https://phys.org/space-news/astronomy/ en-us The latest science news on astronomy, space, and astrophysics. A new study suggests that the young stars orbiting the Milky Way's central black hole may have a surprisingly ordinary origin. But the black hole's influence may be what makes their origin look more exotic than it really is. Along with shaping their orbits, it may also destroy their stellar companions. The paper outlining this work was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics on Aug. 11. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-stars-galaxy-black-hole-companions.html Astronomy Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:40:01 EDT news707989133 The COSMOS field, or Cosmic Evolution Survey Deep Field, is one of the most famous patches of the universe observed by astronomers. Located in the constellation Sextans, this region was photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in segments from 2003 to 2005 using its Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). With support from ground-based and other space-based telescopes, the resulting images were then stitched together to create a stunning picture of cosmic evolution. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-rubin-observatory-peers-deep-famous.html Astronomy Sat, 12 Sep 2026 08:00:08 EDT news708097543 As our telescopes have improved and we've been able to peer farther back in time, we've begun finding more fascinating features of the universe. But one thing we haven't found for sure is Population III (Pop III) stars. These were the earliest stars in the universe, formed completely from pristine hydrogen and helium, with no "metals" (i.e., elements heavier than those two) polluting their processes. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-big-universe-starbursts.html Astronomy Fri, 11 Sep 2026 19:20:01 EDT news708346759 The eROSITA (extended ROentgen Survey with an Imaging Telescope Array) telescope, the primary instrument aboard the Russian-German Spektr-RG space observatory, was developed by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) and collaborators to study the soft X-ray night sky. The mission launched in 2019 and has delivered deep, sharp images over very large areas of the sky to map the high-energy universe. This past summer, the German eROSITA Consortium made its second data release (DR2), the most comprehensive catalog of the X-ray universe ever released. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-erosita-comprehensive-high-energy-census.html Astronomy Fri, 11 Sep 2026 09:00:08 EDT news708330121 On a mostly flat plain an hour north of Stockholm lies a collection of large burial mounds dating from an ancient culture at least 2,500 years old. These people were not Vikings; they were northern Germanic Goths, pagan polytheists worshiping the precursors of Odin, Freyr and Thor. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-ancient-swedish-goths-accurate-calendars.html Astronomy Thu, 10 Sep 2026 16:20:06 EDT news708271681 For years, scientists have relied primarily on radio imaging from techniques like very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to study jets from the active galactic nuclei of supermassive black holes. This allows for the detection of broad, unresolved features, called components, moving at what appear to be faster-than-light speeds. However, traditional imaging has poor resolution and treats each observation as a separate snapshot in time, limiting information about how the features move. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-video-black-hole-radio-theory.html Astronomy Thu, 10 Sep 2026 12:50:01 EDT news708258036 Astronomers have taken one of the deepest looks yet at Cloud-9, a candidate "dark galaxy," and found no trace of stars. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 21. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-galaxy-stars-cloud-case.html Astronomy Thu, 10 Sep 2026 08:00:01 EDT news707749021 An international team led by researchers from the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil has developed an innovative method to identify stars that have consumed the planets around them. The technique detects variations in the abundance of beryllium, a relatively rare chemical element, and could open a new window into studying the evolution of planetary systems. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-beryllium-stars-swallowed-rocky-planets.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:30:01 EDT news708191461 Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, scientists have discovered a new class of objects behaving unlike any they have seen before. Astronomers suggest these newly spotted objects in other galaxies may help solve not one, but two long-standing questions in astrophysics. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-chandra-uncovers-hypersoft-ray-sources.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:20:09 EDT news708182461 Love it or hate it, artificial intelligence is likely here to stay. Its ravenous need for computational power has overwhelmed chip manufacturers and power companies alike. While our current AI obsession is likely a bubble ready to burst, we won't simply stop using computers. Since their first invention, computers have continued to grow more powerful, and our civilization has grown ever more dependent on them. Computation defines our civilization. Perhaps computational power is what defines any advanced civilization. If that's the case, then the most advanced civilizations in the universe would push computing to its most powerful and efficient state. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-alien-civilizations-hyper-efficient-distinct.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:20:04 EDT news708177631 Toward the end of their lives, low-mass stars undergo an abrupt dip in brightness, also known as the luminosity bump. While the endpoint of this bump is well understood, its onset has remained elusive. Now, in a paper published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Saskia Hekker, leader of the Theory and Observations of Stars group at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS), finds that entropy is the key driver of the bump. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-discontinuity-disorder-luminosity-evolved-stars.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:00:01 EDT news708172681 New observations of the composition of distant galaxies offer insights into the earliest phases of the universe and confirm decades of scientific understanding of the elements and particles produced by the Big Bang, according to a new study. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-helium-conditions-seconds-big.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 14:40:03 EDT news708172561 A few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars ignited—literally the "let there be light" moment for the universe. Now known to astronomers as Population III, or Pop III, stars, these giants were very different from the stars we know today. They formed from pristine hydrogen and helium, with almost no "metal" (i.e., other elements) holding them back. They were also huge, growing to tens to hundreds of times larger than the sun. And they died young, in many cases collapsing into the universe's earliest black holes. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-gen-gravitational-detectors-black-holes.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 11:00:11 EDT news708159902 Astronomers have found the first direct evidence that a wandering black hole can feed itself by dragging gas along in its wake as it moves through its galaxy. It's the first direct evidence of an accretion channel long predicted in theory but never before observed. The paper describing this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 11. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-black-hole-caught.html Astronomy Wed, 09 Sep 2026 07:30:02 EDT news706964431 Nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole. The few that don't have had theirs ejected during a galactic collision. That's because galaxies and their black holes have formed hand in hand. There is still some debate as to whether galaxies formed around the seeds of supermassive black holes or the other way around, but there is plenty of evidence to support the idea that the two evolve together. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-black-holes-faster-galaxies.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 20:40:01 EDT news708097594 An international team of astronomers has discovered the most distant progenitor to a galaxy supercluster ever. The discovery supports existing theories of how galaxy clusters evolve and reveals how they are connected to the larger cosmic web. The study relies largely on data from the ODIN survey, conducted with the U.S. Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera on the U.S. National Science Foundation Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-extremely-massive-galaxy-proto-supercluster.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:00:03 EDT news708101641 Intense, brief flashes of radio light called fast radio bursts (FRBs) travel across billions of light-years to reach Earth, passing through a fog of matter along the way. The bursts' origins are unclear but may originate from highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars. The denser the fog through which FRBs travel, the more dispersed their signals become—similar to the way a prism splits white light into a rainbow of colors. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-fast-radio-disentangle-galactic-feedback.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:00:10 EDT news708093601 Active black holes are easy to detect. Their superheated accretion disks emit bright X-rays, and the jets streaming from their poles are easily seen at visible and radio wavelengths. But most stellar-mass black holes are inactive. They either drift through the galaxy alone or orbit a companion star without consuming its material. We can't observe inactive black holes directly. We can only observe their effects on nearby objects. We currently know of three such black holes thanks to the Gaia spacecraft. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-quiet-black-holes-stellar-companion.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:20:01 EDT news708080516 For the first time, scientists used the combined power of NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes to study some of the most far-flung bodies in our solar system, trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). Some are the smallest and faintest ever directly seen. The researchers unexpectedly found fewer small TNOs than expected and that the colors of these bodies followed the same relationships as those of their larger family members. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-hubble-webb-solar.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 12:05:13 EDT news708087880 UK astronomers have uncovered new clues about the origin of 3I/ATLAS—only the third known object from beyond the solar system ever spotted. In a new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers reveal that the comet formed in extremely cold conditions, far from any star. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-interstellar-visitor-3iatlas-clues-frozen.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:50:01 EDT news708080978 We know the universe is constantly expanding. We also know that gravitationally bound objects, such as solar systems and black holes, seem to be immune to that expansion. But a new paper by theoretical physicists Valerio Faraoni and Massimiliano Rinaldi challenges that assumption. They suggest that black holes can't just ignore the expanding universe around them. Instead, they have to expand along with it. Their paper is posted to the arXiv preprint server. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-black-holes-universe.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:20:04 EDT news708078782 Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers have captured one of the most detailed three-dimensional views yet of a massive binary star system while it is still being born. By tracking the motions of two young, massive stars over nearly eight years, the team found that the pair follows a highly stretched-out orbit and is surrounded by strongly tilted gas disks, both relative to each other and to the stars' orbit. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-alma-massive-binary-real.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:20:02 EDT news708077941 The most comprehensive catalog of exploding white dwarf stars ever assembled has revealed new clues about dark energy, the mysterious force driving the universe's accelerating expansion. Researchers at The University of Queensland's School of Mathematics and Physics have led a global effort to compile a dataset containing information on 2,884 Type Ia supernovae used to measure cosmic distances. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-big-supernova-dataset-dark-energy.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 09:20:03 EDT news708075721 A new study finds that two early-universe objects thought to be faint quasars are actually extraordinarily luminous galaxies powered by bursts of star formation. James Webb Space Telescope observations of the galaxies, seen when the universe was less than a billion years old, reveal signatures of extremely massive stars, including some potentially more than 200 times the mass of the sun. The paper outlining this discovery was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 18. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-jwst-extreme-star-galaxies-masquerading.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 08:00:01 EDT news707748999 In 2012, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) was commissioned to measure the effect of dark energy, the mysterious force driving the expansion of the cosmos. Since then, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys have obtained optical images of tens of millions of galaxies and quasars, including through NOIRLab's Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO). In recent news, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team made its 11th data release (DR 11), constituting the largest-ever 2D map of the universe. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-desi-legacy-imaging-survey-largest.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Sep 2026 12:00:06 EDT news707991722 Current gravitational-wave observatories aren't sensitive enough to capture the gravitational waves of binary stars. They can only see the gravitational chirps of black holes just as they are merging. But that will change as more sensitive instruments are developed. Recently, a team of astronomers discovered a binary white dwarf system that could be a good target for advanced gravitational-wave observatories. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-pair-white-dwarfs-minute-orbit.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Sep 2026 11:40:08 EDT news707991362 Astronomers have detected extreme, never-before-seen behavior from a rare kind of pulsar and stumbled on a surprising link to one of astronomy's biggest current mysteries. Using 174 hours of radio observations, researchers detected PSR J1227-4853, a rapidly spinning neutron star known as a "transitional millisecond pulsar," which unleashes hundreds of ultrashort, ultrapowerful "giant pulses." Their paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 31. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-rare-pulsar-unleashes-giant-pulses.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:50:01 EDT news707042987 When two black holes crash together and merge, the newly formed black hole rings like a bell, sending out gravitational waves with specific frequencies that fade over time. This brief, fading pattern of waves is called ringdown, and it may hold secrets about what is hiding around black holes. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-black-holes-hidden-hair-scientists.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Sep 2026 09:00:06 EDT news707741942 The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the largest multispectral imaging and spectroscopic redshift survey of the cosmos, has released its 20th data release (DR 20). It is also the third release of the survey's fifth phase (SDSS-V), representing a massive operational expansion of the legacy established with prior releases. This milestone provides an unprecedented look at the stars, the interstellar medium (ISM) and distant galaxies that make up the cosmos. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-20th-sloan-digital-sky-survey.html Astronomy Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:00:07 EDT news707981701 Using more than 15 years of observations from the Parkes radio telescope, astronomers detected three rotational glitches in the pulsar PSR J1637−4642—a young neutron star that had shown no signs of glitches since its discovery. The three glitches included one that changed its rotation rate by nearly 3 parts per million. Their paper was posted to the arXiv preprint server on Aug. 20. It has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-quiet-pulsar-suddenly-reveals-glitches.html Astronomy Sun, 06 Sep 2026 08:40:03 EDT news707748985