Astronomy
Astronomy news from Cosmic Herald — telescopes, exoplanets, black holes, and the discoveries reshaping our picture of the universe.
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Astronomy
Webb Just Mapped 164,000 Galaxies Across 13.7 Billion Years. This Is the Cosmic Web in Detail.
The COSMOS-Web survey, the largest program ever conducted by Webb, has produced the most detailed map of the universe's large-scale structure ever made — tracing 164,000 galaxies through 13.7 billion years of cosmic history, back to when the universe was one billion years old.
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Astronomy
JWST Watches an Exoplanet Get Flash-Fried on the Universe's Most Eccentric Orbit
Webb's infrared eye tracked HD 80606 b as it swung past its star, catching a 1,100°F temperature spike and sniffing out methane and CO₂ in its tortured atmosphere.
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Astronomy
Chandra's Deep Look at NGC 6540: How a Mysterious X-Ray Flare Became Three Distinct Sources
A catastrophic X-ray flare from globular cluster NGC 6540 that blazed for just 300 seconds in 2005 has finally been resolved into three separate sources. Chandra's improved sensitivity revealed what decades of earlier observations missed—but the flare's true origin remains elusive.
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Astronomy
Asteroid 2026 JH2's Surprise Close Approach Exposes Detection Gaps in Planetary Defense
A 62-foot asteroid discovered just days before its closest approach demonstrates how near-Earth objects can slip past detection systems—and why autonomous surveys matter for planetary safety.
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Astronomy
The Coma Cluster: Where Dark Matter Was First Weighed and Found Wanting
In 1933, Fritz Zwicky calculated the mass of the Coma Cluster from its galaxies' motions and found a discrepancy of a factor of 400. He called the missing mass 'dunkle Materie.' The mystery hasn't been solved in the ninety years since.
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Astronomy
Inside a Stellar Nursery: How the Orion Molecular Cloud Builds Stars
The Orion Molecular Cloud is the nearest massive star-forming region to Earth — a turbulent, ultraviolet-blasted environment where new solar systems are assembling right now, and JWST has given us our sharpest look yet.
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Astronomy
Pulsars are spinning neutron stars that keep better time than atomic clocks — and we're using them to detect gravitational waves
A pulsar is a neutron star rotating dozens to hundreds of times per second, beaming radio waves with clocklike regularity. Arrays of pulsars spread across the galaxy are now sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves from supermassive black hole mergers.
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Astronomy
The missing planets: why there's a gap in the size distribution of worlds around other stars
Kepler data revealed a strange gap in exoplanet sizes: planets between 1.5 and 2 Earth radii are surprisingly rare. The leading explanation involves atmospheric loss driven by stellar radiation, and JWST is now testing that theory directly.
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Astronomy
Webb is finding brown dwarfs we didn't know existed. There may be as many as stars.
The James Webb Space Telescope's infrared sensitivity is revealing a population of brown dwarfs — objects too small to fuse hydrogen, too large to be planets — lurking near the Sun that previous surveys missed entirely. The implications for our census of the galaxy are significant.
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Astronomy
Fast radio bursts are everywhere. We still don't fully understand any of them.
The CHIME telescope in Canada has catalogued thousands of fast radio bursts — millisecond flashes of radio energy from across the universe — and the patterns in that catalog are raising more questions than they answer. Some repeat. Some don't. A few seem to come from inside our own galaxy.
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Astronomy
The black hole at the center of the galaxy is more active than we realized
Sgr A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, has been caught in an increasing number of bright flares. New monitoring campaigns combining radio, infrared, and X-ray telescopes are building a picture of a black hole that is anything but dormant.
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Astronomy
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever seen broke our models. Now we're rebuilding them.
GRB 221009A — dubbed the BOAT, for Brightest Of All Time — was detected in October 2022 and is still being studied. The burst was so energetic it briefly overwhelmed detectors across the solar system and challenged decades of theory about how these explosions work.
