Accreting protoplanets in the LkCa 15 transition disk.

Exoplanet detections have revolutionized astronomy, offering new insights into solar system architecture and planet demographics. While nearly 1,900 exoplanets have now been discovered and confirmed, none are still in the process of formation. Transition disks, protoplanetary disks with inner clearings best explained by the influence of accreting planets, are natural laboratories for the study of planet formation. Some transition disks show evidence for the presence of young planets in the form of disk asymmetries or infrared sources detected within their clearings, as in the case of LkCa 15 (refs 8, 9). Attempts to observe directly signatures of accretion onto protoplanets have hitherto proven unsuccessful. Here we report adaptive optics observations of LkCa 15 that probe within the disk clearing. With accurate source positions over multiple epochs spanning 2009-2015, we infer the presence of multiple companions on Keplerian orbits. We directly detect Hα emission from the innermost companion, LkCa 15 b, evincing hot (about 10,000 kelvin) gas falling deep into the potential well of an accreting protoplanet.

Chemical species in fly ash from coal-burning power plants.

Fly ash specimens from four power plants in the Tennessee Valley Authority system have been separated into three matrices: glass, mullite-quartz, and magnetic spinel. Chemical species of trace elements are defined to a large extent by the matrices that contain them. The magnetic component of fly ash is ferrite. The mullite-quartz phase is relatively pure and can be recovered as a resource.

Sequence of E. coli tRNA-Glu1 by automated sequential degradation.

A minor tRNA-Glu1 constituent of a preparation of E. coli B tRNA-Glu (Oak Ridge) has a guanosine residue at position 66 rather than an adenosine as in the tRNA-Glu2 described by Ohashi et al. (3). Automated sequential degradation was used to sequence this region.