Astronomy
Astronomy news from Cosmic Herald — telescopes, exoplanets, black holes, and the discoveries reshaping our picture of the universe.
-
Astronomy
A 200-Hour Mosaic Over Morocco Reveals Five Ghost Supernovas in Auriga
A 200-hour, 10-panel mosaic shot from Morocco's Oukaimeden Observatory resolves five ancient supernova remnants tangled together in the constellation Auriga, including the famous Spaghetti Nebula.
-
Astronomy
A Rebellious Exoplanet Orbits Backward, and Astronomers Don't Know Why
GJ 3090 b, a sub-Neptune 73 light-years away, orbits its star retrograde and severely misaligned — with no companion object to blame, forcing astronomers to consider that the star itself grew a backward disc.
-
Astronomy
JWST Finds the Same Star-Formation "Recipe" in a 13-Billion-Year-Old Galactic Fossil
JWST resolved over 10,000 faint stars in the ancient dwarf galaxy Boötes I and found its initial mass function matches the Milky Way's, hinting that the rules of star formation may not change even in near-primordial conditions.
-
Astronomy
A Global Telescope Relay Just Nailed Down the True Color of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS
Pooling data from professional observatories and citizen-run eVscopes worldwide, a new study finds interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS wore a stubbornly red dust coma through its entire solar system passage, regardless of how bright it got.
-
Astronomy
Opinion: Can We Establish Communications with Intelligent Life Forms in Our Galaxy?
A guest opinion: with only a handful of nearby Sun-like stars and vanishingly small odds that two civilizations' communication windows would ever overlap, real two-way contact with alien intelligence may be far less likely than we hope.
-
Astronomy
XRISM Catches a Hypergiant's Wind Falling Onto a Pulsar, Line by Line
XRISM's Resolve instrument watched iron lines flip from absorption to emission during a flare from GX 301-2, giving the first direct spectroscopic evidence of stellar-wind plasma falling onto a neutron star.
-
Astronomy
LRO Spots a Once-in-a-Century Fresh Crater Named McGetchin
NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter caught a freshly formed lunar crater the size of the Colosseum, blasted open in 2024 by a building-sized impactor and only noticed in October 2025.
-
Astronomy
Fast Radio Bursts Are Turning Into a Census Tool for the Universe's Missing Gas
Caltech researchers used dispersion measures from 130 localized fast radio bursts to detect galactic feedback reshaping the cosmic web at 6.5-sigma, a technique poised to scale into the tens of thousands of bursts DSA-110's successor is expected to find after 2029.
-
Astronomy
Astronomers Find a 'Black Hole Star' Shining 100 Billion Times Brighter Than Any Star Should
A JWST survey has turned up an object from the universe's first few hundred million years that looks like a solar-system-sized star but is powered by a black hole 100,000 times the Sun's mass — a possible answer to the mystery of the 'little red dots.'
-
Astronomy
Faculae Flip Dark: New Study Shows M-Dwarf 'Bright Spots' Could Be Throwing Off Exoplanet Size Measurements
A 3D simulation study finds that the "bright spots" long assumed to dot every star's surface actually turn dark on M dwarfs, a wavelength-dependent quirk that could be quietly skewing exoplanet radius and atmosphere measurements from JWST.
-
Astronomy
ALMA Catches Two Massive Baby Stars Colliding Into an Eccentric Binary
Eight years of ALMA, VLA, JWST and VLT data show a massive protobinary 5,300 light-years away didn't form from one collapsing disk — it assembled 60 years ago when two separately-born stars gravitationally captured each other.
-
Astronomy
MeerKAT Hears the Universe's Faintest Hydrogen Whisper
Using 96 hours of MeerKAT radio data, astronomers directly detected the faint 21-cm hydrogen signal from galaxies billions of light-years away, validating a technique that could remap the universe's structure without resolving a single galaxy.
