Astronomy
Astronomy news from Cosmic Herald — telescopes, exoplanets, black holes, and the discoveries reshaping our picture of the universe.
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Astronomy
Gaia Data Just Killed the 'Universal' Stellar Initial Mass Function
A Gaia-based survey of 110 Milky Way star clusters finds the stellar initial mass function's 'break mass' shifts with cluster age, undermining decades of assuming one universal recipe for how stars of different sizes form.
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Astronomy
Euclid Space Telescope Uncovers the Universe's Most Ancient Quasars
ESA's Euclid mission has spotted 31 quasars from the universe's first billion years, including two record-holders shining with a trillion Suns' worth of light just 670 million years after the Big Bang.
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Astronomy
Euclid Space Telescope Uncovers 31 Ancient Quasars, Two From the Universe's First 5 Percent
ESA's Euclid telescope has spotted 31 quasars from the early universe, including two dating to just 670 million years after the Big Bang, deepening a puzzle over how supermassive black holes grew so fast.
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Astronomy
Hubble, Chandra, and Webb Team Up for a Red-White-and-Blue Portrait of an Ancient Star Cluster
For America's 250th, NASA colored the cosmos red, white, and blue — spotlighting a 13-billion-year-old star cluster whose hues betray its violent, chemically layered past.
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Astronomy
Webb Catches Baby Stars Feeding in Fits and Starts: New Evidence for Episodic Accretion in FS Tau
A new Webb infrared image of the FS Tau protostar system reveals gaps in its gas outflows — evidence that young stars gain mass in sudden bursts rather than a steady stream.
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Astronomy
TESS Just Mapped Rotation Periods for a Million Nearby Stars
A new TESS-based catalog measures rotation periods for over a million stars within 1,600 light-years, quadrupling the known sample and sharpening the map of young stellar associations.
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Astronomy
JWST Spots Methane on a Planet Orbiting a Dead Star — And It's a Preview of Our Own Solar System's Future
JWST has detected methane, haze, and heat in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a white dwarf — the first atmosphere ever confirmed around a planet circling a dead star.
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Astronomy
Chandra, Hubble and Webb Team Up for a 'Red, White and Blue' Universe on America's 250th
To mark America's 250th, NASA fused X-ray, infrared and optical data from Chandra, Webb and Hubble into four patriotic-toned composites — plus sound versions of the cosmos — released June 30 through July 4.
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Astronomy
The Universe May Be Lopsided: DESI and Euclid Data Challenge Cosmology's Bedrock Assumption
A Nature paper published June 30, 2026 finds galaxies stay aligned into coherent structures across billions of light years — more strongly than Lambda-CDM predicts, and potentially in violation of the cosmological principle.
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Astronomy
Action! Rubin Observatory Officially Starts Its 10-Year LSST Survey
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.
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Astronomy
X-ray Echoes of Dead Stars Nudge the Milky Way's Outer Arms Farther Out
Using dust-scattered X-ray light echoes from three gamma-ray bursts, astronomers re-measured two of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms and found them up to 10% farther from the galactic center than assumed.
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Astronomy
A Super-Earth on the Cosmic Shoreline: UC Irvine Sharpens Up GJ 3378 b, 25 Light-Years Away
UC Irvine astronomers revised the mass and orbit of GJ 3378 b, placing the twice-Earth-size world firmly in its red dwarf's habitable zone just 25 light-years away — and on the shortlist for NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory.
