Astronomy

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has imaged the largest known protoplanetary disk, revealing a turbulent and asymmetric structure around a young star. The disk, nicknamed Dracula's Chivito, stretches nearly 400 billion miles across and lies about 1,000 light-years from Earth.

May 12, 2026 Reported by AI

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have produced the most detailed map yet of the universe’s cosmic web, the vast network of dark matter and gas that links galaxies. The map traces structures back to when the universe was roughly one billion years old.

A superluminous supernova nicknamed SN Winny, located 10 billion light-years away, appears in the sky five times due to gravitational lensing by two foreground galaxies. Researchers from the Technical University of Munich and other institutions have analyzed this rare event to measure the universe's expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant. The discovery could help resolve the ongoing Hubble tension between different measurement methods.

April 29, 2026 Reported by AI

An international team of astronomers has determined that the Milky Way's star-forming disk ends around 35,000 to 40,000 light-years from the galactic center. Using stellar age mapping, they found a U-shaped pattern where star formation drops sharply beyond this boundary. Stars farther out are mostly older migrants drifting from inner regions.

Researchers have pinpointed why planets orbiting two stars, like Tatooine in Star Wars, are rarer than expected. Einstein's general theory of relativity causes orbital instabilities that eject or destroy most such planets around tight binary stars. Only 14 confirmed circumbinary exoplanets exist among over 6,000 discovered.

April 15, 2026 Reported by AI

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) at Kitt Peak National Observatory has finished its five-year sky survey ahead of schedule, capturing spectra from 47 million galaxies and quasars—six times more than all previous surveys combined—plus 20 million stars. This creates the most detailed high-resolution 3D map of the universe to date, exceeding initial goals of 34 million objects and offering new insights into cosmic structure and potentially weakening dark energy.