Astronomy news from Cosmic Herald — telescopes, exoplanets, black holes, and the discoveries reshaping our picture of the universe.
Webb's new NIRCam portrait of N159, 161,000 light-years away, comes with a catalog of more than 300,000 stars, and it shows the region's western edge is still collapsing, behind the rest of the complex.
Read the story →An 11-hour JWST spectral time series of WISE 0855, a roughly 265 K brown dwarf 7.2 light-years away, shows patchy water clouds and carbon monoxide and phosphine levels that rise and fall together as the object rotates.
JWST maps of the Minispiral near Sgr A* show gas carrying about 1.8 times the Sun's metal abundance, probably left by past supernovae, lit by Wolf-Rayet stars and threaded with fast, dust-shredding clumps.
ESA's galaxy-mapping Euclid telescope has turned up its first previously unknown comet, C/2026 S1 (Euclid): a faint, active visitor about 1.3 billion km away on a steep orbit that takes thousands of years to complete.
Only about 70 of the Milky Way's black holes have been found. Southampton's Black Hole Hunters project wants volunteers to search AI-prescreened NASA TESS data for gravitational self-lensing, the faint regular brightening when a hidden black hole passes in front of its companion star.
Deep Gemini North images of Pa 30, the likely remnant of the supernova recorded in 1181, show its filaments are chains of knots rather than smooth streaks, with about ten times more [S II] filaments detected than before.
A new 'transmission strings' method applied to JWST data shows WASP-17b's atmosphere is lopsided: its evening side runs about 650 K hotter than its morning side and bulges where winds carry heat from the dayside toward the night.
Warwick astronomers ran white dwarf spectra through a model of human vision and found that, seen up close, some of these stars would look pink, purple, cyan, yellow, or in one case chartreuse green, even though the average white dwarf really is white.
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.
Two MNRAS papers from UCL argue that the strange metal-poor stars long cited as evidence for ultra-energetic hypernovae fit ordinary supernovae better once you account for messy, incomplete mixing of the ejected material.
Large Binocular Telescope observations of 54 metal-poor gas clouds put the universe's original helium at 24.58% of its mass, measured to 0.5%. That agrees with the cosmic microwave background and Big Bang theory, and it tightens the limits on unknown light particles.
The 0.4-second gamma-ray burst GRB 250704B was followed by about 560 seconds of soft X-rays seen by Einstein Probe. It is the longest prompt X-ray flash yet tied to a neutron star merger, and it hints that the collision may have left behind a magnetar.
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