Astronomy news from Cosmic Herald — telescopes, exoplanets, black holes, and the discoveries reshaping our picture of the universe.
Durham University simulations presented at NAM 2026 suggest the Milky Way's disc reoriented by more than 90 degrees after its head-on collision with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, with our galaxy's slowly rotating stellar halo as the tell-tale fingerprint.
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.
Uppsala researchers found the Sun holds 55% more silver than the reference value — not from new observations, but from a 3D non-LTE model that finally accounts for the photosphere's turbulence, closing a decades-old gap with meteorites from 0.25 dex to 0.06.
JWST resolved a rotating, multiphase disk about 800 light-years wide feeding the black hole in NGC 4696, and traced a filament funneling gas into it — the clearest look yet at the "missing link" between cluster-scale cooling and accretion.
Astronomers pulled a third giant planet, Beta Pictoris d, out of 11 years of VLT data and confirmed it with JWST — at ~2.4 Jupiter masses and 100x fainter than Beta Pic b, it's the faintest planet ever directly imaged from the ground.
A team led by Beijing Normal University's Bo-Lun Huang tested 697 white dwarf abundance records against 3,493 meteorite analyses, asking whether the debris raining onto dead stars carries the chemical signature of refined metal. It doesn't — but the framework they built to ask is the real result.
Hubble's ultraviolet vision pulled four stellar corpses out of the glare of their brighter red dwarf companions, including one just 25 light-years away that took nearly 30 years to confirm.
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.
JWST spectroscopy shows the infrared glow behind two Project Hephaistos Dyson-sphere candidates comes from unrelated background galaxies, not extraterrestrial engineering.
No single method measures the universe. Astronomers climb a ladder — parallax, then pulsing Cepheid stars, then exploding white dwarfs, then redshift — each rung calibrating the next, and a crack near the top is now cosmology's biggest open problem.
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.
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.
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