Science & Discovery
Space science and discovery from Cosmic Herald — planetary science, cosmology, astrobiology, and the search for life beyond Earth.
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Science & Discovery
JWST's Rocky Worlds Program Delivers Its First Complete Verdict: GJ 3929 b Is a Bare, Airless Rock
Four stacked JWST/MIRI eclipses of the super-Earth GJ 3929 b rule out thick CO2 or water atmospheres at high confidence, giving the Rocky Worlds program its first finished case file — and a warm, dark rock instead of a habitable world.
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Science & Discovery
Webb Telescope Marks Fourth Anniversary by Revealing the Hidden Heart of Centaurus A
NASA's new Webb image of Centaurus A cuts through dust to resolve individual stars in a galaxy still reeling from a 2-billion-year-old collision, marking four years of the telescope's public images.
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Science & Discovery
Hidden Jet from a 'Missing-Link' Black Hole Lights Up the Radio Sky
Radio astronomers caught a years-long afterglow from AT2019ijn revealing an off-axis relativistic jet from a rare intermediate-mass black hole 3.4 billion light-years away.
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Science & Discovery
A 20-Year Argument Over the Bullet Cluster's Mass Just Got Settled — by Webb and a Ground-Based Camera
A joint JWST-DECam lensing study pins the Bullet Cluster's mass ratio at 10.14-to-1, ending two decades of dueling estimates and confirming it's a minor merger, not the near-equal collision often assumed.
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Science & Discovery
JWST Spots the Most Distant Barred Spiral Galaxy Ever Seen, and It's Already Surprisingly Grown-Up
JWST has found a massive barred spiral galaxy just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, the earliest such structure ever confirmed, challenging assumptions about how quickly orderly disks can form.
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Science & Discovery
A Warm, Wildly Eccentric Jupiter Just Showed Up in the Gap Where Few Giant Planets Are Found
NGTS-39 b, a 58-day, wildly eccentric Jupiter-mass world spotted by TESS and confirmed by NGTS, fills in a notoriously empty stretch of exoplanet demographics — and hints at a hidden companion tugging its orbit.
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Science & Discovery
A New Earth-Sized Neighbor: Astronomers Refine GJ 3378b's Mass in the Habitable Zone
A UC Irvine-led team cut the mass estimate for nearby exoplanet GJ 3378b roughly in half, from about 5 to 2.3 Earth masses, bolstering the case that it's a rocky, potentially habitable world just 25 light-years away.
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Science & Discovery
An Ultra-Black Coating Could Save Astronomy From 60,000 Satellites
University of Surrey researchers say coating satellites in Vantablack 310, which reflects just 2% of incoming light, could bring megaconstellation brightness near IAU limits—and it gets its first orbital test next year.
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Science & Discovery
X-Ray Light Echoes From Old Gamma-Ray Bursts Show the Milky Way's Arms Are Bigger Than We Thought
By timing X-ray rings that three historic gamma-ray bursts scattered off interstellar dust, astronomers measured purely geometric distances showing the Milky Way's outer spiral arms sit about 10% farther out than previously believed.
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Science & Discovery
NASA's TESS Spots a Super-Jupiter 40,000 Light-Years Away Using a Trick From Einstein
Astronomers used gravitational microlensing to pull a super-Jupiter called Gaia23bra b out of TESS's archived data — a planet-hunting trick that reaches 260 times farther than the satellite's usual transit method.
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Science & Discovery
A New Suspect in the Sun's Hottest Mystery: Charged Cosmic Dust
A University of Alabama in Huntsville study in The Astrophysical Journal proposes that charged dust grains near the Sun reshape the plasma waves carrying energy into the corona, adding a new suspect to the decades-old coronal heating mystery.
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Science & Discovery
Sunspot AR4479 Fires an X1 Flare and Ten M-Flares, and NOAA Posts a G2 Watch for the Fourth of July Weekend
Active Region 4479 threw an X1.1 flare and roughly ten M-class flares in a single day, launching a staggered train of Earth-directed CMEs. NOAA issued G1-G2 storm watches for July 3-4, opening a holiday-weekend aurora window that could reach the northern-tier United States.
