Astronomy
Astronomy news from Cosmic Herald — telescopes, exoplanets, black holes, and the discoveries reshaping our picture of the universe.
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Astronomy
Gold and platinum were made in the collision of two neutron stars. We watched it happen.
On August 17, 2017, gravitational wave detectors caught two neutron stars merging. The electromagnetic flash that followed — a kilonova — was observed by dozens of telescopes worldwide and confirmed that collisions between neutron stars produce most of the heavy elements in the universe.
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Astronomy
Quasars are the most luminous objects in the universe — and they tell us how galaxies are built
When Maarten Schmidt measured the redshift of 3C 273 in 1963, he realized he was looking at something 2 billion light-years away outshining entire galaxies. Sixty years later, quasars are understood as the most extreme phase of supermassive black hole growth — and keys to understanding how every large galaxy, including ours, formed.
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Astronomy
Every massive object in the universe is also a telescope — and we've learned to use them
Einstein predicted in 1915 that gravity bends light. Eddington confirmed it in 1919. A century later, gravitational lensing has become one of the most productive techniques in observational astronomy — revealing dark matter, finding exoplanets, and letting us see the first galaxies.
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Astronomy
The Milky Way's skeleton is made of ghost stars — and Gaia is mapping every one
Gaia has revealed dozens of stellar streams threading through the galaxy — thin ribbons of stars from ancient satellite galaxies and globular clusters torn apart over billions of years. Astronomers are now reading them for evidence of dark matter and the Milky Way's violent past.
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Astronomy
Webb is revolutionizing the science of brown dwarfs — objects that blur every boundary we use to define a star
Too massive to be planets but too small to fuse hydrogen, brown dwarfs occupy an awkward middle ground. Webb is now probing their atmospheres with unprecedented depth — and finding objects that challenge everything from the definition of 'star' to the origin of Jupiter-mass bodies floating freely in space.
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Astronomy
The coldest planet we've ever photographed seems to have icy clouds
JWST directly imaged Epsilon Indi Ab, a frigid super-Jupiter next door, and found less ammonia than models predict. The likely culprit — patchy water-ice clouds — would make it the first such clouds spotted on a giant world beyond the Solar System.
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Astronomy
Webb stares at a rocky exoplanet and sees nothing — which tells us plenty
JWST's mid-infrared look at the rocky world LHS 3844b found a dark, featureless surface and no sign of an atmosphere. For exoplanet scientists, a bare rock is a data point about which small worlds can hold onto air at all.
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Astronomy
One planet, two weathers: Webb catches an ultra-hot world with a split atmosphere
Using JWST, astronomers have measured a clear difference between the morning and evening edges of the ultra-hot gas giant WASP-121b — the same planet showing two distinct atmospheres at once, separated only by the line where day meets night.
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Astronomy
Europe's 'dark universe detective' is building a 3D map of the invisible cosmos
Most of the universe is made of things we cannot see — dark matter and dark energy. ESA's Euclid telescope is surveying billions of galaxies across ten billion years of history to map that invisible scaffolding, with its first major cosmology data release due this October.
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Astronomy
The hunt for air on a nearby Earth-size world is the hardest test JWST has taken on
TRAPPIST-1e is an Earth-size planet in its star's habitable zone, just 40 light-years away. Whether it has an atmosphere is one of the most consequential questions in astronomy — and JWST's first attempts to answer it show just how hard it is.
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Astronomy
A comet from another star is passing through — and it carries water unlike any in our solar system
3I/ATLAS is only the third object ever confirmed to come from beyond our solar system. Telescopes and spacecraft across the planet have spent months studying it — and what they've found is a chemistry that didn't form here.
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Astronomy
A monster black hole in an almost empty patch of the early universe is rewriting the origin story
JWST has found a black hole some 50 million times the Sun's mass sitting in a region nearly devoid of stars, a billion years after the Big Bang. It is the most lopsided black-hole-to-host ratio ever seen — and evidence that some black holes were born big.
