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10 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 6, 2026.
A $30 million rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin weeks after launch and never recovered its pointing. After 22 years of catching gamma-ray bursts, Swift is falling about five miles a month.
The planet's north pole has worn a hexagon for four decades. The new southern decagon is still strengthening — and two amateur astronomers saw the first hints of it.
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.
Astronomers at Warwick and Colorado used Hubble's ultraviolet vision to pull four dead stars out of the glare of brighter companions — one just 25 light-years away, now the ninth-closest white dwarf to the Sun.
NASA released a red, white and blue portrait of the 13-billion-year-old globular cluster NGC 6426, whose ancient stars hold clues to how the universe first forged the ingredients for planets and life.
New images from the Hubble Space Telescope show the galaxy losing its star-forming gas as it races through the dense cluster, a process that is slowly snuffing out its ability to build new stars.
The 400-billion-mile planet-forming disk around the young star IRAS 23077+6707, 1,000 light-years from Earth, is roughly 40 times wider than our solar system and unexpectedly turbulent.
The observatory, scheduled for launch as early as fall 2026, carries a field of view 100 times wider than Hubble's to hunt dark matter, dark energy, and distant worlds.
Fourteen million light-years away, astronomers have confirmed the first Reionization-Limited H I Cloud — a relic of the early universe containing five billion solar masses of dark matter and not a single star.
The Small Magellanic Cloud — long used as a stand-in for early-universe galaxies — passed directly through the disk of the Large Magellanic Cloud hundreds of millions of years ago, permanently disrupting its structure in ways that invalidate decades of cosmological assumptions.