NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
-
Astronomy
Webb's Infrared Eye Opens a 'Treasure Chest' of 70 Hidden Newborn Stars in Carina
NASA's newest Webb image pierces the dust of a Carina Nebula cometary globule called the "Treasure Chest," revealing roughly 70 young stars, including a rare 19-solar-mass O-type star, many still wrapped in planet-forming discs.
-
Astronomy
A Golden Corona: NASA's APOD Captures an Unusually Amber Total Solar Eclipse Over Spain
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day reveals why the August 12 total solar eclipse's corona over Benavente, Spain glowed gold instead of white — a rare mix of low-sun geometry and wildfire smoke.
-
Astronomy
Three Space Telescopes Turn the Tarantula Nebula Into a Layered 'Craft' — and Solve an X-ray Mystery
NASA's new Chandra-Webb-Hubble composite of the Tarantula Nebula looks like stacked cellophane, and the science behind it explains why the region glows with far less X-ray light than star-formation models predicted.
-
Astronomy
Webb Telescope Reveals the Lion Nebula's Infrared Mane in Stunning New Detail
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has imaged the "Lion Nebula" in infrared, exposing dust clumps and ionized gas invisible to Hubble and revealing the white dwarf that will finish dismantling the structure in about 10,000 years.
-
Astronomy
New Horizons Data Suggests Liquid Nitrogen Is Still Flowing on Pluto
A reanalysis of decade-old New Horizons images has turned up dark streaks on Pluto's nitrogen glacier that look like recent liquid seepage — the first sign of active flowing liquid anywhere on the dwarf planet.
-
Astronomy
Webb's 'Little Red Dots' Turn Out to Be the Tip of a Supermassive-Black-Hole Iceberg
A nearby spiral nicknamed 'the Saguaro' just gave astronomers the missing piece of the little red dot puzzle: faint, buried X-rays confirming these mysterious JWST objects are ordinary black holes caught in an unusually obscured growth spurt.
-
Astronomy
A House-Sized Asteroid Just Passed Closer to Earth Than the Moon
Newly discovered asteroid 2026 OD3 buzzed past Earth at 0.6 lunar distances on July 25, one of three close flybys this week that underscore how many small asteroids go undetected until days before arrival.
-
Astronomy
Hubble Watches a Nova Fire 'Bullets' Through the Milky Way at 20 Million MPH
Hubble imagery reported July 24, 2026 shows a nova launching dense clumps of ejected material across the galaxy at roughly 20 million mph — and astronomers still can't explain where the projectiles come from.
-
Astronomy
The Lopsided Galaxy: Hubble Catches NGC 4654 Squeezed on One Side, Stripped on the Other
A new Hubble image of NGC 4654, an intermediate spiral 72 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster, shows a galaxy being compressed along one flank and unravelled along the other — the combined fingerprint of ram-pressure stripping and a tidal encounter with NGC 4639 some 500 million years ago.
-
Astronomy
Hubble and Webb Team Up to Find Omega Centauri's First Confirmed Black Hole
Twenty years of Hubble astrometry plus fresh James Webb data caught a 4.46-solar-mass black hole tugging a companion star in a record 94-year orbit inside Omega Centauri.
-
Astronomy
Euclid Doubles the Known Sample of the Universe's Most Ancient Quasars
ESA's Euclid telescope has found 31 new quasars from the cosmic dawn, including two record-breakers at redshifts 7.77 and 7.69, more than doubling the known sample from that era.
-
Astronomy
A Whisper of Radio Waves Pins Down the Distance to a Mysterious Gamma-Ray Halo
China's FAST telescope caught a microjansky-faint radio pulse from a gamma-ray pulsar, finally giving astronomers a distance estimate that helps explain the puzzling TeV source it may be powering.
