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Astrophysical disks are rotationally-supported disks of gas and dust. They are found in a range of astrophysical objects, from small protoplanetary systems and accreting X-ray binaries, to massive disks surrounding actively accreting supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies. They emit electromagnetic radiation at a range of wavelengths depending on their specific interactions with their parent bodies and surroundings.
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.
Dust in protoplanetary disks is likely to be fragile and porous. A theoretical model of the IM Lup disk offers comprehensive support for the presence of fragile, porous dust based on a comparison with multiwavelength observations.
IXPE has revealed how the spin of the accreting neutron star Hercules X-1 changes in three dimensions. The spin axis of the star moves both through the star and across the sky, hinting that the crust of the star is asymmetric by almost one part in a million.
A three-dimensional reconstruction of a bright flare orbiting the black hole Sagittarius A* is computationally recovered from ALMA light curve data by constraining a neural network with a gravitational model of black holes.
Relativistic jets observed from transient neutron stars throughout the Universe produce bright flares for minutes after each X-ray burst, helping to determine the role individual system properties have on the speed and revealing the dominant launching mechanism.
Spectrally and spatially resolved ALMA observations of water vapour in the inner regions of the famous planet-forming disk around HL Tauri pave the way towards an observational characterization of planet formation at the water snowline.
Based on physical modelling and using deep-learning tools, a 3D reconstruction of a flare orbiting the black hole Sagittarius A*, at the centre of the Milky Way, provides observational clues to the formation of high-energy flares and the dynamics of black-hole accretion disks.
Charles Gammie and colleagues wrote the HARM code to tackle the extreme physics close to a spinning black hole. Twenty years later, it is performing a similar task in three dimensions in 1/10,000th of the time.