A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars ignited—literally the “let there be light” moment for the universe. Now known to astronomers as Population III, or Pop III, stars, these giants were very different from the stars we know today. They formed from pristine hydrogen and helium, with almost no “metal” (i.e., other elements) holding them back. They were also huge, growing to tens to hundreds of times larger than the sun. And they died young, in many cases collapsing into the universe’s earliest black holes.

Astronomers have found the first direct evidence that a wandering black hole can feed itself by dragging gas along in its wake as it moves through its galaxy. It’s the first direct evidence of an accretion channel long predicted in theory but never before observed. The paper describing this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 11.

Halley’s Comet captures the imagination in a way that few other astronomical objects do. When it last made its approach toward the sun (admittedly when this author, who is now middle-aged, was 1 year old in 1986), humanity responded with a fleet of spacecraft known informally as the “Halley Armada.” Yet because of the comet’s trajectory, those spacecraft were only able to visit their target for a fleeting few hours, leaving planetary scientists wanting more. Now, a new paper by researchers at Khalifa University and their co-authors, available on the arXiv preprint server, describes a mission plan that would allow a spacecraft to rendezvous with this best-known comet for the first time.