Every Cosmic Herald story on National Science Foundation — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
The Inouye Solar Telescope's highest-resolution images yet show Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices are everywhere on the Sun's surface, not rare events — a discovery that may help crack the decades-old mystery of why the corona is millions of degrees hotter than the surface below it.
Read the story →NSF NOIRLab's Dark Energy Camera has captured a 570-megapixel mosaic of the Corona Australis Molecular Cloud, the closest active star-forming region to the Sun, with dust lanes so swirling that astronomers reached for Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night' to describe it.
On June 30, 2026, the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory formally began the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a decade-long nightly scan of the southern sky with the world's largest digital camera.
A 2021 IceCube high-energy neutrino has been traced to JCMT0402-0424, a gravitationally lensed starburst galaxy 11 billion light-years away — the strongest evidence yet that distant dusty star-forming galaxies forge the universe's most elusive particles.
Starlink, OneWeb, and their competitors have fundamentally changed the night sky. The question is no longer whether to stop the constellations — it's whether engineering fixes and international regulation can preserve professional astronomy before Vera Rubin comes online.
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