Astronomy

The farthest Kreutz sungrazer ever discovered will pass just 161,000 kilometers above the Sun's surface on Saturday, threading the inner solar corona in a make-or-break encounter that could produce a comet visible in broad daylight or end in total disintegration.

The fourth gravitational wave transient catalog adds 128 new detections from a nine-month observing run, including the heaviest and fastest-spinning black hole mergers ever recorded.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope caught comet C/2025 K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces across three days, marking the closest-to-breakup observation in the telescope's history.

Using the upgraded GRAVITY+ instrument on the ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer, researchers have directly detected a second protoplanet forming in the disk around the young star WISPIT 2, located 437 light-years from Earth.

The NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has activated its real-time astronomical alert pipeline, flagging 800,000 transient objects on its first operational night and setting the stage for a decade-long survey expected to catalog more objects than every previous optical telescope combined.

Scientists have detected all five canonical nucleobases in pristine samples from asteroid Ryugu, the first confirmation of a complete set of DNA and RNA building blocks in material collected directly from space.

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.

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured the most detailed images yet of nebula PMR 1, nicknamed the Exposed Cranium, revealing a two-light-year-wide structure shaped by jets from a massive dying star roughly 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Vela.

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.

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.