https://phys.org/space-news/astronomy/ en-us The latest science news on astronomy, space, and astrophysics. An international research collaboration between the University of Vienna and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States has used machine learning to re-examine one of the most debated signals in astrophysics. The so-called Galactic Center Excess (GCE), a faint, roughly spherical glow of gamma rays at the center of the Milky Way, has fascinated physicists for more than a decade. The new results suggest that an explanation in terms of dark matter cannot currently be ruled out. The results have now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-dark-gamma-ray-milky-center.html Astronomy Wed, 17 Jun 2026 09:20:01 EDT news700903870 One well-done gas giant, coming right up! That's the latest from researchers analyzing NASA's James Webb Space Telescope observations of HD 80606 b, an exoplanet four times the mass of Jupiter with an extremely elliptical orbit that sweeps close by its sun-like star. The research team is presenting its study and preliminary findings Tuesday at the 248th meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS248) in Pasadena, California. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-nasa-webb-exoplanet-roasted.html Astronomy Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:40:10 EDT news700903022 A team of scientists has used NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar and the U.S. National Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT) to carry out the most extensive radar study to date of Europa, the ocean world orbiting Jupiter. By repeatedly "pinging" Europa with 3.5-centimeter (1.4-inch) radio waves between 2011 and 2024, the team measured how the moon reflects radar signals and confirmed that its icy surface scatters radio energy in an unusually strong and complex way not seen on rocky worlds. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-radar-echoes-europa-reveal-secrets.html Astronomy Wed, 17 Jun 2026 08:20:06 EDT news700902423 New research led by a scientist at IPAC—a science and data center for astrophysics and planetary science at Caltech—studying the hot Jupiter CoRoT-2 b has settled on one of the three leading hypotheses explaining why its atmosphere has a hot spot in the opposite direction from that seen on all other exoplanets of this type. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-oddball-exoplanet-hot-jupiter.html Astronomy Wed, 17 Jun 2026 07:20:09 EDT news700897261 Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles of the universe. They live a ghostly existence with no electric charge, very little mass and extremely few interactions with matter. They are also the most abundant particles with mass in the universe and can be created through a variety of processes, such as the decay of heavy particles, nuclear reactions in the sun and the explosions of stars. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-neutrino-ghost-distant-shadow-blaster.html Astronomy Wed, 17 Jun 2026 05:00:01 EDT news700758407 Researchers using two of humanity's most powerful observatories—NASA's James Webb and Hubble Space Telescopes—have definitively shown that Terzan 5 is not a globular star cluster, as it was once classified, offering new insight into how galaxies like our own form and evolve over time. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-webb-hubble-reveal-history-relic.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:30:01 EDT news700847941 A Yale-led team of astronomers has found a third galaxy devoid of dark matter—located alongside the other two in a formation that has never been seen before. Astronomers have followed a faint, cosmic trail of gas to a third galaxy that has no dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-charm-row-faint-galaxies-dark.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:50:01 EDT news700842481 Astronomers using the U.S. National Science Foundation Very Large Array (NSF VLA) have found that when a supermassive black hole tears apart an unlucky star, the fireworks are not over when the first flash fades. Years after the initial outburst, many of these black holes "burp" out streams of material that slam into surrounding gas and glow in radio waves, giving the NSF VLA a front-row seat to how black holes grow and blast energy back into their galaxies. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-black-holes-unleash-delayed-radio.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:00:03 EDT news700824204 An international team of astronomers led by Camille Poitras, a Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Laval University, has produced the most detailed X-ray view ever obtained of the jet launched by the supermassive black hole in the galaxy M87. By combining observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory acquired between 2012 and 2025 with advanced image-processing techniques, the researchers were able to track the evolution of jet structures with unprecedented detail. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-chandra-tracks-m87-black-hole.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:20:05 EDT news700824001 Thanks to the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, University of Michigan researchers are helping chip away at one of astronomy's cosmic mysteries: The universe's most massive galaxies appear to be missing stars. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-revealing-black-hole-mighty-star.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:00:06 EDT news700821602 Italian astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) to perform polarimetric observations of the star WRAY 15-1880 and its young circumstellar disk. Results of the new observations, presented June 10 on the arXiv preprint server, suggest that this disk may host a primitive planetary system. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-young-disk-wray-primitive-planetary.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 08:20:01 EDT news700802492 Astronomers have detected one of the most powerful ultra-fast outflows ever seen from a distant supermassive black hole. Using XMM-Newton and NuSTAR, a team studied a hyper-luminous quasar at cosmic noon and found two distinct wind components blasting away from the black hole, details of which are outlined in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server on June 3. The study has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is currently under minor revision. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-powerful-ufo-blasting-distant-black.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Jun 2026 07:00:01 EDT news700486457 When stars like our sun age, they puff up into red giants. Their bubbling outer mass gradually escapes into space, and their remaining cores contract into white dwarfs. Since most stars end their lives this way, the universe is teeming with white dwarfs. A new study from Caltech's Jim Fuller, professor of theoretical astrophysics, proposes a new model of the final death throes of sun-like stars that shows how escaping mass from the stars' surfaces leads to a series of little kicks. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-star-death-throes-involve-lot.html Astronomy Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:40:05 EDT news700758364 The aftermath of a supernova, a stellar explosion, is usually a slowly fading cloud of hot gas. So when astronomers pointed NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory at the nearby galaxy Messier 83 (M83), they did not expect to find a population of supernova remnants, or the debris from these explosions, showing dramatic changes in their brightness. The new results have been presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Pasadena, California, and published in The Astrophysical Journal. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-chandra-reveals-flickering-supernova-remnants.html Astronomy Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:20:07 EDT news700758355 A team of astronomers, led by Brooke Kotten of the University of Michigan, has shown that TOI-5882—a sunlike star located some 1,300 light-years away—has likely eaten one of its planets. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-lithium-spike-reveals-sun-star.html Astronomy Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:40:02 EDT news700746421 In the early universe, the first galaxies began to take shape roughly a million years after the Big Bang. Within these young systems, stars formed from vast reservoirs of cold gas, gradually building the structures we see in the cosmos today. Understanding this star-forming gas is key to explaining how galaxies grew, but directly tracing its neutral component has remained challenging, especially at great distances. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-alma-star-gas-early-galaxies.html Astronomy Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:00:12 EDT news700731002 Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers may have found a supernova remnant in an intriguing neighborhood in the middle of our galaxy. A paper describing these new findings was published in The Astrophysical Journal. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-nasa-chandra-supernova-remnant-galactic.html Astronomy Sun, 14 Jun 2026 08:00:01 EDT news700412953 Astronomers using the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa have discovered the most distant hydroxyl megamaser ever detected, opening a new radio astronomy frontier. A hydroxyl megamaser is a natural space laser, and this one is located in a violently merging galaxy more than 8 billion light-years away. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-south-african-telescope-recordbreaking-early.html Astronomy Sat, 13 Jun 2026 20:30:01 EDT news700146080 Using NASA's Chandra X-ray spacecraft, astronomers have performed deep X-ray observations of a galactic globular cluster known as NGC 6540. The new observational campaign, described June 1 on the preprint server arXiv, focused on disentangling the nature of a peculiar X-ray flare emitted by the cluster about two decades ago. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-chandra-ngc-mysterious-ray-flare.html Astronomy Sat, 13 Jun 2026 10:10:01 EDT news700225575 Astronomers may have uncovered new details about one of the Milky Way's most important ancient collisions. Using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and a new clustering algorithm, researchers have found evidence suggesting the famous Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus structure (GSE) has a far more complicated origin than previously thought. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-cornerstone-milky-history-rewriting-evidence.html Astronomy Fri, 12 Jun 2026 11:00:09 EDT news700477904 Astronomers have discovered a huge reservoir of cold molecular gas, the direct fuel for star formation, in REBELS-25, a massive, star-forming galaxy. The team, led from Leiden University, focused on REBELS-25, seen when the universe was only about 700 million years old, around 5% of its current age. The research is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-cosmic-dawn-fuel-discovery-early.html Astronomy Thu, 11 Jun 2026 19:40:01 EDT news700418701 We may not know what dark matter is, but we keep getting whiffs of it. "We are reaching a point where the observational evidence for dark matter is simply undeniable," said Mayank Sharma, a Virginia Tech graduate student in physics. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-echoes-reveal-dark-buildup-supermassive.html Astronomy Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:10:01 EDT news700418821 Binary asteroid systems are widespread throughout our inner solar system. For decades, the standard paradigm held that many of them form when a rapidly spinning primary asteroid casts off material, which then reaccumulates into an elongated moon orbiting near the Roche limit. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-binary-asteroids-puzzling-configurations-link.html Astronomy Thu, 11 Jun 2026 10:20:01 EDT news700389490 Our universe's expansion is still accelerating despite recent claims suggesting otherwise, an international team of astrophysicists says. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-cosmic-analysis-rebuts-slowdown.html Astronomy Wed, 10 Jun 2026 19:00:02 EDT news700313642 The complex puzzle known as little red dots has become more complete since their initial discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022. Now a particular little red dot's spectrum is helping connect many of the pieces. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-black-hole-stars-webb-strongest.html Astronomy Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:40:03 EDT news700313821 Astronomers have discovered a "galaxy-killing wind" that may explain why there are far more massive "dead" galaxies than expected in the early universe. This wind, powered by cosmic collisions between galaxies, could quickly blow away all the fuel for new stars, leaving a galaxy on the brink of death and helping to solve one of the biggest mysteries in modern astrophysics. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-galaxy-early-universe.html Astronomy Wed, 10 Jun 2026 09:00:03 EDT news700300141 Astronomers have revealed distinct differences in atmospheric conditions between the morning and evening transition zones of the ultra-hot gas planet WASP-121 b, which separate day from night, commonly called terminators. This achievement was only possible due to the unmatched sensitivity of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). https://phys.org/news/2026-06-jwst-reveals-dawn-dusk-atmosphere.html Astronomy Wed, 10 Jun 2026 05:00:01 EDT news700214341 Solar flares are the most explosive energy-release events in the solar corona, leading to intense particle acceleration, plasma heating and bulk plasma motions on short timescales. Core questions during solar flares remain unresolved, including how and where particle acceleration occurs, and how energized electrons propagate through coronal magnetic structures. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-meerkat-reveals-electron-sites-solar.html Astronomy Tue, 09 Jun 2026 13:40:01 EDT news700228561 Astronomers have identified a possible new example of one of the universe's strangest galaxy types: galaxies that appear to contain little or no dark matter. The newly studied pair, FCC 224 and FCC 240, on the outskirts of the Fornax Cluster, share several unusual traits with the only known pair of controversial dark-matter-deficient galaxies. The findings were uploaded to the arXiv preprint server on May 22. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-dark-deficient-twins-fornax-cluster.html Astronomy Tue, 09 Jun 2026 09:20:03 EDT news700143095 Using a novel simulation model based on machine learning, an international research team at GSI/FAIR has succeeded in gaining a deeper understanding of element formation in stellar events such as neutron star mergers. For the first time, the scientists used deep learning with a neural network to model the energy release during r-process nucleosynthesis in hydrodynamic simulations. The results are published in the journal Physical Review D. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-neutron-star-merger-simulations-gain.html Astronomy Mon, 08 Jun 2026 15:00:07 EDT news700140362