astronomy

NASA has set a firm August 30 launch date for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, eight months ahead of schedule, as the observatory is packed for its barge trip to Kennedy Space Center.

PSR J1810-0623 spins 220 times a second and circles a white dwarf every 15.4 days on an orbit with an eccentricity of just 0.000015, one of the roundest pulsar binaries known.

A 40-plus-line JWST spectrum of a gravitationally lensed little red dot, including a 16-line 'iron forest,' best fits a supermassive black hole cloaked in dense gas, astronomers report in The Astrophysical Journal.

ALMA observations reveal a cone-shaped cavity carved into cold gas around Sagittarius A*, the first clear evidence of a wind blowing from the galaxy's central black hole.

A rotational-transit study in Nature Astronomy finds WASP-121 b's evening terminator is hotter and more expanded than its morning side, with upper-atmosphere water broken into its constituent atoms.

Researchers pinpointed a repeating radio signal to a white dwarf pulling matter from a red dwarf companion every 1.4 hours, a 'Rosetta stone' for the class.

A CNRS-led team used the VLT's SPHERE instrument to watch a protoplanetary disk spin, finding anomalies linked to forming giant planets.

An ESO and Gemini North team found winds on seven hot Jupiters slow as the planets get hotter, a pattern best explained by planet-wide magnetic fields.

James Webb observations show Saturn's apparent spin change is driven by a feedback loop in which its aurora heats the atmosphere, generating winds and currents that sustain the aurora.

JWST has tracked the first complete daily cloud cycle on an exoplanet, finding that WASP-94Ab grows magnesium silicate clouds each morning and clears them each evening, while correcting a decade of skewed atmospheric measurements from Hubble.

Astronomers used JWST's MIRI to directly study the surface geology of LHS 3844 b, a super-Earth 48.5 light-years away, revealing a basaltic, atmosphere-free world resembling Mercury — a first for exoplanet science.

NASA's Hubble has imaged IRAS 23077+6707, a protoplanetary disk nicknamed Dracula's Chivito that spans nearly 400 billion miles and shows asymmetric filaments unlike any disk seen before.