Observations of the active galaxy 3C 120 with XRISM and several VLBI arrays show its cold, thin accretion disk is truncated at about 20 gravitational radii, replaced inside by a hot, thick flow. This suggests jets are launched from the hot inner flow, possibly via the Blandford–Znajek process, even at high accretion rates.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
The Vera Rubin Observatory marked two years since testing began with its engineering Commissioning Camera by releasing a new image of the Seagull Nebula (IC 2177), about 3,700 light years away. The smaller camera produced 144-megapixel images and gathered about 16,000 exposures over seven weeks.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
MIT's Erin Kara leads a team using X-ray reverberation mapping to study supermassive black holes and how they grow and shape their galaxies. Data from XRISM, NICER and other missions suggest black hole systems vary faster than expected, and ULTRASAT and LISA will extend the work.
— via Universe Today, Matthew Williams
JAXA's MMX probe lifted off on October 20, 2026, bound for Phobos, with a goal of bringing home at least 10 grams of regolith in 2031. Nobody has ever returned a sample from the Mars system, and it could settle a fierce debate over where Mars' moons came from.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
A new global map of ancient Mars rainfall puts the highest formaldehyde deposits in the Tharsis and Elysium mountains, which received about ten times the global average. Formaldehyde is a building block for sugars and amino acids, though the study can't say how much remains on the surface today.
— via Universe Today, Matthew Williams
JWST's look at the gas swirling within 0.1 parsec of the Milky Way's central black hole finds metal abundances of roughly 1.8 times solar. The enrichment is probably left over from past supernovae, and Sgr A East, a supernova remnant overlapping Sgr A* in the sky, is one likely source.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
Thousands of small thrust fault scarps mapped by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter show the Moon has been contracting, yet the faults are only about 300 to 400 million years old. A new study says the Moon switched from being pulled apart to being squeezed around 3.6 billion years ago, but the contraction stayed too slight to build these cliffs until much later.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
In simulations of two low-mass neutron stars merging, turbulence amplifies the magnetic field more than 300 times within about a millisecond. The merged star ends up a magnetar candidate, and further turbulence could strengthen the field even more, though the simulation stops short of showing that.
— via Universe Today, Brian Koberlein
Webb has found water-ice clouds in WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, settling a decade-old argument over whether its spectrum came from clouds or from chemistry stirred up by updrafts. The team watched it for 11 hours with NIRSpec, taking a fresh spectrum every 15 minutes.
— via Universe Today, Andy Tomaswick
Euclid, a telescope built to survey 1.5 billion distant galaxies, has found its first comet, C/2026 S1 (Euclid), about 1.3 billion km away. New software from Mikko Pöntinen flagged a streak across several images, and the comet's odd orbit arching over the galaxy carried it through one of Euclid's fields.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
Webb's view of the galaxy cluster MACS J0454.1-030 shows lensed objects magnified by a factor of more than 300, according to astronomers' estimates. One galaxy in the image dates to just 800 million years after the Big Bang, and its light suggests a merger was setting off a huge burst of star formation.
— via Universe Today, Matthew Williams
Jets from supermassive black holes ionize gas much farther out than expected, heating the halo around a galaxy that would otherwise cool and fall inward to feed new stars. The finding, drawn from DESI and LOFAR data on hundreds of galaxies with active jets, points to a subtle way a black hole can suppress star formation from afar.
— via Universe Today, Brian Koberlein
In simulations of 195 dying stars, even a small amount of neutrino flavor changing was enough to flip a star's fate between supernova and black hole. The effect was strongest for stars of 16 to 30 solar masses, most of which collapsed directly into black holes.
— via Universe Today, Brian Koberlein
A galaxy cluster called El Gordo, 7 billion light-years out, is too massive and too early to fit standard cosmology. A new simulation suggests dark matter that sometimes collides elastically and sometimes doesn't could explain the mismatch, though the fit depends on numbers still too uncertain to confirm it.
— via Universe Today, Brian Koberlein
A radio source behind the Milky Way's Zone of Avoidance, first thought to be a pulsar, turns out to sit in a galaxy cluster, according to Chandra and eROSITA X-ray data. The authors propose a radio phoenix: old plasma ejected by the cluster's brightest galaxy and revived by a cluster merger.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
After 499 new measurements of 70 Oph A and 334 of 70 Oph B, plus decades of archival data, the search for planets around this nearby binary came up empty, and the stars' velocity wobbles trace back to stellar activity. The results rule out Jupiter-mass planets inside about 5 au of 70 Oph A.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
Around the young protostar IRAS4A2, astronomers have found "heavy methanol" at roughly 100 times the abundance current chemical models predict, the first unambiguous detection of a quadruply deuterated molecule in space. The excess points to an unknown formation process, and several unidentified spectral lines nearby may belong to other deuterated variants.
— via Universe Today, Matthew Williams
Halley's Comet is still shedding debris 35 AU out, and it's about to light up the sky anyway. The Orionids peak October 21st at a modest ZHR of 20, but their sister shower, the Taurids, brings slow-moving "Halloween Fireballs" that could get a boost this year as parent comet Encke nears its closest solar pass since 2027.
— via Universe Today, David Dickinson
Scientists sorted 300 well-studied multi-planet systems and found they split into two distinct families, with the host star's mass driving the difference. Lower-mass stars produce tightly packed "peas-in-a-pod" systems resembling our own, upending older ideas about solar system architecture.
— via Universe Today, Evan Gough
The CHARA Array just measured limb darkening directly on 31 stars beyond the Sun, and the numbers don't match theory. Longer infrared wavelengths showed 38% weaker darkening than shorter ones, nearly double the 20% difference stellar atmosphere models predicted.
— via Universe Today, Brian Koberlein
