A black hole wrapped in starlight, and the question it isn’t quite answering
Three days ago a paper in Nature named an object MoM-BH\-1, and the name is half the news. The asterisk is on purpose. MoM stands for "Mirage or Miracle," a survey the authors were running when the object dropped into their crosshairs; the BH\ is shorthand...
Galaxies that died early, and the scars they don’t show
Two years ago, a paper in Nature announced a single strange object: a galaxy at redshift 4.65, already as massive as a respectable present-day disk, and already done forming stars. The universe was about 1.4 billion years old. The galaxy had no business being retired....