Astronomy
56 articles RSS
Gaia Data Reveals the Sun Fled the Milky Way's Core with Thousands of Stellar Twins Billions of Years Ago
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.
ALMA Creates Its Largest Image Ever, Mapping 650 Light-Years of Hidden Chemistry at the Milky Way's Core
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.
Webb Spots Most Distant Jellyfish Galaxy Ever Seen, Pushing Ram-Pressure Stripping Back 8.5 Billion Years
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.
HETDEX Astronomers Unveil the Largest 3D Map of Hydrogen Light in the Early Universe, Revealing a Hidden Sea of Cosmic Structure
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.
MeerKAT Detects the Most Distant Hydroxyl Megamaser Ever Observed, Eight Billion Light-Years Away
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.
Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS Reveals Prebiotic Chemistry as It Heads for Jupiter Encounter
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.
Webb Maps Uranus's Upper Atmosphere in 3D, Revealing Auroral Bands Shaped by the Solar System's Strangest Magnetosphere
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.
Hubble, Euclid, and Subaru Discover a Galaxy That Is 99% Dark Matter—Detected Only by Its Globular Clusters
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.