An April Astrobites

For the last year-and-a-bit I've been writing for Astrobites, a kind of 'reader's digest' for the latest astronomy research. While the main point of Astrobites is to summarise cutting-edge research for an undergraduate audience, my feeling is that this is best done by eliding the details of the analysis and writing at length about the actual physics that's being studied. In today's article I've taken the opportunity to write about fast and slow rotators (the two classes of massive elliptical galaxies). My weakness for gimmickery has led to me entitling the article "2 slow, 2 furious" and referring to the two classes of galaxy as "the fast and the furious" on the Astrobites front page. But, riffing on the same theme, I've actually written about two papers, published a few weeks apart and which are rather similar. This gave me the opportunity to shine a spotlight on how research often goes - if it's worth doing, you're probably not the only one doing it! I left it to the reader to follow my implication that, most likely, the two research teams could also be described as "the fast" and "the furious", respectively... Anyway, the conclusion reached by both teams is interesting, so do take a look!