Science & Discovery
Space science and discovery from Cosmic Herald — planetary science, cosmology, astrobiology, and the search for life beyond Earth.
-
Science & Discovery
A Cosmic Breadcrumb Trail: First Stellar Stream Found Outside the Milky Way Offers New Way to Weigh Dark Matter
Astronomers combing archival Hubble images spotted the first confirmed globular-cluster stellar stream beyond our galaxy, in a faint dwarf 115 million light-years away — and the technique could finally let us map dark matter in galaxies other than our own.
-
Science & Discovery
Black Holes Older Than the Big Bang Could Explain Dark Matter, New Study Suggests
A University of Portsmouth cosmologist argues that black holes from a universe that existed before our own could have survived a cosmic "bounce" and still be hiding in plain sight as dark matter.
-
Science & Discovery
This 374-Second Binary Is Losing Energy Faster Than Any White Dwarf Pair We Know
A newly timed ultracompact white dwarf binary toward the Large Magellanic Cloud is spiraling inward faster than any comparable system on record, making it a leading calibration target for the future LISA gravitational-wave observatory.
-
Science & Discovery
Astronomers Spot Tiny Plasma Whirlpools on the Sun — Right at the Edge of What We Can See
A Nature study using the Inouye Solar Telescope has resolved 20-km plasma vortices on the Sun's surface for the first time, structures researchers compare to spotting a coin from 180 km away.
-
Science & Discovery
Sharpest-Ever Sun Images Reveal Swirling Instabilities Hiding in Plain Sight
The Inouye Solar Telescope's highest-resolution images yet show Kelvin-Helmholtz vortices are everywhere on the Sun's surface, not rare events — a discovery that may help crack the decades-old mystery of why the corona is millions of degrees hotter than the surface below it.
-
Science & Discovery
A Dead Star's X-rays May Have Just Confirmed a 90-Year-Old Prediction About Empty Space
NASA's IXPE spacecraft, paired with NICER and Australia's Murriyang radio telescope, caught magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 emitting X-rays polarized up to ~80% — evidence that its trillion-times-Earth magnetic field bends empty space itself, as QED predicted in 1936.
-
Science & Discovery
A Faint X-Ray Flash Just Filled In the 'Missing Link' Between Ordinary Supernovae and Gamma-Ray Bursts
China's Einstein Probe caught a brief X-ray shock breakout from a dying Wolf-Rayet star that had all the makings of a gamma-ray burst but never fired one, giving astronomers just their second clean look at this elusive process in two decades.
-
Science & Discovery
Giant Solar-Wind Waves Are Tearing Mars' Atmosphere Into Space, MAVEN and Tianwen-1 Reveal
A Boston University-led study pairing NASA's MAVEN with China's Tianwen-1 finds solar-wind-driven Kelvin-Helmholtz waves flinging Martian ions into space at 10-100 times the rate of previously known escape channels.
-
Science & Discovery
Curiosity Finds Mars' Largest Honeycomb-Patterned Field Yet in Valle Grande
Climbing Mount Sharp, Curiosity photographed a sprawling field of inch-wide honeycomb fractures in Valle Grande — the biggest such formation in its 14-year mission, with its origin still unresolved.
-
Science & Discovery
A New Theory Explains How Fast Star-Forming Gas Actually Lives and Dies
A University of Maryland-led simulation study finds that individual clumps of star-forming gas survive for as little as 400,000 years, reframing how astronomers should read galaxy-scale star formation data.
-
Science & Discovery
A Black Hole Wandered 30,000 Light-Years From Home — Then It Ate a Star
NASA's Swift Observatory and a UNC-Chapel Hill team caught a roughly million-solar-mass black hole shredding a star far outside its galaxy's core — the farthest such offset ever seen, and evidence that black holes can go wandering after galactic mergers.
-
Science & Discovery
LIGO's Latest Catalog Sorts Black-Hole Mergers Into Four Distinct Families
A new analysis of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's fifth transient catalog finds statistical evidence for four separate black-hole merger populations — including a rare group of black holes built from earlier mergers.
