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68 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: November 11, 2026.
A Würzburg team reproduced the Event Horizon Telescope image by modeling electrons spiraling along twisted magnetic fields in the jet of the nearest active galaxy.
A supercomputer study led by Kenta Kiuchi finds turbulence at the contact point could forge a magnetar, one of the universe's most strongly magnetized objects.
X-ray data from the XRISM telescope show the 'Neupert effect,' first seen on the sun in 1968, near the black hole in galaxy NGC 3783.
Indian Institute of Science physicists followed a magnetized star from birth to white dwarf and found it can far exceed the famous 1.4-solar-mass Chandrasekhar limit, with consequences for the supernovae used to measure the universe.
GRB 220706A kept flaring in X-rays for about 51 days after detection, and its central engine stayed active roughly 20 days longer than any burst on record. No single explanation fits every detail.
The 82-year-old Belgian-American physicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is honored for realizing that Antarctic ice could reveal high-energy neutrinos streaming in from distant galaxies.
Astronomers in India found four nested pairs of radio hotspots around a galaxy 3.9 million light-years across, each one older the farther it sits from the core. The jets' direction has also swung by 24 degrees, a sign the black hole's spin axis is wobbling.
IRAS 18293-0941 pairs a 10-solar-mass black hole with a hot star. Its jet slams into a gas cloud 100 light-years away, where particles may reach energies about 100 times the Large Hadron Collider's.
In 195 simulated star deaths, adding neutrino 'flavor' changes flipped many stars between 16 and 30 solar masses from supernovae to silent black holes, which could explain why astronomers see fewer explosions than expected.
If dark matter is made of ultralight particles that ripple like waves, those ripples should shift the multiple images of a distant quasar. The simulations matched a real lensed quasar better than standard models.
PSR J1227-4853 spins 592 times a second. Indian astronomers found 235 giant pulses in 174 hours of observation, some 10,000 times brighter than the star's ordinary signal.
PSR J1637-4642 was quiet through ten years of monitoring at Australia's Murriyang telescope. Fifteen and a half years of data now show three sudden spin-ups, and the biggest of them jumped the star's rotation by 2.7 parts per million.
RBH-1 left a trail of newborn stars 202,000 light-years long. A Santa Barbara team worked backward to the merger that threw it out, about 70 million years ago.
When a supermassive black hole switches its jets off, the leftover lobes were thought to glow for a long, slow stretch. A survey with MeerKAT found the afterlife is short — and earlier searches were looking for the wrong thing.
Colgate physicists calculate that the remnants of hypothetical 'Dark Stars' from cosmic dawn could dominate the gravitational-wave background that pulsar timing arrays have been measuring.
A University of Washington team found that a galaxy's own lumpy disk can carve the same gaps and kinks astronomers have been reading as fingerprints of dark matter.
ALMA resolved a magnetic field coiled around the gas streaming off a protostar 960 light-years away. It is a few thousandths of a gauss — weaker than a fridge magnet, and strong enough to shape a star.
Astronomers measured the gravitational redshift of SDSS J0608−0059 and found it sits on the wrong mass-radius curve for an ordinary white dwarf — evidence it came from a single massive star, not a merger.
The Einstein Probe caught the faintest X-ray shock breakout ever seen from this class of supernova. Two independent teams found no jet, no burst, and a 20-solar-mass Wolf-Rayet star that should have made both.
A Flatiron Institute simulation of the galaxy’s entire history finds that about 91% of stellar-mass black holes drift alone, and roughly 3% were kicked out of the galaxy altogether.
The Jellyfish Nebula turns out to have a sibling. A Stanford-led team used 16 years of gamma-ray data to show the two remnants came from a single binary system — a pairing never seen before.
Astronomers have confirmed LHAASO J1912+1014u as a proton PeVatron, the kind of natural accelerator that has been hunted for decades as the source of the galaxy's highest-energy cosmic rays.
A team led by SUNY Poly and the Kavli IPMU finds that a primordial black hole passing through a white dwarf could tidally heat it into a thermonuclear runaway — and that the resulting explosions would leave a distinctive chemical signature already visible in the Milky Way.
Researchers at 25 institutions showed the mysterious 'low-energy enhancement' comes from magnetic transitions inside the nucleus — a result that changes how fast stars are calculated to build heavy elements.
Observations of Swift J1727.8−1613 with the Very Large Telescope caught powerful outflows still running after the system had dimmed to a hundredth of its peak brightness.
Physicists at TU Darmstadt recalculated the masses of 70 exotic nuclei and found the traffic jam that builds heavy elements in neutron star collisions lasts longer than every previous model assumed.
The flash astronomers named TDE 2025abcr came from 30,000 light-years off-center in a galaxy 750 million light-years away — the first quiet, wandering giant ever caught this far from home.
By combining Event Horizon Telescope and Global Millimeter VLBI Array images at two wavelengths, a Shanghai-led team produced the first spatially resolved spectral map of a black hole's shadow.
Sifting through two decades of Hubble images, a University of Utah team spotted a star being tugged by an invisible companion — the first of thousands of black holes thought to be hiding in the giant cluster.
A Caltech astrophysicist calculates that lopsided eruptions from bloated, dying sun-like stars act like thousands of tiny rocket thrusts, nudging the stars to speeds of about a kilometer per second.
By jolting a mix of simple gases with 10,000 volts, a University of Sydney researcher brewed synthetic cosmic dust laced with the carbon-based molecules that form the building blocks of living things.
A model proposing that dark matter is made of at least two kinds of particles — a heavier one that sinks toward galactic centers and a lighter one that drifts outward — could resolve puzzles that have frustrated cosmologists for years.
A CUNY team built a spinning system out of engineered metamaterials that amplifies passing waves — reproducing the half-century-old Penrose-Zel'dovich process once thought possible only around a rotating black hole.
A neural network called RHINE lets physicists simulate the violent nuclear furnace of a neutron-star merger in a fraction of the time, sharpening the story of where the heaviest elements come from.
Refined simulations from a NASA science center suggest the Sun's own magnetic dynamo is what keeps the mysterious tachocline confined to a knife-edge, a key to forecasting solar storms.
A single 10-month observing run added 161 new detections, nearly doubling the record — and delivered the sharpest gravitational-wave signal ever recorded, along with hints that some black holes are built from earlier black holes.
The most detailed spectrum yet of one of these ancient objects strongly favors a black hole cloaked in hot gas over a galaxy full of stars — evidence, researchers say, of heavy black-hole seeds being born in real time.
An extraordinarily bright X-ray flare could be the first direct evidence of a long-sought intermediate-mass black hole tearing apart and devouring a dead star.
Electrons accelerated in the turbulent region ahead of Jupiter's bow shock offer the first direct evidence that the same process powering them also forges cosmic rays across the galaxy.
New research suggests the mysterious Amaterasu particle and similar cosmic rays may be atomic nuclei heavier than iron that retain energy across vast distances.
New research suggests the most powerful cosmic rays could be atomic nuclei heavier than iron, potentially explaining how these extreme particles reach Earth with unprecedented energies.
New research suggests the most extreme cosmic rays could be ultraheavy atomic nuclei from distant explosions, not protons as previously thought.
Five years of observations with Chile's ALMA telescope revealed a cone of hot gas carved around Sagittarius A*, the long-sought outflow from our galaxy's central supermassive black hole.
Supercomputer simulations on Japan's ATERUI III show interstellar magnetic fields strip rotational energy from forming star pairs, letting two protostars spiral together fast enough to match what astronomers actually see.
New simulations suggest small 'seed' black holes gorged on gas faster than thought possible, explaining the monsters the James Webb telescope found just after the Big Bang.
Advanced plasma simulations reveal how turbulent disorder in space creates massive organized magnetic structures that influence everything from black holes to solar storms.
Scientists used advanced plasma simulations to discover how the universe builds enormous magnetic fields out of turbulence, potentially reshaping our understanding of cosmic phenomena.
Nearly two decades of NASA data revealed that a rapidly spinning magnetar powered superluminous supernova SN 2017egm, helping settle a long debate over what drives the universe's brightest stellar explosions.
Scientists use most detailed plasma simulations ever created to discover how cosmic turbulence builds enormous organized magnetic structures from chaos.
Scientists discover how cosmic turbulence creates enormous organized magnetic structures spanning galaxies and star systems.
TIC 295741342 — two sun-like stars in a 4.75-day binary plus a red giant 9.7 times the radius of the Sun on a 412-day orbit — is the most precisely aligned triple-star architecture ever measured, and astronomers say the swelling giant will likely tear the inner binary apart within 100,000 years.
Researchers trace mysterious 220 PeV particle that slammed through Mediterranean Sea to blazars—supermassive black holes shooting jets directly at Earth.
MIT physicists detect potential dark matter signature in LIGO data, offering new way to study the universe's most mysterious substance.
DAMPE space telescope reveals universal pattern governing mysterious high-energy particles from across the galaxy.
A new Astronomy & Astrophysics study finds that the soon-to-launch Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be sensitive enough to weigh isolated neutron stars through gravitational microlensing, finally cataloguing the city-sized stellar corpses that have eluded detection for nearly a century.
DAMPE space telescope reveals that all cosmic ray particles follow the same fading pattern, potentially solving century-old puzzle about their origins.
DAMPE space telescope reveals universal pattern in mysterious high-energy particles, offering new clues about their galactic origins and behavior.
Researchers using the DAMPE space telescope discovered that cosmic ray particles all fade away at the same point, revealing a hidden rule governing their behavior.
DAMPE space telescope reveals universal pattern governing mysterious ultra-powerful particles traveling across the galaxy.
Researchers capture split-second chaos as copper atoms lose and regain electrons, creating highly charged ions in extreme conditions.
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