Category: Astronomy

15-year Fermi-LAT lightcurve of OP 313, divided into quiescent (blue) and flaring (yellow) states. Credit: arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.12474

This Sleeping Black Hole Suddenly Exploded Into the Most Powerful Gamma Ray State on Record

COSMOS Field MoM-z14 Galaxy (NIRCam pullout image). Credit: European Space Agency

James Webb Reveals the Universe Grew Up Much Faster Than We Ever Imagined

Credit: Wikipedia

New Math Suggests Dyson Bubbles Can Stay Stable Using Only Gravity and Starlight

Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have produced one of the most detailed maps to date of dark matter. By measuring how gravity from unseen matter bends the light of background galaxies, the map shows how dark matter acts as the hidden framework on which visible galaxies are built. The overlaid contours mark regions of equal dark-matter density, highlighting where this invisible matter—shown here in a blue color—is most strongly concentrated. Credit: Dr. Gavin Leroy/COSMOS-Webb collaboration.

Astronomers Have Finally Seen the Invisible Scaffolding That Shapes the Cosmos

Distribution of sky positions (left panel), and proper motions (right panel) in Magellanic Stream coordinates of the five CEMP stars (red stars) relative to the rest of the Magellanic Clouds sample in SDSS-V DR20. All five stars have sky coordinates and proper motions consistent with LMC membership. Credit: arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.10514

Scientists Finally Discovered the Elusive Carbon Stars That Were Missing From Our Closest Galactic Neighbor

Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk

Scientists Discovered 400,000 Cosmic Secrets Hidden in 22 Years of X-Ray Data

In the heart of our galaxy, scientists discovered the first sulfur-bearing six-membered ring molecule hiding in an interstellar cloud. Credit: MPE/ NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers Found the Largest Sulfur Molecule Ever Detected in Deep Space

TESS target pixel file (TPF) of Sector 22 for TOI-3862. Credit: arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.10450

This Ancient Planet Is Literally Being Stripped To Its Bones By Its Own Sun

A side-by-side visual of two globular clusters: NGC 3201 (left) and Messier 70 (right). The star cluster on the right is visibly compact in shape, as the stars near the center of the object appear very close together. Contrastingly, the star cluster on the left is less compact, as the stars are more spread apart from one another in the field. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

These Cosmic Time Travelers Are Staying Young by Sucking the Life Out of Their Neighbors

Artist's impression of a supermassive black hole system. Infalling gas forms a bright corona near the black hole. In some systems, a jet is launched. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers Found a Supermassive Black Hole Ignoring a Universal Speed Limit

Revealing star formation hidden to the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit: Guilaine Lacaghe et al.

The Early Universe Was a Total Galaxy Factory Way Earlier Than We Thought

This ARKS gallery of faint debris disks reveals details about their shape: belts with multiple rings, wide smooth halos, sharp edges, and unexpected arcs and clumps, which hint at the presence of planets shaping these disks; chemical make-up: the amber colors highlight the location and abundance of the dust in the 24 disks surveyed, while the blue highlights their carbon monoxide gas location and abundance in the six gas-rich disks. Credit: Sebastián Marino, Sorcha Mac Manamon, and the ARKS collaboration

Astronomers Finally Capture the Teenage Years of Planetary Systems Hidden for Billions of Years

observations-shed-more

This Peaceful Looking Galaxy Cluster Is Actually Hiding a Violent Secret

Plumes erupt from Enceladus' southern polar regions. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Saturn’s Moon Enceladus is Actively Cooking Up the Ingredients for Life

Credit: Y. Liu, X. Yang, Y.F. Liang, W.L. Zhang and Y. Li (PMO)

The Mysterious Signal From 2.5 Billion Light Years Away is Not Alone

A composite RGB image of the Ring Nebula (also known as Messier 57 and NGC 6720) constructed from four WEAVE/LIFU emission-line images. The bright outer ring is made up of light emitted by three different ions of oxygen, while the "bar" across the middle is due to light emitted by a plasma of four-times-ionised iron atoms. North is up and East is to the left in the image. Credit: University College London

Scientists Discover a Giant Iron Structure 500 Times the Size of Pluto’s Orbit

Deep layers of molten rock inside some super-earths could generate powerful magnetic fields—potentially stronger than Earth’s—and help shield these exoplanets from harmful radiation. Credit: University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics / Michael Franchot

Massive Oceans of Glowing Liquid Stone May Be Hiding Inside Alien Super-Earths

JWST discovery image of the MACS 1931.8-2635 galaxy cluster containing SN Eos. Credit: arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.04156

This Ancient Supernova Exploded When the Universe Was Only a Billion Years Old

This LOFAR DR2 image of J1007+3540 superimposed over an optical image by Pan-STARRS shows a compact, bright inner jet, indicating the reawakening of what had been a ‘sleeping’ supermassive black hole at the heart of the gigantic radio galaxy. Credit: LOFAR/Pan-STARRS/S. Kumari et al.

This Distant Galaxy Is Coming Back to Life and It Looks Like a Violent Explosion

JWST/NIRCam images of the sample objects. Credit: Nature (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09900-4

James Webb Finally Solved the Mystery of the Little Red Dots

sa1123Univ01

What is the Milky Way? Everything About Our Galaxy

FAST observations used in this study. Data from FAST Data Releases 1–23 were selected. Credit: arXiv (2026). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2601.01912

These 19 Newly Discovered Pulsars Were Hiding in Our Own Galactic Backyard

Illustration of a meteorite impact forming the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the moon's far side, causing melting of the crust and mantle and evaporation of volatile elements. Credit: Heng-Ci Tian

Scientists Finally Know Why the Moon Has Two Completely Different Faces

Phased radial velocity curve and phased and binned TESS light curve for J0658. Credit: Mattig et al., 2025.

This Ordinary Point of Light Was Actually Hiding a Massive Cosmic Secret

This image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows a full view of the Circinus galaxy, a nearby spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years away. The inset highlights a Webb close-up of the galaxy’s core, where infrared observations pierce through dust to reveal hot material feeding its central supermassive black hole. Webb’s image, made using the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI) tool on its NIRISS (Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph) instrument, isolates hot dust in the immediate surroundings of the supermassive black hole, revealing that most of the infrared emission comes from a compact, dusty structure feeding the black hole rather than from outflowing material. In the Webb image, the inner face of the torus glows in infrared light, while the darker areas represent where the outer ring is blocking light. Credit: NASA

Scientists Thought This Black Hole Was Exploding but It’s Actually Doing the Opposite

Artist’s impression of a M dwarf star surrounded by planets. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Most Planets in Our Galaxy Might Be Trapped in a Permanent Microbe Phase

The central square image, taken with the MUSE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope, shows shock waves around the dead star RXJ0528+2838. When a star moves through space it can push away nearby material creating a so-called bow shock, which in this image is glowing in red, green and blue. The colors represent hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, respectively. These shocks are usually produced by a strong outflow expelled from the star. However, in the case of RXJ0528+2838 –– a white dwarf with a Sun-like companion –– astronomers discovered that the shock wave can't be explained by any known mechanism. Some hidden energy source, perhaps magnetic fields, could be the answer to this mystery. Credit: ESO/K. Ilkiewicz and S. Scaringi et al. Background: PanSTARRS

Astronomers Found a Ghostly Shock Wave Where Nothing Should Exist

The galaxy, called GS-10578 but nicknamed "Pablo's galaxy" after the astronomer who first observed it in detail, is massive for such an early period in the universe: about 200 billion times the mass of our sun, and most of its stars formed between 12.5 and 11.5 billion years ago. Credit: JADES Collaboration

Astronomers Discovered a Galaxy That Starved to Death Without a Single Explosion

The galaxy COSMOS-74706 with its prominent spiral arms and prospective central bar structure. Credit: Daniel Ivanov et al

This 11 Billion Year Old Galaxy Is Way More Mature Than Scientists Expected

Spatial and redshift distribution of the galaxy proto-cluster members and the background galaxies with strong DLAs. Credit: Nature Astronomy (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02745-x

Scientists Found a Ghostly Reservoir of Gas That Shouldn’t Exist in the Deep Past