45 articles
Named MoM-BH*-1, it shines like 100 billion Suns yet carries the light signature of a single star. MIT researchers say the best explanation is a black hole cloaked in a solar-system-sized shell of hydrogen - and that Webb's 'little red dots' may be the same thing.
For at least one full 33-day orbit, the VLA and MeerKAT swept the famous exoplanet across radio frequencies sensitive enough to catch a trillion-watt beacon. A SETI team found no artificial signal - though they are careful about what that silence proves.
Using a telescope in Chile, scientists detected helium escaping from LHS 1140 b - a super-Earth sitting exactly where liquid water could exist on a rocky surface. It is the first rocky habitable-zone world confirmed to hold any atmosphere at all.
A new survey of 31 ancient quasars includes two all-time record-breakers that shone 13 billion years ago. Euclid did in a year what took all prior telescopes over a decade.
Using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR, researchers detected two layered wind components moving at 10% and 30% the speed of light from a 2-billion-solar-mass black hole 11 billion light-years away - the most distant ultra-fast outflow ever caught in a non-lensed quasar.
For the first time, astronomers had advance warning an interstellar visitor was approaching - and used it to scan 3I/ATLAS for alien tech. The Allen Telescope Array sifted 74 million signal candidates and found nothing artificial aboard.
A lithium spike in the spectrum of a subgiant star 1,300 light-years away is consistent with planetary ingestion - and its close brown-dwarf companion may have pushed the planet inward.
NASA's TESS mission has confirmed two Jupiter-sized planets orbiting a star 1,110 light-years away that are so diffuse they are lighter than cotton candy, setting a new density record for gas giants.
An Indian citizen scientist working with the RAD@home network identified a radio galaxy with a unique bow-and-arrow shape in LOFAR survey data - the clearest radio signature yet of a galaxy falling supersonically into a galaxy cluster.
The Euclid space telescope published its first high-resolution survey of the Milky Way's central bulge on June 24, 2026, providing the resolution needed to confirm candidate exoplanets flagged by ground-based surveys over the last two decades.
A dense, star-packed galaxy from just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang has shown Hubble how the young universe shed its hydrogen fog - providing the first direct view of cosmic reionization from so close to its conclusion.
J0439+1634, a supermassive black hole active just 850 million years after the Big Bang, flickers like a candle flame - and its surprisingly flat, organized accretion disk is challenging what we thought we knew about early black hole growth.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has found that galaxy cluster XLSSC 122, from 10.4 billion years ago, is the most distant known strong gravitational lens - with a dark matter core so concentrated that the standard Lambda CDM cosmological model cannot account for it.
The nearly 18,000-pound observatory completed its barge journey from Maryland to Florida on June 21, beginning weeks of fuelling, solar panel tests, and clean-room checks before its August 30 target launch.
Astronomers have reclassified Terzan 5, long catalogued as a globular cluster, as a surviving remnant from the Milky Way's formation - a 'bulge fossil fragment' with four distinct stellar generations spanning billions of years.
For the first time, astronomers have found that salt clouds are essential to explaining a planet's atmosphere. James Webb's two-hour study of GJ 504b could reshape how scientists model cold giant worlds.
A new arXiv paper and Keck Institute study argue that the five-spacecraft LIFE mission has cleared its core engineering hurdles - raising the first plausible technical pathway to directly sampling the atmospheres of Earth-like exoplanets for chemical signs of life.
A study in Nature Astronomy has identified hundreds of atoms of plutonium-244 in a 1976 Pacific Ocean crust sample, providing evidence that debris from a kilonova - a neutron star merger - has been steadily raining on Earth for over 100 million years.
The Lucy spacecraft's 2025 flyby of a main-belt asteroid has produced a detailed portrait of a doubly-tumbling, bilobate rock with iron-rich clays - evidence of liquid water from 155 million years ago.
For the first time, astronomers have traced two supernova remnants - the Jellyfish Nebula (IC 443) and its neighbor G189.6+3.3 - back to the same binary star system, roughly 6,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Gemini.
Using ALMA and the Gemini North telescope, an international team linked a high-energy neutrino detected by IceCube to a dust-shrouded starburst galaxy 11 billion light-years away - pointing to a previously overlooked class of cosmic particle accelerator.
A UCLA-NRAO team has assembled the most extensive radar portrait of Europa's icy surface ever collected, spanning 13 years and two major radio facilities - and the dataset will serve as the benchmark for NASA's Europa Clipper when it arrives in 2030.
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has recorded the sharpest view yet of HD 80606 b - a gas giant 217 light-years away whose temperature rockets by 1,100°F as it sweeps past its host star, revealing methane and carbon dioxide in its rapidly shifting atmosphere.
A commercial robotic spacecraft is days from launching to perform the first-ever in-orbit servicing of an uncrewed U.S. government telescope - potentially extending Swift's mission into the 2030s.
A new arXiv preprint by Breakthrough Listen researcher Brian Lacki argues that Moon dust could harbor microscopic relics of extinct extraterrestrial megastructures scattered across the galaxy over billions of years.
New impact simulations from ETH Zürich find that a single early-solar-system collision with a moon-sized body can simultaneously account for Venus' anomalous retrograde rotation and its absence of any natural satellite.
A 300-hour Very Large Array programme, the first systematic radio study of its kind, finds that accretion flow - not jet presence - is the variable that controls how tidal disruption events appear across all wavelengths, overturning a decade-old two-category model.
A Jupiter-family comet that brightened roughly 8,000-fold in under 14 hours has reached perihelion, offering northern hemisphere observers a binocular window in the pre-dawn sky this week.
A peer-reviewed rebuttal co-authored by Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt found two methodological mistakes in a high-profile 2025 study that claimed cosmic acceleration might be an illusion - and concluded the universe is still accelerating.
A study published in Nature Astronomy on June 10, 2026 uses JWST's NIRSpec to directly detect that the morning and evening terminator regions of the tidally locked gas giant have measurably different temperatures and chemical composition.
Four astronauts will spend two weeks in Earth orbit docking with both SpaceX Starship and Blue Origin's Blue Moon pathfinders - a critical rehearsal before the first crewed lunar landing on Artemis IV in 2028.
New JWST observations of NGC 4696 have traced, for the first time, how galaxy-spanning filaments of cooling gas connect to a rotating circumnuclear disk that funnels material toward a supermassive black hole - closing a long-standing gap in black hole physics.
A research team has identified erythrulose, a four-carbon sugar, in a molecular cloud near the Galactic Centre - marking the first sugar confirmed in the interstellar medium and tracing a chemical path toward the building blocks of life.
The strongest candidate yet for an undiscovered outer solar system world has an orbit that contradicts the Planet Nine hypothesis, raising the possibility that the theory's architects were looking for the wrong planet all along.
After five decades of overland supersonic flight being banned in the United States, NASA's experimental X-59 aircraft achieved Mach 1.1 on June 5, 2026 - a milestone that could let future passengers experience only a quiet thump instead of a disruptive boom.
A team led by CNRS researchers used ESO's VLT/SPHERE instrument over four years to directly map the rotation of the protoplanetary disk around AB Aurigae - the first such observation - revealing accretion zones that indicate giant planets are actively forming inside it.
A PhD student using CSIRO's ASKAP telescope has traced a class of repeating cosmic radio pulses to a white dwarf binary system - the first confirmed source for signals that puzzled radio astronomers for two decades.
Using five years of ALMA radio data, researchers at Northwestern University have confirmed the first direct evidence of a wind blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center - resolving one of astrophysics' longest-standing predictions.
The International Academy of Astronautics has ratified revised guidelines for verifying and disclosing a potential signal from extraterrestrial intelligence - the first major overhaul since 2010.
NASA confirmed August 30, 2026 as the launch date for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope - eight months early. The wide-field infrared observatory will survey 100 million stars and is expected to catalogue approximately 2,500 new exoplanets.
Using its Mid-Infrared Instrument, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope identified methane and anomalously high carbon dioxide on comet 3I/ATLAS - a visitor from another star system - the first chemical fingerprint ever obtained from interstellar material.
A Nature Astronomy study published June 2, 2026 found that slow atmospheric winds on seven ultra-hot Jupiters carry the signature of magnetic fields comparable in strength to those in our own solar system - the first such measurement ever made.
Founded in 2021 by astrophysicist Avi Loeb, the Galileo Project is building a global network of sensor-laden observatories to replace eyewitness reports with reproducible, AI-analyzed data on unexplained aerial phenomena.
A preprint under review at Nature Communications suggests the target of China's sample-return mission may not be a fragment of the Moon - upending a key scientific assumption five days before orbit insertion.
Sensor artifacts, data gaps, and rigorous methodology - what does it really take to turn a puzzling sky sighting into a scientifically useful data point? Researchers explain.
