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
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.
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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.
