James Okafor

Articles by James Okafor

• After 50 years, astronomers catch our galaxy's black hole exhaling
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  Sagittarius A* is a famously quiet black hole, but new ALMA observations have finally revealed powerful winds streaming from it — the outflow astronomers spent half a century hunti…

• The most massive black hole pair ever found is hiding in a starless void
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  Two ultramassive black holes totalling roughly 60 billion solar masses sit at the heart of a distant galaxy, spiralling toward a merger that would create one of the largest black h…

• Saturn now has 285 moons — and the count keeps climbing
  Science & Discovery · 2026-06-08

  A 2026 batch of discoveries pushed Saturn's moon tally to 285 and Jupiter's to 101. The new satellites are tiny, faint, and a sign that a new generation of survey telescopes is jus…

• Webb peers into a nearby galaxy's heart and settles a 30-year argument
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  Using a clever masking technique, Webb resolved the dusty core of the Circinus Galaxy and found that almost all its hot-dust glow comes from right beside the black hole — overturni…

• Webb finds a black hole that grew too big, too fast, too early
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  Inside a 'little red dot' just 570 million years after the Big Bang, Webb has caught a supermassive black hole feeding voraciously — and far too large for its host galaxy, deepenin…

• The Hubble tension: a 5-sigma crack in the standard model
  Science & Discovery · 2026-06-08

  Two rigorous ways of measuring how fast the universe expands disagree by about 9%, at better than five sigma. A decade of scrutiny — most recently with JWST — has failed to dissolv…

• Measuring a strain of 10⁻²¹: how gravitational-wave detectors work
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  LIGO detects spacetime distortions a thousandth the width of a proton across a four-kilometre arm. The instrument is an exercise in suppressing every other effect on Earth — and it…

• From one solar system to six thousand worlds
  Science & Discovery · 2026-06-08

  Thirty years after the first planet was found around a Sun-like star, NASA's confirmed exoplanet count has passed 6,000 — almost none of them ever directly imaged. The methods that…

• Why the most powerful telescope ever built has to freeze itself
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  Webb's gold mirror, tennis-court sunshield, and orbit a million and a half kilometres from Earth all follow from one requirement: to see the first galaxies, it must observe in the …

• What a fleet of telescopes learned from our third interstellar visitor
  Science & Discovery · 2026-06-08

  The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS has been probed across the spectrum — Webb found methane, ALMA found water unlike any local comet's, and X-ray observatories caught it glowing. A SE…

• NASA's next great observatory, Roman, gets an August launch date
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now set to launch August 30 on a Falcon Heavy — ahead of schedule and under budget. Its wide-field infrared survey could catalogue around 1…

• A giant galaxy that doesn't spin is forcing a rethink of how they form
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  Webb found a massive galaxy from less than two billion years after the Big Bang whose stars move at random, with no rotation at all — a 'slow rotator' that theory says should not e…

• A nearby dwarf galaxy is a blueprint for the universe's first dust
  Science & Discovery · 2026-06-08

  Webb found unexpected dust-making in Sextans A, a chemically primitive dwarf galaxy — evidence that the earliest galaxies could forge solid grains by pathways unlike those that dom…

• Saturn's wandering spin was never real — Webb found the culprit
  Science & Discovery · 2026-06-08

  For decades Saturn appeared to change its rotation rate, which should be impossible. Using Webb, researchers showed the 'change' was aurora-driven winds distorting the measurement …

• On this hot Jupiter, rock clouds form by morning and burn off by night
  Astronomy · 2026-06-08

  Webb resolved the day–night weather of WASP-94A b, a gas giant 700 light-years away: magnesium-silicate clouds blanket the morning side and vanish on the scorching evening side — a…