Astronomy
56 articles RSS
China's FAST Telescope Finds a Millisecond Pulsar in an Almost Perfectly Circular Orbit, a Rare Window Into Binary Evolution
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.
Webb Spectrum of GLIMPSE-17775 Delivers Strongest Evidence Yet That 'Little Red Dots' Are Black Hole Stars
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.
Northwestern Team Detects the Milky Way Black Hole's Long-Predicted Wind, Ending a 50-Year Search
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.
JWST Maps a Dawn-Dusk Divide on Ultra-Hot Jupiter WASP-121 b, Where the Evening Sky Runs Hotter and Water Falls Apart
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.
Astronomers Trace a Mysterious Long-Period Radio Transient to an Accreting White Dwarf Binary, ASKAP J1745-5051
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.
Astronomers Directly Observe the Rotation of a Planet-Forming Disk for the First Time, Tracking AB Aurigae Over Four Years
A CNRS-led team used the VLT's SPHERE instrument to watch a protoplanetary disk spin, finding anomalies linked to forming giant planets.
Astronomers Report First Robust Measurement of Magnetism on Exoplanets, Inferred From Strange Winds on Seven Hot Jupiters
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.
JWST Solves Saturn's Decades-Long Rotation Mystery, Revealing a Self-Sustaining Auroral Heat Pump in the Upper Atmosphere
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.
Webb Observes a Hot Jupiter's Daily Weather Cycle for the First Time, Revealing Rock Clouds That Form Every Morning and Dissolve by Nightfall
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.
JWST Peers at a Rocky Super-Earth's Surface for the First Time, Finding a Dark, Airless World That Looks Like Mercury
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.
JWST Detects Methane in Atmosphere of TOI-199b, the First Temperate Giant Exoplanet to Have Its Chemistry Mapped
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has characterized the atmosphere of TOI-199b, a Saturn-sized world 330 light-years away—the first temperate giant exoplanet studied in detail.
JWST Shows Neptune's Moon Nereid Is an Original Survivor, Not a Kuiper Belt Capture — Rewriting the Planet's Violent History
A Science Advances study using Webb data finds Nereid's icy composition rules out a Kuiper Belt origin, making it the sole intact remnant of Neptune's primordial moon system.