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For papers that merit urgent publication, MNRAS Letters, the online section of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, publishes short, topical and significant research in all fields of astronomy …
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Modified gravity in plane sight
The Milky Way has many satellite galaxies (e.g. the Magellanic Clouds), which orbit around it. The same is also true for the satellites of our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda. Though this has been known for many years, the origin of these satellite planes has remained a mystery. In this picture, we expect a nearly random distribution of satellites. This contradicts observations, even when disregarding the particularly problematic velocity data.
Stars in the telescopic eye: LVHIS and the nearby Universe
Spiral galaxies like the Milky Way and its neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, contain about 100 billion stars each, the light of which can be seen by eye. Also visible are small amounts of dust, typically enshrouding the sites of young star formations. What cannot be seen by the naked eye are the vast amounts of cold hydrogen gas and even larger reservoirs of dark matter. These elements of galaxy make-up are detectable only by radio telescopes.
Smashing black holes at the centre of the Milky Way
Massive star clusters are ideal nurseries of stellar black holes (BHs), with masses of 10-100 solar masses, and represent the most likely birthplaces for intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), truly enigmatic objects with putative masses in the range 100-100000 solar masses. Intermediate-mass black holes leave little signs of their presence and their detection remains one of the outstanding challenges of modern astrophysics.
How do black holes shape the cosmos?
At the center of every galaxy is a supermassive black hole. Looking at the wider scale, is it possible that these gravity monsters influence the overall structure of our universe? Using a new computer model, astrophysicists have recently calculated the ways in which black holes influence the distribution of dark matter, how heavy elements are produced and distributed throughout the cosmos, and where cosmic magnetic fields originate.
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