.com reported. The pace is slow enough for the feeding to last up to billions of years.
Reality
MIT-led astronomers say ZTF J0440+2325, 300 light-years away, is the first system seen where one low-mass object steadily feeds on another. Nobody has settled how long the feeding can last, and published estimates run from hundreds of thousands to billions of years.
Reality
Einstein Probe's fourth X-ray-flash supernova was too faint to confirm on its own. A wide-field optical survey looking at the same sky made it a data point.
Reality
Astronomers report helium moving unexpectedly fast long after AT2024wpp peaked, which they read as surviving stellar structure. That complicates the tidy version of tidal disruption.
Reality