Astronomy

Webb telescope finds a Jupiter-sized planet orbiting a tiny red dwarf has fewer heavy elements in its atmosphere than its own star, defying all existing formation theories.

The first dual-coronagraph record of a Kreutz sungrazer's destruction and a pre-print tracing the comet's 1,663-year orbit to a daylight comet of 363 AD are reshaping models of cometary survival and the family's ancient genealogy.

The Kreutz sungrazer broke apart approximately six hours before reaching its closest point to the Sun on April 4, peaking at magnitude -0.6 in coronagraph imagery before its nucleus shattered. Only submicron dust debris emerged on the far side, leaving nothing visible from the ground.

NGC 1052-DF9 is the third ultra-diffuse galaxy found lacking dark matter in a linear trail near NGC 1052, lending significant support to the Bullet Dwarf collision theory and challenging alternative gravity models.

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.