This week, NSF added *another* bizarre requirement: Now, applicants must submit official transcripts. The original solicitation -- as in past years -- permitted students to submit *un*official transcripts, which was free for applicants and far simpler. We'll update our Bite accordingly.

From Brandon Pries: How is the growth of massive black holes regulated by starlight and stellar explosions? Learn more in today’s bite! ⚛️🔭☄🧪 astrobites.org/2025/11/05/s...

From Abbé Whitford: In today’s bite, we talk about how one can use the Antarctic environment to optimize radio astronomy measurements. ⚛️🔭☄🧪 astrobites.org/2025/11/04/r...

From Ansh Gupta: Eating matter is what black holes do best, but what happens when we find one choking on its food? The answer might surprise you! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/11/04/q...

Kasper Zoellner reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on the consequences of shooting an asteroid with a spacecraft. aasnova.org/2025/11/03/s... 🔭

In today’s post, guest author Matheus Bernini Peron explains how UV radiation from neighboring stars can hamper giant planet formation. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/11/01/p...

From Nathalie Korhonen Cuestas: Keeping track of millions of stars is tricky. Today’s authors take on the challenge of accounting for each one’s time of birth. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/31/d...

Love astronomy, astrophysics, and science communication? Come join the Astrobites team! Applications due November 26th. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/31/a...

From Lucas Brown @lucasb413.bsky.social : In today’s bite, we investigate a controversial paper from two years ago, tracing its origins and attempting to finally answer the question: are black holes dark energy? 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/30/a...

From Viviana Cáceres: Today’s paper shows us how to repurpose microlensing surveys to study clumps of dark matter drifting through space. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/29/d...

From William Smith: AGN disks might connect black holes across the mass spectrum in one bustling gaseous environment. As the black holes drift inward, their interactions may set the stage for both EMRIs and IMRIs in the same system. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/28/t...

From Hillary Diane Andales: Rubin will give us a wider and deeper view of the Universe than ever before. How many of the Milky Way’s tiny friends will it discover? 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/27/m...

Drew Lapeer reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on the impact of galactic outflows on the formation of stars in the local starburst galaxy Messier 82. aasnova.org/2025/10/27/o... 🔭

From Shalini Kurinchi-Vendhan @shalinikv.bsky.social : Can black holes light up the high redshift Universe? …and as a follow up, could they be a candidate for dark matter? 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/25/c...

From Magnus L'Argent: Graduate student stipends have not been keeping up with inflation. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/24/c...

From Ansh Gupta: Hot DOGs in space are more exciting than they sound. Let’s dissect the brightest one to learn how they hide black holes and some of the most extreme conditions in the universe. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/23/h...

From Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social : What does the surface of a red supergiant star look like? It’s no polarising statement to say that it has more in common with a pot of bubbling soup than you might think! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/21/a...

From Viviana Cáceres: Thick stellar winds might be blowing away the chances of forming intermediate-mass black holes from the collapse of very massive stars. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/20/t...

What do marine microplankton have to do with high energy cosmic rays? Astrobites author Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social explains! 🔭✨☄️ You can learn more by checking out Ryan’s piece “What doesn’t kill them makes them (marine microplankton) stronger”: astrobites.org/2025/10/15/m...

William Smith reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on the possibility of merging black holes producing flares within the accretion disks surrounding active supermassive black holes. aasnova.org/2025/10/20/f... 🔭

From Joe Williams: The Fomalhaut debris disk is well-studied, but new analysis suggests that there may be a hidden planet we haven’t seen… 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/18/f...

From Kasper Zoellner: Are the low-density planets that keep popping up in our growing collection of exoplanets really the wet worlds that we imagine them to be? Join us today as we reveal they may actually be more similar to comets than anything else. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/17/a...

From Veronika Dornan @dornanv.bsky.social : You really have to tip your hat to the authors of today’s bite, who closely studied the dynamics and metallicities of the globular clusters of M104. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/16/m...

From Ryan White @astroryan.bsky.social : As the Sun bobs its head above and below the Galactic plane, the Earth’s marine microplankton flock in crowds to see the beautiful view. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/15/m...

From Niloofar Sharei @astroneal.bsky.social : You think stars form quietly? Think again. In the early universe, galaxies were packed with star-forming clumps. Some disrupted quickly, while others survived. Today’s paper reveals which lived and which died young. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/14/c...

From Sahil Hegde: For today’s bite, we chatted with Nathan Sanders (one of the original founders of Astrobites) about his journey into and beyond astronomy and the process of writing and publishing a book! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/13/n...

Mckenzie Ferrari reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on the explosive origins of hyper-velocity survivor stars. aasnova.org/2025/10/13/k... 🔭

From Margaret Verrico @meverri.bsky.social : What happens when you take a dwarf galaxy and stretch it out to the size of the Milky Way? Today’s authors search for ultra-diffuse galaxies which have recently stopped forming stars to find an answer. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/11/p...

From Caroline von Raesfeld: In today’s bite, I share what I learned about science funding in the United States’ history and future in a science policy course I took last spring. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/10/s...

From Kylee Carden: Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are small molecules consisting of rings of carbons, ubiquitous in the interstellar medium though they don't seem to be present in disks around the youngest stars. Today’s paper tries to understand why that is. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/09/d...

From Lindsey Gordon @lcgordon.bsky.social : In today’s paper, the authors use their Gradient Technique to estimate the plane of sky magnetic fields in several bright clusters. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/08/g...

From Margaret Verrico @meverri.bsky.social : Do galaxies shut off star formation from the inside-out or the outside-in? And what does that tell us about their history? 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/07/i...

Today Astrobites is featuring results from the DESI DR2, published today in PRJ! In Part 1, we cover the key results papers describing their measurements with DR2. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/06/d...

Kylee Carden reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on how we might someday detect moons around planets outside our solar system by precisely tracking the positions of a star and a planet. aasnova.org/2025/10/06/f... 🔭

In this bite, the Astrobites authors discuss recent changes to the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship, their impact, and what you can do to help. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/04/n...

From Lindsey Gordon @lcgordon.bsky.social : Today’s authors use FLAMINGO simulations to probe the tension between different observational methods of estimating cosmological parameters. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/04/f...

From Brandon Pries: How does one prevent a black hole from growing in a tiny galaxy? Today’s authors investigate two potential mechanisms! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/03/b...

From Kylee Carden: In 2022, NASA’s DART spacecraft crashed itself into an asteroid in a binary system. Today’s paper investigates the unexpected evolution of the binary’s orbit after the collision. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/02/d...

Tori Bonidie reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on a study that explores whether there are planets hiding from us inside the gaps of multi-planet systems. aasnova.org/2025/10/01/p... 🔭

From Diana Solano-Oropeza @dsolanooropeza.bsky.social : Turns out there’s more than one way to “plate” a planet! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/10/01/s...

From Abbé Whitford: Today’s Astrobite summarizes Chapter 3, Climate Modelling, from the e-book ‘Climate Change for Astronomers’, to discuss how climate models work, their limitations, and the status of projections from climate models. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/27/c...

From Mckenzie Ferrari: Learn how rocket launches and the demand for satellites threaten astronomy and the ozone layer. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/26/r...

Have you ever wondered how we might go about finding microscopic black holes from the dawn of time? Check out my new article for @supercluster.com — my first published piece of science writing outside of @astrobites.bsky.social! ✨⚫️🔭 www.supercluster.com/editorial/da...

From Kylee Carden: Though moons are ubiquitous in our Solar System, we have not yet found one elsewhere (an exomoon). Today’s paper investigates whether we could find moons by precisely tracking the positions of a star and planet. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/25/e...

From Lindsey Gordon @lcgordon.bsky.social : Today’s authors consider the way AGN jet shape changes our measurements of blazar polarization. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/24/b...

What is a CV? How is this different from a résumé? How do I start building a CV? All of these questions and more await within this guide written by many of our authors! 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/23/g...

From Anavi Uppal @anaviuppal.bsky.social : When we don’t have spectra, we can estimate the distance to a quasar by calculating its photometric redshift. Today’s authors present a new way to use the ‘flickering’ of quasars to improve these distance estimates. 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/22/q...

Nathalie Korhonen Cuestas reports for @astrobites.bsky.social on supermassive black holes in the early universe that may have been hiding phases of their growth. aasnova.org/2025/09/22/a... 🔭

From Ansh Gupta: Giant black holes may have hatched from cosmic eggs. What happens when we find one on our doorstep? 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/19/b...

From Joe Williams: Planets should form aligned with their host protoplanetary discs. So why does this star have a planet and disc that aren’t at all in line? 🔭✨☄️ astrobites.org/2025/09/18/f...