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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.

Far-infrared measurements of galaxies in the early Universe would reveal their detailed properties, but have been lacking for the more typical galaxies where most stars form; here an archetypal, early Universe star-forming galaxy is detected at far-infrared wavelengths, allowing its dust mass, total star-formation rate and dust-to-gas ratio to be calculated.

This study shows that supernova material was delivered to the early Solar System by interstellar ices, explaining isotope variations and revealing that even inner planets like Earth and Mars accreted water-rich material from the outer Solar System.

GRB 060505 and GRB 060614 were not accompanied by supernova emission down to limits hundreds of times fainter than the archetypal SN 1998bw that accompanied GRB 980425, and fainter than any type Ic supernova ever observed.

Reanalysis of the spectra associated with the merger of two neutron stars identifies strontium, spectroscopically establishing the origin of the heavy elements created by rapid neutron capture and proving that neutron stars comprise neutron-rich matter.

Type Ic supernovae (SNe) originate either from the core collapse of very massive stars or from less massive stars in binary systems. Here, the authors show that progenitors of Type II and Ic SNe have comparable lifetimes and initial masses, which supports binary interaction for most Type Ic SNe progenitors.

Galaxies that formed during the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang have physical properties that deviate from later galaxies, due to substantial gas infall from the intergalactic medium that dilutes the observed chemical enrichment.

Spectra taken after the kilonova associated with GW170817 show a high degree of spherical symmetry and a line shape is found that is consistent with a completely spherical expansion to within a few per cent.

Observations from the JWST of the second brightest GRB ever detected, GRB 230307A, indicate that it belongs to the class of long-duration GRBs resulting from compact object mergers, with the decay of lanthanides powering the longlasting optical and infrared emission.

A distance measurement based on observations of the hot-dust emitting region of the active galaxy NGC 4151 yields a value of 19 megaparsecs, implying a 1.4-fold increase in the dynamical mass of the galaxy’s central black hole and a corresponding correction to emission line reverberation masses of black holes in other active galactic nuclei if calibrated against NGC 4151′s dynamical mass.

The formation of dust in the dense circumstellar medium of the bright supernova 2010jl is at first rapid and produces very large grains, which resist destruction, whereas later the dust production rate increases, meaning its source is ejecta; this links early and late dust mass evolution in supernovae with dense circumstellar media.