Astronomy

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.

South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope has discovered a record-breaking hydroxyl gigamaser in a merging galaxy system, shattering the previous distance record by a factor of two.

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.