 Astronomers mosaic-imaged a giant molecular filament using ALMA to reveal, for the first time, the early mass assembly history during clustered star formation in a single cloud.
The study focuses on a central question in star formation: how massive stars and stellar clusters assemble their mass over time? To tackle this problem, astronomers have long focused on deeply embedded “infant” stars that remain hidden within cold molecular clouds. These objects are invisible at optical wavelengths but radiate strongly at (sub-)millimeter and radio wavelengths due to their low temperatures. Over the past decades, large Galactic surveys have significantly expanded the sample of star-forming regions across diverse environments and distances. However, this diversity has also introduced substantial environmental variations, complicating efforts to isolate evolutionary effects from external influences.
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 The High-energy Transients Follow-up (HiTF) Group reported their first scientific observation via the General Coordinates Network, based on data obtained with the PKU 60-cm Telescope. The report, led by Yacheng Kang, a PhD student in Prof. Lijing Shao’s group, presents optical follow-up photometric observations of a peculiar gamma-ray burst detected on March 10 by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. Although this was not the first GCN report on the event, the HiTF Group responded promptly to the global call for coordinated multi-site follow-up observations, providing valuable support for continued monitoring. This effort marks an important step for PKU astronomy to independently conduct follow-up observations.
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 The 12 yr LAMOST quasar survey since 2012 has independently discovered more than 40k quasars, making the LAMOST quasar survey currently the third-largest survey project in the world in terms of the number of quasars identified spectroscopically, second only to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, as reported in a recent study published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series by the LAMOST quasar survey team, which is led by Xue-Bing Wu, a professor at the Department of Astronomy, School of Physics, Peking University.
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 Astronomers have long sought evidence to explain why comets at the outskirts of our own solar system contain crystalline silicates, since crystals require intense heat to form and these “dirty snowballs” spend most of their time in the ultracold Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. Now, looking outside our solar system, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has returned the first conclusive evidence that links how those conditions are possible. An international team, including Prof. Gregory Herczeg at KIAA, clearly showed for the first time that the hot, inner part of the disk of gas and dust surrounding a very young, actively forming star is where crystalline silicates are forged. Webb also revealed a strong outflow that is capable of carrying the crystals to the outer edges of this disk. Compared to our own fully formed, mostly dust-cleared solar system, the crystals would be forming approximately between the Sun and Earth.
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 A research team led by Prof. Lijing Shao in the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University has proposed a new Bayesian framework for gravitational-wave ringdown analysis and developed an open-source algorithm, FIREFLY, to apply to real gravitational-wave data. Since their first discovery about ten years ago, gravitational waves have become instrumental in understanding astrophysical processes, fundamental laws of physics, as well as black-hole spacetimes. Above all, useful information is eventually extracted from (usually rather noisy) data with dedicated statistical techniques.
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 Beijing, China — An international research team led by Prof. Fangzhou Jiang at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University has unveiled a new theory explaining one of the biggest astrophysical mysteries revealed by the James Webb Space Telescope, the origin of the enigmatic “Little Red Dots”. These tiny but extraordinarily bright objects at cosmic dawn appear to host supermassive black holes far larger than their surrounding galaxies should allow. Until now, their existence has posed a severe challenge to standard models of galaxy and black-hole formation and coevolution.
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