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Nature Astronomy

13 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 21, 2026.

Physics
Black Holes Ten Times the Sun's Mass and Black Holes Millions of Times Heavier Turn On Their Jets at Exactly the Same Point: When Feeding Drops to 2% of the Eddington Limit

Tidal disruption events compress a supermassive black hole's feeding cycle from millennia into years. A Curtin-IAS team found the delayed radio jets, arriving hundreds to thousands of days after a star is torn apart, switch on at the same threshold known from X-ray binaries in our galaxy. 'The physics does not seem to care how big they are.'

Sep 21 3 min read
Science
The Solar System's First Solid Bodies Were 83% to 92% Fire-Forged Rock Beads and Almost No Ice, Yale Chemists Found by Reading Sulfur and Iron in Meteorites That Melted So Completely They Erased Their Own Ingredients

Two independent tracers in outer-solar-system iron meteorites both point to matrix levels of 8% to 17%, lower than in any known chondrite. 'Both tracers independently tell the same story,' said lead author Damanveer Grewal. The result pushes the aerodynamic sorting that built the planets back to the very beginning.

Sep 19 4 min read
Physics
Chandra Found 84 Objects That Shine in the Softest X-Rays and Vanish in the Hard Ones

The 'hypersoft X-ray sources,' spotted in the Andromeda and Pinwheel galaxies and four ellipticals, pour out extreme ultraviolet light and may be the long-sought stars that become Type Ia supernovae. The paper is in Nature Astronomy.

Sep 11 4 min read
Science
Two Grains of Ryugu Dust Held Ammonium, Nitrate and Carbon-Nitrogen Bonds — All Clustered Around Dried-Up Salt

Kyoto University researchers say the asteroid's parent body concentrated nitrogen as its briny water froze or evaporated, acting as a slow chemical reactor.

Sep 10 3 min read
Science
The Universe Still Has the Hydrogen. It Has Stopped Turning It Into Stars

Star formation is running at less than half the rate it did 4.5 billion years ago. A survey of 2.5 million galaxies says the raw gas supply has barely dropped, which breaks the standard explanation.

Sep 3 3 min read
Physics
Galaxies Are Still Spinning the Way Gravity Told Them To 13 Billion Years Ago — and It Shows Up at 7 Sigma

Tidal torque theory says a galaxy's rotation was set before the galaxy existed, by uneven gravity tugging on the clump of matter that became it. A Xiamen University team reconstructed the primordial density field and found the fingerprint intact.

Aug 9 3 min read
Science
Europa's Ice Shell May Slam Shut in Hours, Complicating NASA's Hunt for Life There

Rutgers simulations found that water rising from Europa's ocean turns turbulent, dumps its heat and freezes its own escape route closed — before it can ever reach the shallow pockets spacecraft are designed to find.

Jul 31 3 min read
Physics
Astronomers Find Strongest Evidence Yet of Magnetic Fields on Planets Beyond Our Solar System

By clocking the winds of seven scorching 'hot Jupiters,' researchers inferred planet-wide magnetic fields up to four times stronger than Saturn's.

Jun 8 3 min read
Physics
Strange Winds on Scorching 'Hot Jupiters' Yield the Strongest Evidence Yet of Magnetic Fields on Alien Worlds

By clocking iron-laced winds screaming across seven ultra-hot gas giants, astronomers found a pattern that ordinary weather physics can't explain — but magnetism can.

Jun 5 3 min read
Science
A Black Hole 'Feeding Frenzy' May Solve the Mystery of Giant Black Holes in the Early Universe

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.

Jun 5 3 min read
Science
James Webb Telescope Finds 200-Billion-Solar-Mass Galaxy That Refuses to Spin Less Than Two Billion Years After the Big Bang

XMM-VID1-2075, identified by a UC Davis–led team using JWST's NIRSpec integral-field spectrograph and published in Nature Astronomy on May 4, has a rotation-to-dispersion ratio below 0.3 — making it dynamically indistinguishable from fossil galaxies that should not exist for another five billion years.

May 27 4 min read
Science
Webb Telescope Strips LHS 3844 b Bare: Super-Earth Is a Dead, Atmosphere-Less Rock

Using JWST's mid-infrared spectrograph, an MPIA-led team found the tidally locked exoplanet has no air, a 1,000-Kelvin dayside and a dark basaltic crust closer to Mercury than to Earth.

May 8 3 min read
Physics
Scientists Measure Black Hole Jets for the First Time — They Pack Power of 10,000 Suns

Using a planet-spanning network of radio telescopes to track how stellar winds bent the jets of Cygnus X-1, researchers calculated that roughly 10% of all infalling energy escapes as jets traveling at half light speed — confirming a key assumption of astrophysics.

Apr 21 5 min read