Astronomy news from Cosmic Herald — telescopes, exoplanets, black holes, and the discoveries reshaping our picture of the universe.
A reanalysis of decade-old New Horizons images has turned up dark streaks on Pluto's nitrogen glacier that look like recent liquid seepage — the first sign of active flowing liquid anywhere on the dwarf planet.
Read the story →New adaptive-optics imaging from the LBT and VLT shows main-belt asteroid (44) Nysa has an unprecedented three-lobed shape and a previously unknown ~1 km moon, possibly making it the first confirmed contact-trinary asteroid.
Ultra-deep imaging has pinned down the true edge of IC 1101, confirming it spans 1.7 million light-years and 3.4 trillion solar masses — and it's still growing from a merger 2-3 billion years ago.
A nearby spiral nicknamed 'the Saguaro' just gave astronomers the missing piece of the little red dot puzzle: faint, buried X-rays confirming these mysterious JWST objects are ordinary black holes caught in an unusually obscured growth spurt.
A new Hubble-based study mapping 200 million stars across Andromeda shows its star-formation rate has fallen 80% in 500 million years, with the steepest drop in just the last 40 million.
A central-meridian filament blast and a far-side prominence erupted in near-perfect sync on July 28, while AR4494 kept flaring and a G1 storm carried over from an incoming CME due July 30.
Newly discovered asteroid 2026 OD3 buzzed past Earth at 0.6 lunar distances on July 25, one of three close flybys this week that underscore how many small asteroids go undetected until days before arrival.
A SHAO-led team used the Event Horizon Telescope and the GMVA to build the first spatially resolved, dual-frequency spectral map of M87*, tying the famous 2019 ring to the physical state of plasma near the event horizon at a ~30-microarcsecond transition.
JWST's SAPPHIRES survey has caught a compact proto-group of six galaxies at z=4.97 — 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang — that models say will merge into a single ~100-billion-solar-mass galaxy.
Hubble imagery reported July 24, 2026 shows a nova launching dense clumps of ejected material across the galaxy at roughly 20 million mph — and astronomers still can't explain where the projectiles come from.
A new Hubble image of NGC 4654, an intermediate spiral 72 million light-years away in the Virgo Cluster, shows a galaxy being compressed along one flank and unravelled along the other — the combined fingerprint of ram-pressure stripping and a tidal encounter with NGC 4639 some 500 million years ago.
Durham University simulations presented at NAM 2026 suggest the Milky Way's disc reoriented by more than 90 degrees after its head-on collision with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, with our galaxy's slowly rotating stellar halo as the tell-tale fingerprint.
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