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The highest-quality JWST spectra reveal that little red dots are young supermassive black holes shrouded in dense cocoons of ionized gas, where electron scattering, not Doppler motions, broadens their spectral lines.

An extreme Einstein ring ~10,000 times as bright as the Milky Way in the infrared is studied with VLT/ERIS and ALMA, and the authors find that the lensed galaxy is a starburst with a fast-rotating disk, rather than being driven by a major merger.

Little Red Dots (LRDs) are a high-redshift galaxy population with unclear nature. Here, authors show CANUCS-LRD-z8.6, a spectroscopically confirmed LRD, hosting an active galactic nucleus, and its properties provide insights for early black hole and galaxy formation.

JWST spectroscopy confirms redshifts for two very luminous galaxies with z > 11, and also demonstrates that another candidate with suggested z ≈ 16 instead has z = 4.9.

As part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), NIRSpec has spectroscopically confirmed four young and metal-poor galaxies at redshift 10.3–13.2, from an early epoch of galaxy formation.

JWST/NIRSpec observations of Abell2744-QSO1 show a high black-hole-to-host mass ratio in the early Universe, which indicates that we are seeing the black hole in a phase of rapid growth, accreting at 30% of the Eddington limit.

Analysis of the JWST/NIRSpec spectrum of the recently observed Lyman-break galaxy JADES-GS+53.15508-27.80178 revealed a redshift of z = 7.3, a Balmer break and a complete absence of nebular emission lines, indicating that quenching occurred only 700 million years after the Big Bang.

The combination of JWST and ALMA data here unravel the history of the gas content of a quiescent galaxy, which became quenched through an act of self-sabotage. Black-hole accretion feedback heated the galaxy’s surrounding material, preventing its accretion.

An (ultraviolet) dust attenuation feature at 2,175 Å, attributed to carbonaceous dust grains in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, also exists in galaxies up to a redshift of 7.

The authors report the photometric detection of the distant spectroscopically confirmed galaxy JADES-GS-z14-0 at z > 14 with JWST/MIRI. The inferred properties suggest rapid mass assembly and metal enrichment during the earliest phases of galaxy formation.

A type Ia supernova shows the presence of helium-rich circumstellar material, as demonstrated by its spectral features, infrared emission and a radio counterpart, that probably originates from a single-degenerate system in which a white dwarf accretes material from a helium donor star.

Measuring atomic spectra in high magnetic fields is important for understanding astrophysical objects such as white dwarfs, but laboratory fields are too small to do so. Murdin et al. study the analogous spectra of phosphorous-doped silicon, whose material properties scale the equivalent field to far lower values.

JWST observations of a strongly lensed low-mass galaxy in a 600-million-year-old Universe show massive star clusters (the Firefly Sparkle) cocooned in a diffuse arc in the Canadian Unbiased Cluster Survey.

Observations of the young supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5 in the Large Magellanic Cloud reveal concentric shells of ionized calcium and sulfur that resemble hydrodynamical simulations of the double detonation of a sub-Chandrasekhar-mass white dwarf.

Evidence is found for a distant galaxy growing inside-out within the first 700 million years of the Universe. The galaxy has a dense central core comparable in mass density to local massive ellipticals, and an extended star-forming disc.

The discovery of the most energetic transient event to date is reported. Its spectroscopic properties and temporal evolution imply it is powered by shock interaction between expanding material and large quantities of surrounding dense matter.

There are three different evolutionary pathways leading to post-starburst galaxies in the EAGLE simulations, all consistent with observationally motivated scenarios. These multiple pathways explain the observational diversity of post-starburst galaxies.

RUBIES-EGS-QG-1 is an exceptionally massive and mature galaxy discovered just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Its stars formed in an extremely rapid burst, posing a major challenge to all current theoretical models.

The rapid rise in brightness of a tidal disruption event is attributed to the destruction of a main sequence star by a black hole of intermediate mass in a dwarf galaxy. Such events are rare, and non-accreting intermediate-mass black holes are challenging to find.

JWST–NIRSpec spectroscopic confirmation of two luminous galaxies is presented, proving that luminous galaxies were already in place 300 million years after the Big Bang and are more common than what was expected before JWST.

Ground-based and satellite observations show that the black hole in the ultraluminous X-ray source P13 has a mass of less than 15 times that of the Sun and displays the properties that typically distinguish ultraluminous X-ray sources from other stellar-mass black holes.

An extreme flare has been seen from a supermassive black hole at redshift z = 2.6. First detected in 2018, it is 30 times brighter than similar events. The most likely cause is the shredding of a star of 30 solar masses or more.

Magnetic fields in stellar upper atmospheres are key to understanding stellar activity and its planetary effects. Here, the authors study chromospheric magnetic fields in three M-dwarf stars using spectropolarimetric observations, finding fields reaching hundreds of Gauss with complex height-dependent structures.

GS-9209 is spectroscopically confirmed as a massive quiescent galaxy at a redshift of 4.658, showing that massive galaxy formation and quenching were already well underway within the first billion years of cosmic history.

Radio and optical spectroscopic observations of a brown dwarf reveal auroral emissions powered by magnetospheric currents, showing that aurorae may be a signature of magnetospheres much larger than those observed in our Solar System.

Structures observed in polarized light across the broad Hα emission line in the quasar PG 1700+158 originate close to the accretion disk in a wind. The wind has large rotational motions (4,000km s⁻¹), providing direct observational evidence that outflows from active galactic nuclei are launched from the disks.

Spatially resolved JWST spectroscopy of a massive, quiescent galaxy at a redshift of ~4 reveals that it formed its stars and quenched rapidly, despite being surrounded by an abundant gas reservoir and gravitationally bound to a star-bursting companion.

JWST imaged three of the gas giants orbiting the star HR 8799 to study their atmospheres. The uniform enrichment of heavy elements, including sulfur, indicates that they formed like Jupiter and Saturn by accreting a lot of icy and rocky solids.

Electric fields in the solar atmosphere are not studied as widely as the magnetic fields mainly due to small, short living signals. Here, the authors show measurement of an electric field associated with magnetic diffusion triggering an energetic event in the solar atmosphere.

A strongly lensed galaxy at redshift z ≈ 6 is resolved into at least 15 star-forming clumps embedded in a rotating disk. Clump formation in this system, which is not predicted by cosmological zoom-in simulations, may be driven by disk instabilities with weak feedback, rather than past mergers.

Low-mass, low-metallicity cool subdwarf stars are rare in the solar neighbourhood, and therefore their properties are not well constrained observationally. Here the authors report both a mass and radius determination of a cool subdwarf in an eclipsing binary system, providing a valuable data point.

The discovery of a vast reservoir of primordial neutral hydrogen gas surrounding a young galaxy cluster just one billion years after the Big Bang offers new insight into how the first large cosmic structures assembled.

The Zwicky Transient Facility has observed a transitioning white dwarf with two faces, with one side of its atmosphere dominated by hydrogen and the other by helium.

High-resolution flare footpoint observations in the extreme ultraviolet and X-rays were taken by Solar Orbiter. Combined with simulations, the results reveal that the dominant mechanism carrying flare energy through the Sun’s atmosphere can vary on small spatial scales.

An individual star at z = 1.49 is gravitationally lensed and highly magnified by a foreground galaxy cluster. Fluctuations in the star’s emission provide insight on the mass function of intracluster stars, compact objects and the presence of dark-matter subhaloes.

ZTF J1406+1222 is a wide hierarchical triple system that hosts a low-metallicity subdwarf star and a ‘black widow’ millisecond pulsar that has a highly varying optical flux and a 62-minute period.

Increased UV–optical nuclear emission in a nearby galaxy together with a spectrum showing emission lines typical of unobscured AGNs and Bowen fluorescence features suggests a longer-term event of intensified accretion onto the central supermassive black hole.

Type II supernova explosions are common, but our understanding of such events is not complete. Such an event was observed just three hours after the explosion started, providing important information about the early stages.

Persistent low-velocity baryonic jets have been detected from a supersoft X-ray source; the low velocity suggests that these jets have not been launched from a white dwarf, and the persistence speaks against the origin being a canonical black hole or neutron star, indicating that a different type of source must be implicated.

The detection of Hα reported in galaxy candidate GHZ2/GLASS-z12 provides a direct probe of star formation activity and can be used to trace massive stars with ages of ~10 Myr or younger.

An extensive analysis of the JWST-NIRSpec spectrum of GN-z11 shows a supermassive black hole of a few million solar masses in a galaxy 440 million years after the Big Bang.