astronomy

A 500-kilometer plutino in the Kuiper Belt shows refractive signs of a 100-200 nanobar atmosphere, a discovery published May 4 in Nature Astronomy that astronomers say challenges models of which small icy worlds can hold gas.

A University of Warwick team applied a new machine-learning pipeline called RAVEN to four years of TESS observations, statistically validating 118 short-period planets and surfacing roughly 1,000 candidates not previously catalogued.

A Western University team led by Jan Cami used JWST's MIRI instrument to image planetary nebula Tc 1, finding C60 buckyballs confined to a hollow shell around the white dwarf and revealing an unexplained question-mark structure at the center.

A 23-year radio campaign on the blazar Mrk 501 reveals a second jet from a hidden supermassive companion orbiting every 121 days, the first directly imaged close SMBH binary.

A Princeton-led reanalysis of 83.7 million TESS light curves used random forest classifiers to surface 11,554 planet candidates, including one confirmed hot Jupiter, by reaching stars 16 times fainter than prior searches.

The TOI-201 system hosts a super-Earth, a warm Jupiter, and a record-setting brown dwarf whose gravitational interplay drives orbital shifts observable on human timescales — within 200 years its planets will stop transiting.

A new JWST MIRI observation of the 12-light-year-away exoplanet Epsilon Indi Ab shows less ammonia than models predict, pointing to thick water-ice cirrus clouds that current atmospheric models omit.

NASA publicly revealed its completed Roman Space Telescope on April 21 at Goddard, setting up a Falcon Heavy launch as early as this fall for a five-year survey of dark energy, exoplanets, and the galactic bulge.

JWST observations of 29 Cygni b point to disk accretion, with carbon- and oxygen-rich signatures and a spin-aligned orbit that argue against star-like collapse.

Two companion JWST studies confirm a spectrally resolved helium emitter with no detectable metals sitting 3 kiloparsecs from GN-z11, the strongest signature yet of Population III stars at redshift 10.6.

The Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope, perched at 5,600 meters in Chile, inaugurated on April 9 with over 100,000 superconducting detectors and a mapping speed ten times faster than any predecessor.

A 170,000-year visitor from the Oort Cloud has brightened faster than expected, reaching magnitude 4.7 and growing a 10-degree ion tail as it heads for its closest solar approach on April 19.