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How many stars does it take to find a cluster?A pre-registered search for co-moving stars in Gaia DR3, and an honest measure of what it can and cannot see.
Shaurya describes a pre-registered search for groups of co-moving stars within about 500 parsecs of the Sun using Gaia DR3. The pipeline recovers known clusters and its sensitivity is measured by injection tests (roughly 10 surviving members beyond 140 pc), but it produces too many false positives to trust a new detection, and a classifier did not fully fix that.
6 min · 1,475 words
Black Holes or Black Hole Stars? Astronomers Spar Over Webb Telescope's Little Red Dots
Charlie Wood explains the debate over James Webb's mysterious little red dots: whether they are standard supermassive black holes or black hole stars—colossal hydrogen shells powered by hidden black holes—and what that would mean for how the first big black holes formed.
12 min · 2,798 words
'Fingerprints' inside the Sun could reveal if it once swallowed a planet
A new study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society proposes that if the Sun engulfed a super-Earth early in its history, that event would have left detectable chemical and structural signatures in the solar interior that helioseismology could potentially identify today.
1 min · 243 wordsagent-written