https://phys.org/space-news/astronomy/ en-us The latest science news on astronomy, space, and astrophysics. Since their discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope in 2022, little red dots (LRDs) have been the subject of great interest to astronomers. Understanding the nature of these extremely distant, compact red sources has been a puzzling scientific endeavor. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-red-dots-temporary-black-hole.html Astronomy Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:10:01 EDT news704551076 A team of researchers has discovered that winds generated by supermassive black holes are 100 times more powerful than previously thought, carrying energy across distances of approximately 300,000 light-years. The discovery demonstrates that these explosive winds affect the vast expanse of space beyond the galaxies they inhabit. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-black-hole-blast-years.html Astronomy Wed, 29 Jul 2026 10:20:10 EDT news704534582 Astronomers have built the first three-dimensional map of gas temperature in the space surrounding our solar system, revealing a far messier and more dynamic picture than current models predict. The study was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 16. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-3d-reveals-hidden-thermal-nearby.html Astronomy Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:40:01 EDT news704454447 By analyzing data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and conducting new radial velocity measurements, U.K. and French astronomers have found evidence that the mysterious Tabby's star may be orbited by an object about nine times more massive than Jupiter. The new findings are published on the preprint server arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-tabby-star-orbited-planetary-mass.html Astronomy Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:00:03 EDT news704450067 More than 20 years after NASA's Spirit rover landed on Mars, a researcher from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has uncovered new evidence that suggests water may once have covered large parts of the red planet. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-evidence-mars-emerges-spirit-rover.html Astronomy Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:40:03 EDT news704446561 At long last, astronomers have firm evidence that Betelgeuse, one of the most famous stars in the night sky, is not alone. Using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), a team led by French researcher Miguel Montargès obtained the clearest image yet of what is likely Betelgeuse B, the star orbiting Betelgeuse. "This is the conclusion of a century-long quest," Montargès says. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-astronomers-strongest-evidence-betelgeuse-companion.html Astronomy Tue, 28 Jul 2026 08:00:03 EDT news704360761 Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are produced when massive objects in the cosmos accelerate or collide. By detecting these waves, astrophysicists can study various cosmic events, including black hole mergers, neutron star collisions and the early evolution of the universe. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-moon-thick-crust-amplify-elusive.html Astronomy Tue, 28 Jul 2026 07:00:03 EDT news704365472 A new study using data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope finds that star formation in the nearby Andromeda galaxy has undergone a 500-million-year decline, with an even steeper drop in the last 40 million years. Andromeda, a spiral galaxy comparable in size to our Milky Way, is close enough to be seen with the unaided eye from areas with dark skies. Located about 2.5 million light-years from Earth—practically our cosmic backyard—Andromeda offers an opportunity for astronomers to examine its stellar populations in detail, leading to a better understanding of the past of galaxies like our own. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-hubble-star-formation-andromeda-galaxy.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 17:20:09 EDT news704382061 Mercury was long considered the exception to the rule that magnetic planets have radiation belts similar to Earth's Van Allen belts, but a new study by University of Michigan Engineering and the University of California, Berkeley, suggests otherwise—Mercury occasionally has such a layer of radiation in its magnetic field. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-mercury-reveals-short-belts-sun.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:40:06 EDT news704381641 "Dead stars" known as white dwarfs have already shown the potential to help us better understand how planetary systems, including our own solar system, take shape and evolve. Now, research from the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that potential could be even greater than anticipated. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-dead-stars-healthy-appetites.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:40:03 EDT news704380621 Quasars, distant cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, are among the most luminous objects in the universe. While not uncommon, their brightness can make it difficult to accurately measure the galaxies they reside in. This means scientists must use gravitational lensing to assist in analyzing these bright objects, a method that relies on studying how an object's strong gravity bends light around its host galaxy. Yet despite their own powerful gravity, quasars that can act as lenses are rare. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-quasar-lenses-emerge-ai-scan.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:20:07 EDT news704377501 A team of astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has observed an extremely rare "wandering" black hole located tens of thousands of light-years from the center of its galaxy. This finding could reshape scientists' understanding of how massive black holes move through the universe after galaxies collide. The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-astronomers-universe-rarest-black-hole.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 14:20:04 EDT news704376481 Positrons—the antimatter counterpart of electrons—are created in high-energy cosmic processes. When normal matter meets its antimatter counterpart, they annihilate, or vanish, and produce a distinctive 511 keV gamma-ray signal. Scientists use this signal to detect where these annihilations occur. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-extragalactic-positron-annihilation-hotspots-milky.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:30:02 EDT news704373911 By analyzing the data from NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, Chinese astronomers have investigated a recently identified millisecond pulsar known as PSR J0435+3233. As a result, they found that the pulsar exhibits gamma-ray pulsations. The discovery was detailed in a paper published July 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-gamma-ray-pulsations-reveal-extreme.html Astronomy Sun, 26 Jul 2026 14:00:01 EDT news704105534 Chinese astronomers report the detection of a peculiar optical transient event that occurred in the center of a dwarf galaxy. The newly discovered event, designated AT2019ijn, is a fast-rising, slow-decaying blue optical transient with exceptionally bright radio emission. The finding was detailed in a paper published July 6 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-rare-blue-optical-transient-class.html Astronomy Sat, 25 Jul 2026 08:40:01 EDT news703824942 A careful statistical comparison of observations recorded by NASA's Juno mission and the Planetary Science Institute's Io Input Output observatory (IoIO) shows that IoIO observations reliably predict the density of Jupiter's plasma disk, an important part of Jupiter's magnetosphere, according to a new Geophysical Research Letters paper co-authored by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Jeff Morgenthaler. Jian-Zhao Wang of the University of Colorado Boulder is the paper's lead author. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-io-volcanic-output-40day-plasma.html Astronomy Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:40:03 EDT news704109602 Astronomers have discovered a remarkably tiny group of six young galaxies just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This may be a rare glimpse of how some of the universe's largest galaxies formed. The paper outlining the findings was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 13. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-astronomers-massive-galaxy-piece-billion.html Astronomy Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:40:02 EDT news703844724 Venus is an inhospitable place, with temperatures soaring to several hundred degrees Celsius (hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit) and no oceans like those on Earth. Planetary scientists long believed Venus was geologically dormant. However, recent research indicates that Venus remains geologically "alive" and even hosts active volcanoes. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-young-rift-flanks-venus-tectonically.html Astronomy Fri, 24 Jul 2026 05:00:05 EDT news704016001 Astronomers searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence may have been missing alien signals in part of the radio spectrum that has not recently been explored. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-alien-radio-channel.html Astronomy Thu, 23 Jul 2026 19:00:03 EDT news703934221 Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have captured one of the clearest views yet of how an early supermassive black hole may grow within a network of young galaxies. The compact active galaxy, seen just a billion years after the Big Bang, lies beside a 12,000-parsec-long filament containing multiple galaxies that are expected to merge within a few hundred million years. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jwst-captures-rare-glimpse-early.html Astronomy Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:40:02 EDT news703843181 Observations made with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) have revealed evidence for a moon-like object in the CD-35 2722 system. Unlike moons in our solar system, the newly found object does not orbit a planet, raising questions about what to name it. Instead, it circles a brown dwarf, an object larger than a planet, that orbits the CD-35 2722 star. If confirmed, this could be the first "moon" discovered outside our solar system. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jupiter-mass-exomoon-orbiting-brown.html Astronomy Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:00:03 EDT news703842182 Mysterious high-speed "bullets"—clumps of possibly oxygen-rich gas traveling at up to 20 million miles per hour—have been discovered shooting out of the rarest stellar explosion in our galaxy. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-mysterious-gas-bullets-milky-helium.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:00:05 EDT news703871581 Scientists at the University of California, Riverside, have developed a new way to help gravitational-wave observatories see farther into the universe by solving one of their biggest challenges: tiny heat-induced distortions in the massive mirrors at the heart of the detectors. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-technique-enables-ligo-peer-distant.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:30:07 EDT news703868521 A black hole may be stirring a "pot" of gas containing a neighboring galaxy in the early universe, according to a new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics that used observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The galaxy slowly being "cooked" is named MQN01 J004131.9-493704, but astronomers have nicknamed it the "red potato" because of its appearance in images from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-black-hole-jet-gas-cloud.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 18:20:03 EDT news703863541 For decades, astronomers have cast galaxy mergers as the universe's ultimate relationship drama: two galaxies collide, chaos erupts, black holes awaken and star formation comes to a screeching halt. Upending this long-held belief, new research from Florida International University suggests most galaxies don't "die" in spectacular cosmic pileups after all. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-simulation-explanation-galaxies-stars.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:50:02 EDT news703867262 The star that formed the Jellyfish nebula may have had a partner star that exploded 100,000 years earlier, according to international researchers, who say that this may be the first known discovery of a binary star system in which both stars have gone supernova. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jellyfish-nebula-scene-stars-supernova.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 16:30:01 EDT news703866901 Stars and galaxies make up much of the universe's ordinary, observable matter. But for decades, scientists have wrestled with a cosmic conflict: There should be much more. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-radio-method-universe-ordinary.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 14:40:03 EDT news703854781 A new simulation study suggests that the Antarctic 12-m Terahertz Telescope (ATT12), a next-generation facility led by University of Tsukuba, could uncover between 1 and 10 million dusty star-forming galaxies throughout cosmic history. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-antarctic-terahertz-telescope-uncover-hidden.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 13:20:02 EDT news703853402 The first-ever image of a black hole—a glowing, ring-like structure at the heart of galaxy M87—was unveiled to the world in a landmark moment in 2019. Now, researchers have taken the next big step—moving beyond capturing a picture of the black hole to understanding its physics through dual-frequency images. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-scientists-dual-frequency-images-explore.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:40:04 EDT news703850679 The Milky Way may have undergone a dramatic change in orientation during its history, according to new research that helps explain a long-standing mystery about our galaxy. Using supercomputer simulations of galaxies like the Milky Way, a team of astronomers from Durham University found that galaxies with slowly rotating stellar halos are more likely to have experienced a major "disk flip," in which the galaxy's disk changed its orientation by more than 90 degrees. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-cosmic-gymnastics-milky-underwent-flip.html Astronomy Tue, 21 Jul 2026 11:00:03 EDT news703848661