9+ hour, 37+ min ago   (878+ words) What happens to Webb’s mysterious little red dots as the universe ages? The Saguaro galaxy’s red nucleus offers a way to explore their hidden surroundings. When the James Webb Space Telescope began finding tiny, intensely red sources in the early…...

1+ day, 6+ hour ago   (282+ words) Dark photons are one proposed explanation for dark matter. A new calculation suggests that the early universe’s plasma may have stopped them from depositing heat as efficiently as earlier models predicted. The post Early-Universe Plasma May Have Kept Dark Photons…...

2+ day, 7+ hour ago   (251+ words) Tiny minerals inside one of the most pristine meteorites ever found still carry a record of magnetism from the solar system’s first 200,000 years. Tiny mineral grains inside an Antarctic meteorite may preserve the oldest evidence yet of a magnetic field…...

5+ day, 3+ hour ago   (556+ words) A brilliant X-ray source is not automatically a black hole. Matter falling toward a neutron star can also become intensely luminous, and some neutron stars have surprised astronomers by producing far more radiation than expected. Identifying the object requires evidence…...

1+ week, 3+ hour ago   (637+ words) Satellite constellations can leave bright trails across telescope images. Here is what that means for astronomy and the night sky. Satellites are changing the night sky in a way that has little to do with the old glow of city…...

2+ week, 2+ day ago   (743+ words) Comets are usually introduced through their tails, but a recent Subaru Telescope observation captured one without the cloud that gives a comet its familiar appearance. Comet 28P/Neujmin was more than 10 astronomical units from the Sun—farther out than Saturn—when…...

2+ week, 6+ day ago   (405+ words) Boyajian’s Star may have a large companion orbiting it, according to a new study of the system’s motion. The best estimate puts the object at about 9.4 times the mass of Jupiter, but the uncertainty extends well into brown-dwarf territory. That…...

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (775+ words) Those signals are small. A transit can dim a star by less than one percent, while a star’s gravitational wobble may shift its spectral lines by only a few metres per second. Repeated measurements turn those tiny changes into evidence…...

4+ week, 4+ hour ago   (546+ words) The James Webb Space Telescope has found the clearest example yet of an object that looks like a star but is powered by a black hole. Before your next upload Clean image metadata before you share. Remove EXIF, GPS and…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (565+ words) Most comets and asteroids that pass through the Solar System are permanent residents. The Sun’s gravity keeps them on closed orbits, even when those orbits take thousands of years to complete. An interstellar object is different. It arrives on a…...