A Black Hole’s Puzzling X-Ray Bursts
A supermassive black hole awakened seven years ago, and it’s now behaving in a way astronomers can’t explain. aasnova.org/2026/04/29/a-b…
Belated paper day: arxiv.org/abs/2411.12796
We discovered three ultracompact binaries with accreting white dwarfs (WDs), by their photometric and spectroscopic variability. With orbital periods of 13.2/8.7/7.9 mins, they are the most compact binaries with accretion disks! (1/6)
Attending the LISA symposium this year revealed some amusing implicit condescension from the fundamental physics/gravity crowd: they call binary white dwarfs "verification sources" & accretion disks "environmental effects"! But this intro from Novikov & Thorne '73 takes the cake: