Interstellar medium articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    Spatial and kinematic analysis of the solar neighbourhood shows that the Radcliffe Wave, a wave-shaped chain of star-forming gas clouds, is oscillating through the Galactic plane while also drifting radially away from the Galactic Centre.

    • Ralf Konietzka
    • , Alyssa A. Goodman
    •  & Núria Miret-Roig

  • Article |

    JWST observations of CH3+ in a protoplanetary disk in the Orion star-forming region are reported showing that gas-phase organic chemistry in the interstellar medium is activated by ultraviolet irradiation and the methyl cation.

    • Olivier Berné
    • , Marie-Aline Martin-Drumel
    •  & Mark G. Wolfire

  • Article |

    The authors report observational evidence that, within interstellar gas, there are temperature inhomogeneities affecting only highly ionized gas and causing the abundance discrepancy problem, and provide new empirical relations for estimation of temperature and metallicity.

    • J. Eduardo Méndez-Delgado
    • , César Esteban
    •  & Manuel Peimbert

  • Article |

    Acceleration of ‘Oumuamua is due to the release of entrapped molecular hydrogen formed through energetic processing of an H2O-rich icy body, supporting the idea that it originated as a planetesimal relic similar to Solar System comets.

    • Jennifer B. Bergner
    •  & Darryl Z. Seligman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    By analysing Hubble Space Telescope/Cosmic Origins Spectrograph spectra, evidence is provided for the presence of a Magellanic Corona surrounding the Large Magellanic Cloud, as predicted given its high mass.

    • Dhanesh Krishnarao
    • , Andrew J. Fox
    •  & Nicolas Lehner

  • Article |

    Binarity and multiplicity in general strongly affect the properties of emerging stars, as well as the physical and chemical structures of protoplanetary disks and therefore potentially any emerging planetary systems.

    • Jes K. Jørgensen
    • , Rajika L. Kuruwita
    •  & Edwin A. Bergin

  • Article |

    Three-dimensional analysis of the solar neighbourhood shows that nearly all star-forming regions near the Sun lie on the surface of the Local Bubble, which was inflated by supernovae about 14 million years ago.

    • Catherine Zucker
    • , Alyssa A. Goodman
    •  & Cameren Swiggum

  • Article |

    Two serendipitously detected dust-obscured galaxies are reported at z = 6.7 and 7.4, with estimates that such galaxies provide an additional 10–25% contribution to the total star formation rate density at z > 6.

    • Y. Fudamoto
    • , P. A. Oesch
    •  & C. White

  • Article |

    The metallicity of the interstellar medium measured towards 25 stars relatively near the Sun shows large variations, suggesting that infalling pristine gas is not efficiently mixed in the interstellar medium.

    • Annalisa De Cia
    • , Edward B. Jenkins
    •  & Jens-Kristian Krogager

  • Article |

    Observations of a cold molecular gas associated with the atomic hydrogen outflow from the centre of our Galaxy indicate that this gas has a surprisingly high mass but unclear origin.

    • Enrico M. Di Teodoro
    • , N. M. McClure-Griffiths
    •  & Lucia Armillotta

  • Article |

    The three-dimensional structure of all cloud complexes in the solar neighbourhood is revealed, showing a narrow and coherent 2.7-kpc arrangement of dense gas, in disagreement with the Gould Belt model.

    • João Alves
    • , Catherine Zucker
    •  & Gregory M. Green

  • Letter |

    Studies of the planetary nebula NGC 7027, using an upgraded spectrometer onboard a high-altitude observatory, have identified the rotational ground-state transition of the helium hydride ion—the first molecule to form after the Big Bang and an essential precursor to molecular hydrogen.

    • Rolf Güsten
    • , Helmut Wiesemeyer
    •  & Jürgen Stutzki

  • Letter |

    A frequently recurring nova is surrounded by an enormous cavity in space, produced as the nova’s ejecta ‘sweeps up’ the interstellar medium around the star after each eruption.

    • M. J. Darnley
    • , R. Hounsell
    •  & S. C. Williams

  • Letter |

    Observations at millimetre wavelengths reveal a young protostar surrounded by a disk with two differently tilted regions.

    • Nami Sakai
    • , Tomoyuki Hanawa
    •  & Satoshi Yamamoto

  • Letter |

    The re-discovery of the binary star system that created the Nova Scorpii AD 1437 stellar outburst shows that it is now a dwarf nova, suggesting that nova systems spend some time as dwarf novae in between larger outbursts.

    • M. M. Shara
    • , K. Iłkiewicz
    •  & D. Zurek

  • Letter |

    The majority of ‘jellyfish’ galaxies, characterized by long ‘tentacles’ of gas, also have active nuclei, indicating that gas is being fed to the central supermassive black hole by ram pressure.

    • Bianca M. Poggianti
    • , Yara L. Jaffé
    •  & Alessandro Omizzolo

  • Letter |

    Star formation at a rate of more than 15 solar masses a year has been observed inside a massive outflow of gas from a nearby galaxy; this could also be happening inside other galactic outflows.

    • R. Maiolino
    • , H. R. Russell
    •  & E. Sturm

  • Letter |

    Subarcsecond localization of the repeating fast radio burst FRB 121102 shows that its source is co-located with a faint galaxy with a low-luminosity active galactic nucleus, or a previously unknown type of extragalactic source.

    • S. Chatterjee
    • , C. J. Law
    •  & H. J. van Langevelde

  • Letter |

    One-arcsecond-resolution millimetre-wave images enable the surface of the Orion Bar molecular cloud to be resolved, revealing a fragmented ridge of high-density substructures, photoablative gas flows and instabilities that suggest that the cloud edge has been compressed by a high-pressure wave expanding into the molecular cloud, in contrast to predictions from static equilibrium models.

    • Javier R. Goicoechea
    • , Jérôme Pety
    •  & Paolo Pilleri

  • Letter |

    The snow-line is the distance from a protostar at which a particular volatile gas condenses; images of the protostar V883 Ori suggest that the water snow-line migrated outwards during a protostellar outburst, with implications for our understanding of the formation of planetary systems such as our own.

    • Lucas A. Cieza
    • , Simon Casassus
    •  & Alice Zurlo

  • Letter |

    Simulations of dwarf galaxies that include photoelectric grain heating and supernovae indicate that the former is the dominant means by which these galaxies regulate their star formation rate, because the latter are unable to account for the observed large gas depletion times.

    • John C. Forbes
    • , Mark R. Krumholz
    •  & Avishai Dekel

  • Letter |

    The so-called accretion flow that powers the growth of supermassive black holes in galaxy centres is assumed to be dominated by a smooth, steady flow of very hot plasma, but now observations instead reveal a clumpy accretion of very cold molecular clouds onto a supermassive black hole in the nucleus of a nearby giant elliptical galaxy.

    • Grant R. Tremblay
    • , J. B. Raymond Oonk
    •  & Michael W. Wise

  • Letter |

    In order for quiescent galaxies to maintain their low-to-non-existent star formation, there must be a mechanism to remove or heat gas that would otherwise cool to form stars; now supermassive black hole winds that are sufficient to suppress star formation in such galaxies are reported.

    • Edmond Cheung
    • , Kevin Bundy
    •  & Donald P. Schneider

  • Letter |

    60Fe in deep-ocean crusts indicates that two supernovae exploded in the solar neighbourhood, reheating the superbubble that harbours our Solar System; calculations of the trajectories and masses of the supernova progenitors gives their explosion times and sites, 90–100 parsecs away, with masses around nine times the solar mass, at 2.3 and 1.5 million years ago, respectively.

    • D. Breitschwerdt
    • , J. Feige
    •  & B. Fuchs

  • Letter |

    Observations of a six-day-long radio transient following a fast radio burst have yielded the host galaxy’s redshift, which, combined with the dispersion measure, provides a direct measurement of the cosmic density of ionized baryons in the intergalactic medium including all of the so-called ‘missing baryons’.

    • E. F. Keane
    • , S. Johnston
    •  & C. Bassa

  • Letter |

    Three massive star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds show clear evidence of burst-like star formation that occurred a few hundred million years after their initial formation era; such clusters could have accreted sufficient gas to form new stars while orbiting in their host galaxies’ gaseous disks throughout the period between their initial and more recent bursts of star formation.

    • Chengyuan Li
    • , Richard de Grijs
    •  & Claude-André Faucher-Giguère

  • Letter |

    Far-ultraviolet observations of the nearby low-mass star-forming galaxy J0925+1403 show that the galaxy is leaking ionizing radiation with an escape fraction of about 8 per cent, which is sufficient to ionize intergalactic medium material that is about 40 times as massive as the stellar mass of the galaxy.

    • Y. I. Izotov
    • , I. Orlitová
    •  & G. Worseck

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