Phys.org Astronomy News

  • TESS just found a planet in a new way—and more may be hiding in its eight years of data
    on July 1, 2026 at 7:21 pm

    For the first time, NASA's TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a distant star thanks to its warping of space-time. Unlike the star-hugging transiting planets TESS regularly reveals, the newfound microlensing world is a super-Jupiter orbiting far from its host star.

  • XMM-Newton and Chandra help revise distance to Milky Way's outer spiral arms
    on July 1, 2026 at 4:20 pm

    The European Space Agency's XMM-Newton and NASA's Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they found the outer arms to be up to 10% farther away than previously thought.

  • Orbit overload could devastate astronomy if 1.7 million proposed satellites brighten night sky
    on July 1, 2026 at 3:20 pm

    A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch more than 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have "devastating consequences for astronomy." According to the study, no more than 100,000 faint satellites, below naked-eye visibility, should orbit Earth to safeguard our ability to observe the night sky with modern telescopes.

  • How a giant planet survived its star's death, then migrated inward
    on July 1, 2026 at 3:00 pm

    When astronomers discovered a giant planet orbiting a dead star in 2020, they wondered how it survived its star's violent demise. Now, observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may finally explain the planet's unlikely escape from destruction.

  • Webb reveals merger scars in galaxies that stopped forming stars 9 billion years ago
    on July 1, 2026 at 1:00 pm

    Research has shed new light on why some distant galaxies suddenly stop forming stars. An international team led by astronomers at the University of Nottingham has used the James Webb Space Telescope to study a large sample of recently "quenched" galaxies in the distant universe, observed around nine billion years ago. Their findings appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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