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
Webb Reads the Atmosphere of a Giant Planet That Outlived Its Star
Webb has detected the first atmosphere ever seen on a planet transiting a white dwarf: WD 1856 b, a 4-to-11-Jupiter-mass giant that survived its star's death and now circles the stellar corpse every 34 hours, carrying clouds and probable methane.
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Science & Discovery
The Radio Sky Is Brighter Than We Thought: A New SKA-Low Measurement Rewrites the Low-Frequency Map
A single SKALA4.1 antenna on an SKA-Low ground mesh in Western Australia measured the absolute brightness of the 60–350 MHz sky, and found the standard Global Sky Model runs 1.2 to 1.5 times too dim, deepening the puzzle of the excess radio background.
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Science & Discovery
Could Giant Alien Mirrors Betray ET? A New Study Tests Whether Orbiting Megastructures Would Survive
A new study models whether huge, feather-light orbital mirrors could survive around exoplanets — and finds that radiation pressure dooms most configurations, making any long-lived mirror a sign of active engineering.
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Science & Discovery
Marsquakes Reveal a Hidden Magma Engine Beneath the Red Planet's Crust
Seismic data from NASA's InSight lander points to vast, Earth-like magma systems deep inside Mars — built without plate tectonics, and possibly still fed by active mantle plumes.
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Science & Discovery
Not Ice Giants After All: A New Model Recasts Uranus and Neptune as Magma-Ocean Worlds
A June 2026 preprint argues Uranus and Neptune aren't water-ice worlds but supercritical, hydrogen-rich magma oceans under H2 envelopes — a model that, with just three parameters per planet, reproduces nearly everything we measure.
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Science & Discovery
Hubble Catches a Tiny Galaxy Burning Off the Cosmic Fog, 1.4 Billion Years After the Big Bang
Astronomers used Hubble to catch ionizing UV light escaping a small, furiously star-forming galaxy in the reionization epoch — the first such detection, and direct evidence for how the early universe became transparent.
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Science & Discovery
Sub-Neptunes May Be 'Soot Factories' Running on Natural Diesel Engines, JWST Data Suggests
A UChicago team led by a former combustion chemist argues sub-Neptune atmospheres breed PAHs — the soot of diesel exhaust — peaking near 600 K and matching JWST and Hubble's puzzling haze trend.
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Science & Discovery
How Venus Got Its Backward Day: A Moon-Sized Impactor May Have Flipped the Planet
New impact simulations presented at EGU 2026 argue a single moon-sized, high-velocity impactor striking young Venus at a steep angle could explain the planet's bizarre 248-day retrograde spin — and why it has no moon.
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Science & Discovery
SpaceX Launches Secretive 'Starfall' Reentry Demo — What the Silence Signals
SpaceX flew a Falcon 9 mission called Starfall — described only as a reentry capsule demonstration — and disclosed almost nothing about it. The deliberate operational security around a clearly serious program may signal something significant ahead.
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Science & Discovery
Trump Executive Order Pushes NASA Toward Quantum-Secured Space Communications
A new executive order directs NASA to plan quantum communication and sensing infrastructure in orbit, accelerating the push toward theoretically unhackable satellite links.
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Science & Discovery
Webb and Hubble Team Up to Reveal an Ancient Relic of the Milky Way's Formation
Terzan 5 isn't a globular cluster after all. Webb and Hubble data reveal four generations of stars spanning 10 billion years, reclassifying it as a rare 'bulge fossil fragment' that survived the Milky Way's chaotic assembly.
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Science & Discovery
The MEO Durability Crisis: Why LEO-Designed Hardware Will Fail the New Orbital Economy
Satellites built with LEO-grade components face premature failure in medium Earth orbit's punishing radiation belt, threatening the economics of planned MEO constellations and servicing hubs.
