astronomy

Two March discoveries reveal a 10-billion-year-old lava world with a thick atmosphere and a sulfur-dominated planet unlike anything in existing classification systems.

SpaceX reached 10,020 active Starlink satellites on March 17, constituting two-thirds of all active spacecraft, while NASA warns 500,000 satellites would contaminate nearly every telescope image.

JWST observations of super-Earth L 98-59 d reveal a sulfur-dominated atmosphere sustained by a perpetual magma ocean, a combination that fits no existing planetary category and may define a new class of exoplanet.

A 30-fold expansion of the solar-twin catalog shows the Sun migrated 10,000 light-years outward from the galactic center between four and six billion years ago, carried by the forming central bar.

A University of Washington team identifies signs of a catastrophic planetary collision around star Gaia20ehk, offering the first real-time analog of the giant impact that created Earth's Moon 4.5 billion years ago.

The ACES survey stitched together ALMA's biggest mosaic to date, revealing dozens of molecules and intricate gas filaments across the galaxy's Central Molecular Zone.

James Webb Space Telescope identifies galaxy COSMOS2020-635829 at redshift z=1.156, the most distant jellyfish galaxy known, revealing cluster environments were stripping galaxies far earlier than models predicted.

A team using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope processed 600 million spectra to build the first large-scale intensity map of Lyman-alpha emissions from 9 to 11 billion years ago, exposing faint galaxies and intergalactic gas invisible to conventional surveys.

Six months of observations of the third interstellar object ever detected have uncovered water, methane, and hydrogen cyanide in its coma--and a Jupiter flyby on March 16 could yield the closest-ever look at an interstellar visitor.

A 15-hour JWST observation has produced the first three-dimensional map of Uranus's ionosphere, confirming decades-long atmospheric cooling and exposing how the planet's tilted, offset magnetic field sculpts complex auroral structures unlike any seen elsewhere in the solar system.

CDG-2, a near-invisible galaxy 300 million light-years away, is the first detected solely through its globular cluster population. Roughly 99% of its mass is dark matter.