NASA
Every Cosmic Herald story on NASA — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
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Astronomy
JWST Watches an Exoplanet Get Flash-Fried on the Universe's Most Eccentric Orbit
Webb's infrared eye tracked HD 80606 b as it swung past its star, catching a 1,100°F temperature spike and sniffing out methane and CO₂ in its tortured atmosphere.
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Astronomy
Chandra's Deep Look at NGC 6540: How a Mysterious X-Ray Flare Became Three Distinct Sources
A catastrophic X-ray flare from globular cluster NGC 6540 that blazed for just 300 seconds in 2005 has finally been resolved into three separate sources. Chandra's improved sensitivity revealed what decades of earlier observations missed—but the flare's true origin remains elusive.
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Astronomy
Asteroid 2026 JH2's Surprise Close Approach Exposes Detection Gaps in Planetary Defense
A 62-foot asteroid discovered just days before its closest approach demonstrates how near-Earth objects can slip past detection systems—and why autonomous surveys matter for planetary safety.
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Astronomy
The missing planets: why there's a gap in the size distribution of worlds around other stars
Kepler data revealed a strange gap in exoplanet sizes: planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii are surprisingly rare. The leading explanation involves atmospheric loss driven by stellar radiation, and JWST is now testing that theory directly.
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Astronomy
Webb is finding brown dwarfs we didn't know existed. There may be as many as stars.
The James Webb Space Telescope's infrared sensitivity is revealing a population of brown dwarfs — objects too small to fuse hydrogen, too large to be planets — lurking near the Sun that previous surveys missed entirely. The implications for our census of the galaxy are significant.
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Astronomy
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen broke our models. Now we're rebuilding them.
GRB 221009A — dubbed the BOAT, for Brightest Of All Time — was detected in October 2022 and is still being studied. The burst was so energetic it briefly overwhelmed detectors across the solar system and challenged decades of theory about how these explosions work.
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Astronomy
Astronomers can't agree on how old the universe is. That's actually exciting.
Two different methods of measuring the expansion rate of the universe give two different answers — and the gap between them is too large to be a measurement error. Known as the Hubble tension, this disagreement might be pointing toward new physics that nobody has found yet.
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Astronomy
The hunt for air on a nearby Earth-size world is the hardest test JWST has taken on
TRAPPIST-1e is an Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, just 40 light-years away. Whether it has an atmosphere is one of the most consequential questions in astronomy — and JWST's first attempts to answer it show just how hard it is.
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Astronomy
A comet from another star is passing through — and it carries water unlike any in our solar system
3I/ATLAS is only the third object ever confirmed to come from beyond our solar system. Telescopes and spacecraft across the planet have spent months studying it — and what they've found is a chemistry that didn't form here.
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Astronomy
NASA's next great observatory is ahead of schedule — and built to see wide, not just deep
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is finished, packed, and now aiming for a launch around the end of August — months early. Its trick isn't sharper vision than Hubble's. It's a field of view about a hundred times larger, and what that does to astronomy.
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Astronomy
After 50 years, astronomers catch our galaxy's black hole exhaling
Sagittarius A* is a famously quiet black hole, but new ALMA observations have finally revealed powerful winds streaming from it — the outflow astronomers spent half a century hunting for.
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Astronomy
The most massive black hole pair ever found is hiding in a starless void
Two ultramassive black holes totalling roughly 60 billion solar masses sit at the heart of a distant galaxy, spiralling toward a merger that would create one of the largest black holes known.
