Astronomers working with the JWST have found a galaxy only 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang that contains three black holes. Two are close to the galaxy's center and will merge soon. The third is more distant, and is expected to merge much later. The discovery shows that black hole mergers were an important contributor to the masses of the SMBH we find in galaxies today.
Scientists have discovered a rare star formation hidden in a distant galaxy, unlike anything seen before beyond the Milky Way. What’s more, the discovery offers a brand new way to measure the distribution of dark matter in distant galaxies.
What does a home actually need to do for us, beyond keeping the weather out? Engineers at MIT have started mapping the answer for astronauts heading to the Moon and Mars, tracing exactly how the walls, layouts and lighting around a person shape their stress, their loneliness and their sense of belonging. It turns out the science of surviving a place and the science of living in one are not the same thing at all, and I have spent enough of the last year thinking about that difference to know how much it matters.
Planet building was supposed to be one of the universe's slow projects, something that only got going billions of years after the Big Bang. New research suggests otherwise. The raw materials for rocky worlds, and perhaps even the water needed for life, may have been ready to go just 100 million years after the Big Bang, long before the first galaxies had even taken shape.
Astronomers found evidence that a giant stream of gas flowing into the GW Orionis young triple-star system may have tilted its planet-forming disk, offering a new explanation for why some planetary systems are misaligned. The next step is to search for shock fronts in the system, and to search for more of these massive streams of gas in other systems.
It was an eclipse for the ages. This past week, many an eclipse chaser and the ‘eclipse curious’ made the journey to stand in the shadow of the Moon, for the only total solar eclipse of 2026. Viewers across northeastern Spain had thrilling views of a low to the horizon eclipse at sunset, while viewers to the north and across Iceland had dicier, cloudy skies to contend with. Here are amazing reader views of the eclipse, along with a few special ones from space.
The eROSITA telescope has released its second great catalogue of the X-ray sky with close to two million sources across half the sky, roughly double what it published before. Buried in it is a result from Bonn that matters more than the headline number. A team there went after the faintest part of a massive galaxy cluster, the outer region where fresh material is still arriving along threads of gas stretching between clusters. Nobody had measured that emission before. The gas turns out to be hotter, denser and poorer in heavy elements than the models say it should be.
