Space Telescopes News

July 19, 2024

Top Headlines

Exoplanet-Hunting Telescope to Begin Search for Another Earth in 2026

July 18, 2024 — Europe's next big space mission -- a telescope that will hunt for Earth-like rocky planets outside of our solar system -- is on course to launch at the end of 2026. PLATO, or PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars, is being built to find ...

Another Intermediate-Mass Black Hole Discovered at the Center of Our Galaxy

July 18, 2024 — So far, only about ten intermediate-mass black holes have been discovered in the entire universe. The newly identified black hole causes surrounding stars in a cluster to move in an unexpectedly orderly ...

The Magnet Trick: New Invention Makes Vibrations Disappear

July 17, 2024 — Damping vibrations is crucial for precision experiments, for example in astronomy. A new invention uses a special kind of magnets to achieve this -- electropermanent magnets. They consist of a permanent magnet and a coil. In contrast to ...

Bizarre 'Garden Sprinkler-Like' Jet Is Spotted Shooting out of Neutron Star

July 16, 2024 — A strange 'garden sprinkler-like' jet coming from a neutron star has been pictured for the first time. The S-shaped structure is created as the jet changes direction due to the wobbling of the disc of hot gas around the star -- a process called ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:00pm EDT

How Astronomers Are Using Pulsars to Observe Evidence of Dark Matter

July 16, 2024 — Tantalizing evidence of potential dark matter objects has been detected with the help of the Universe's 'timekeepers'. These pulsars -- neutron stars which rotate and emit lighthouse-like beams of ...

NASA's Webb Investigates Eternal Sunrises, Sunsets on Distant World

July 15, 2024 — Researchers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have finally confirmed what models have previously predicted: An exoplanet has differences between its eternal morning and eternal evening ...

Scorching Storms on Distant Worlds Revealed

July 15, 2024 — An international study reveals the extreme atmospheric conditions on the celestial objects, which are swathed in swirling clouds of hot sand amid temperatures of 950C. Using NASA's powerful James ...

Cosmic Wrestling Match

July 15, 2024 — Our universe is around 13.8 billion years old. Over the vastness of this time, the tiniest of initial asymmetries have grown into the large-scale structures we can see through our telescopes in the ...

Vivid Portrait of Interacting Galaxies Marks Webb's Second Anniversary

July 12, 2024 — Two for two! A duo of interacting galaxies commemorates the second science anniversary of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, which takes constant observations, including images and highly detailed ...

Dark Matter in Dwarf Galaxy Tracked Using Stellar Motions

July 11, 2024 — The qualities and behavior of dark matter, the invisible 'glue' of the universe, continue to be shrouded in mystery. Though galaxies are mostly made of dark matter, understanding how it is ...

Strong Evidence for Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in Omega Centauri

July 10, 2024 — Most known black holes are either extremely massive, like the supermassive black holes that lie at the cores of large galaxies, or relatively lightweight, with a mass of under 100 times that of the ...

Found With Webb: A Potentially Habitable Icy World

July 9, 2024 — A international team of astronomers has made an exciting discovery about the temperate exoplanet LHS 1140 b: it could be a promising 'super-Earth' covered in ice or ...

Stench of a Gas Giant? Nearby Exoplanet Reeks of Rotten Eggs, and That's a Good Thing

July 8, 2024 — An exoplanet infamous for its deadly weather has been hiding another bizarre feature -- it reeks of rotten eggs, according to a new study of data ...

Fresh Wind Blows from Historical Supernova

July 5, 2024 — A mysterious remnant from a rare type of supernova recorded in 1181 has been explained for the first time. Two white dwarf stars collided, creating a temporary 'guest star,' now labeled supernova ...

Earlier Headlines

A New Pulsar Buried in a Mountain of Data

July 1, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered the first millisecond pulsar in the stellar cluster ...

Tiny Bright Objects Discovered at Dawn of Universe Baffle Scientists

June 28, 2024 — A recent discovery by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins ...

Too Many Missing Satellite Galaxies Found

June 28, 2024 — Bringing us one step closer to solving the 'missing satellites problem,' researchers have discovered two new satellite ...

Pillars of Creation Star in New Visualization from NASA's Hubble and Webb Telescopes

June 26, 2024 — Made famous in 1995 by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the Pillars of Creation in the heart of the Eagle Nebula have captured imaginations worldwide with their arresting, ethereal beauty. Now, ...

Telltale Greenhouse Gases Could Signal Alien Activity

June 25, 2024 — If aliens modified a planet in their solar system to make it warmer, we'd be able to tell. A new study identifies the artificial greenhouse gases that would be giveaways of a terraformed ...

First of Its Kind Detection Made in Striking New Webb Image

June 24, 2024 — For the first time, a phenomenon astronomers have long hoped to directly image has been captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope's Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam). In this stunning image ...

Astronomers See a Massive Black Hole Awaken in Real Time

June 18, 2024 — In late 2019 the previously unremarkable galaxy SDSS1335+0728 suddenly started shining brighter than ever before. To understand why, astronomers have used data from several space and ground-based ...

Pair of Merging Quasars at Cosmic Dawn

June 17, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered a double-record-breaking pair of quasars. Not only are they the most distant pair of merging quasars ever found, but also the only pair confirmed in the bygone era of the ...

Investigating the Origins of the Crab Nebula

June 17, 2024 — A team of scientists used NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to parse the composition of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant located 6,500 light-years away in the constellation ...

High-Precision Measurements Challenge Our Understanding of Cepheids

June 14, 2024 — Scientists have clocked the speed of Cepheid stars -- 'standard candles' that help us measure the size of the universe -- with unprecedented precision, offering exciting new insights about ...

Mysterious Mini-Neptunes

June 13, 2024 — This study discovered mini-Neptunes around four red dwarfs using observations from a global network of ground-based telescopes and the TESS space telescope. These four mini-Neptunes are close to ...

NASA's Roman Mission Gets Cosmic 'Sneak Peek' from Supercomputers

June 12, 2024 — Researchers used supercomputers to create nearly 4 million simulated images depicting the ...

How Do Supermassive Black Holes Get Super Massive?

June 11, 2024 — By combining forefront X-ray observations with state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations of the buildup of galaxies over cosmic history, researchers have provided the best modeling to date of the ...

Scientists Spot More Milky Way-Like Galaxies in Early Universe

June 11, 2024 — Scientists are peering into the past and uncovering new clues about the early universe. Since light takes a long time to travel through space, they are now able to see how galaxies looked billions of ...

NASA's Webb Opens New Window on Supernova Science

June 10, 2024 — Peering deeply into the cosmos, NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is giving scientists their first detailed glimpse of supernovae from a time when our universe was just a small fraction of its ...

Hubble Finds Surprises Around a Star That Erupted 40 Years Ago

June 10, 2024 — Astronomers have used new data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the retired SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) as well as archival data from other missions to revisit ...

Webb Telescope Reveals Asteroid Collision in Neighboring Star System

June 10, 2024 — Astronomers have captured what appears to be a snapshot of a massive collision of giant asteroids in Beta Pictoris, a neighboring star system known for its early age and tumultuous planet-forming ...

Small, Cool and Sulfurous Exoplanet May Help Write Recipe for Planetary Formation

June 10, 2024 — Astronomers observing exoplanet GJ 3470 b saw evidence of water, carbon dioxide, methane and sulfur dioxide. Astronomers hope the discovery of this exoplanet's sulfurous atmosphere will advance ...

Novel Method of Detecting High-Frequency Gravitational Waves in Planetary Magnetospheres

June 5, 2024 — A groundbreaking method of detecting high-frequency gravitational waves (HFGWs) has been proposed. The team's innovative approach may enable the successful detection of HFGWs by utilizing ...

Scientists Detect Slowest-Spinning Radio Emitting Neutron Star Ever Recorded

June 5, 2024 — Scientists have detected what they believe to be a neutron star spinning at an unprecedentedly slow rate -- slower than any of the more than 3,000 radio emitting neutron stars measured to ...