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
Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Is Drenched in Unusually Heavy Water — and That's a Clue to Its Age
A RIKEN-led study finds 3I/ATLAS's water is up to 30 times richer in deuterium than typical solar-system comets, pointing to an origin around an older, metal-poor star.
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Science & Discovery
Astronomers Catch the First Radio Waves Ever Traced to an Exoplanet
MeerKAT detected polarized radio bursts from Beta Pictoris b itself, yielding the first direct magnetic-field measurement of a world outside our solar system — and a hint of an alien aurora.
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Science & Discovery
Perseverance Finds Three-Stage Water History in Jezero Crater's 'Margin Unit'
A peer-reviewed study using Perseverance's SuperCam data reconstructs three distinct water-alteration episodes in Jezero Crater's carbonate-rich Margin unit, reinforcing the site's astrobiological promise.
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Science & Discovery
JWST Survey Finds Some of the Universe's Most Massive Galaxies May Be Missing Their Central Black Holes
A JWST/NIRSpec study of eight ultramassive galaxies finds that sheer size doesn't guarantee a giant black hole — one galaxy shows a stellar velocity dip, not a peak, hinting its central black hole may have been kicked out entirely.
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Science & Discovery
One Rule for Every Black Hole: Jets Switch On at 2% of the Eddington Rate
A Nature Astronomy paper finds that supermassive black holes shredding stars launch delayed radio jets once feeding drops to about 2% of the Eddington limit, the same threshold seen in black holes of roughly 10 solar masses.
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Science & Discovery
Astronomers Confirm the Youngest Exoplanet Ever Found
A Jupiter-sized world less than a million years old, still embedded in its birth disk 450 light-years away, has smashed the record for youngest known exoplanet and challenged giant-planet formation timelines.
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Science & Discovery
A Red Dwarf's Double Jackpot: Microlensing Turns Up a Rare Two-Giant-Planet System
A newly posted study of microlensing event KMT-2026-BLG-0083, caught independently by four survey teams, finds an M-dwarf star hosting two Jupiter-class planets — only the seventh multi-planet system microlensing has ever confirmed.
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Science & Discovery
A 2,884-Supernova Catalog Just Made the Case for Dark Energy Again
A combined 2,884-supernova dataset — the largest and most internally consistent Type Ia sample ever built — adds a 3.3-sigma hint that dark energy's strength has changed over cosmic history.
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Science & Discovery
NASA Recruits the Public to Teach AI What a Telescope Glitch Looks Like
NASA's new Artifact InSPECtor project asks citizen scientists to flag cosmic-ray hits and detector quirks in Euclid telescope spectra, building the human-labeled dataset needed to train AI filters before the Roman Space Telescope starts science operations in 2027.
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Science & Discovery
Chandra Catches a 'Supernova Impostor' Feeding a Hidden Black Hole or Neutron Star
Astronomers predicted and then caught a periodic X-ray outburst from AT 2016blu, proving the famous "supernova impostor" is actually a massive star being drained by a hidden neutron star or black hole every 113 days.
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Science & Discovery
A Meter-Wide Asteroid Was Found, Tracked, and Burned Up — All Within Seven Hours
Asteroid 2026 RW1 was discovered by Arizona's Mount Lemmon Survey and struck the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean just 7 hours 22 minutes later, becoming the 13th asteroid ever caught before impact.
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Science & Discovery
Peptides Don't Just Survive Venus's Acid Clouds. They Fold.
MIT chemists soaked three short peptides in 98% sulfuric acid, the stuff of Venus's upper clouds, and found they held together for weeks and folded into the same defined loop, with the acid itself acting as scaffold.
