Space science and discovery from Cosmic Herald — planetary science, cosmology, astrobiology, and the search for life beyond Earth.
NASA's IXPE spacecraft, paired with NICER and Australia's Murriyang radio telescope, caught magnetar 1E 1547.0-5408 emitting X-rays polarized up to ~80% — evidence that its trillion-times-Earth magnetic field bends empty space itself, as QED predicted in 1936.
Read the story →China's Einstein Probe caught a brief X-ray shock breakout from a dying Wolf-Rayet star that had all the makings of a gamma-ray burst but never fired one, giving astronomers just their second clean look at this elusive process in two decades.
A Boston University-led study pairing NASA's MAVEN with China's Tianwen-1 finds solar-wind-driven Kelvin-Helmholtz waves flinging Martian ions into space at 10-100 times the rate of previously known escape channels.
Climbing Mount Sharp, Curiosity photographed a sprawling field of inch-wide honeycomb fractures in Valle Grande — the biggest such formation in its 14-year mission, with its origin still unresolved.
A University of Maryland-led simulation study finds that individual clumps of star-forming gas survive for as little as 400,000 years, reframing how astronomers should read galaxy-scale star formation data.
NASA's Swift Observatory and a UNC-Chapel Hill team caught a roughly million-solar-mass black hole shredding a star far outside its galaxy's core — the farthest such offset ever seen, and evidence that black holes can go wandering after galactic mergers.
A new analysis of LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA's fifth transient catalog finds statistical evidence for four separate black-hole merger populations — including a rare group of black holes built from earlier mergers.
Mining the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA GWTC-4 catalog, an MIT-led team finds that roughly 14% of merging black holes are themselves products of earlier collisions, with a spin-driven transition near 46 solar masses.
A Nature Astronomy study led by Rutgers' Lujendra Ojha finds that water rising through Europa's ice-shell fractures supercools and clogs with frazil ice, freezing narrow cracks shut within hours - reshaping where Europa Clipper and JUICE should hunt for habitable niches.
Neon bubbling out of mid-ocean-ridge basalts can only have come from the solar nebula, and a new Planetary Science Journal paper uses it to pin the young Earth's mass at roughly 0.3 Earth masses — captured from a disk already depleted at least 100-fold.
ETH Zurich's first high-resolution 3D simulations of Venusian rifting, published in Nature Geoscience, use the broad ridges flanking Venus's 10,000-km rift valleys as a geological clock — and conclude some rifts are still spreading at 3-10 cm per year.
University of Warwick physicist Sandra Chapman told NAM 2026 that the Sun's fiercest space weather ends not with a whimper but a sudden 'switch-off' - and the sunspots left behind at that moment forecast the next cycle six to seven years early.
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