NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Astronomy
Chandra Decodes the 'Treble Clef': A Black Hole Outburst Revived by a Cluster Collision
A treble-clef-shaped radio glow hidden behind the Milky Way turns out to be a radio phoenix: old plasma from a supermassive black hole outburst, revived when two galaxy clusters collided a few hundred million years ago.
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Astronomy
Webb Finds the Host of the Most Distant Fast Radio Burst Ever Seen
Webb traced FRB 20240304B to a small, star-forming dwarf galaxy at redshift 2.148, about 3 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxy is far too young for a neutron-star merger, which points to a young magnetar as the source.
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Astronomy
Webb Peers Into NGC 7129, a Dusty Stellar Nursery Full of Jets and Hidden Protostars
A new Webb image of NGC 7129, about 3,300 light-years away, cuts through the dust to show protostars, shocked gas, bow shocks and a 3.5-light-year cavity carved by the young 5-8 solar-mass star LkH-alpha 234.
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Astronomy
A 27-Year-Old Hubble Puzzle Points to a Planet Born From a Dying Star
Unexplained lines in 1999 Hubble spectra of white dwarf HS 0209+0832 turn out to be niobium and other heavy elements, evidence for what may be the first planet around a white dwarf that formed from its star's death rather than its birth.
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Astronomy
Hubble Logs Its 200,000th Orbit While Waiting for a Supernova to Happen Again
Hubble finished its 200,000th orbit on Sept. 19 while watching galaxy cluster MACS J0417, waiting for the lensed supernova Athena to reappear by early March 2027. The timing could help map the cluster's mass and refine the Hubble constant.
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Astronomy
Hubble's Out-of-Sync Galaxy: NGC 4698 and the Bulge That Turned 90 Degrees
A new Hubble image of NGC 4698, a Virgo Cluster spiral about 55 million light-years away, shows a bulge jutting out at a right angle to its disc and a core rotating perpendicular to everything around it.
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Astronomy
A 200-Hour Mosaic Over Morocco Reveals Five Ghost Supernovas in Auriga
A 200-hour, 10-panel mosaic shot from Morocco's Oukaimeden Observatory resolves five ancient supernova remnants tangled together in the constellation Auriga, including the famous Spaghetti Nebula.
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Astronomy
A Rebellious Exoplanet Orbits Backward, and Astronomers Don't Know Why
GJ 3090 b, a sub-Neptune 73 light-years away, orbits its star retrograde and severely misaligned — with no companion object to blame, forcing astronomers to consider that the star itself grew a backward disc.
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Astronomy
A Global Telescope Relay Just Nailed Down the True Color of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
Pooling data from professional observatories and citizen-run eVscopes worldwide, a new study finds interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS wore a stubbornly red dust coma through its entire solar system passage, regardless of how bright it got.
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Astronomy
XRISM Catches a Hypergiant's Wind Falling Onto a Pulsar, Line by Line
XRISM's Resolve instrument watched iron lines flip from absorption to emission during a flare from GX 301-2, giving the first direct spectroscopic evidence of stellar-wind plasma falling onto a neutron star.
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Astronomy
LRO Spots a Once-in-a-Century Fresh Crater Named McGetchin
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter caught a freshly formed lunar crater the size of the Colosseum, blasted open in 2024 by a building-sized impactor and only noticed in October 2025.
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Astronomy
Hubble Finds a New Decagon Guarding Saturn's South Pole
Hubble archival data reveal a strengthening 10-sided vortex ringing Saturn's south pole — a feature Cassini never saw in 13 years at the planet, and a strange new sibling to its famous northern hexagon.
