Astro Blog

By Jennifer Chu | MIT News .  Excerpt: Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot [that] resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. ...astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.” In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature , the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. ...The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole ...100,000 times as massive as the sun....  Full article at https://news.mit.edu/2026/astronomers-discover-brand-new-type-astrophysical-object-black-hole-star-0812 .

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: Unusual radio signals could be long-sought smoking gun of galactic mergers. Astronomers routinely see galaxies crashing into each other and combining. But the final phase of these cosmic mergers has long proved elusive: two supermassive black holes, each once occupying the center of its own galaxy, closely circling each other within a single, combined galaxy. Now, researchers say they have found compelling evidence of such a pairing. A distant galaxy seems to be firing off two beams of radiation from its center at different angles—a sign that a pair of supermassive black holes lurks at its heart. The two behemoths—each with a mass as large as 1 billion Suns—seem to orbit each other every 121 days. ...In as little as 100 years...the black holes should collide, shaking spacetime itself in a titanic burst of gravitational waves. That final burst “would be a really fantastic gravitational wave signal,” says team leader Silke Britzen of the Max Planc...

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen , Scientific American.  Excerpt: The galaxy MoM-z14 could offer clues to what the universe looked like in its early infancy. ...On Wednesday astronomers on  announced that a bright galaxy  called MoM-z14 that was found using NASA’s  James Webb Space Telescope  (JWST) is the farthest yet detected, existing just 280 million years after the big bang. ...The galaxy, the light of which has taken more than 13 billion years to reach our telescopes, is  brighter, denser and more chemically rich than astronomers had expected , according to NASA....  Full article at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jwst-spots-most-distant-galaxy-ever-pushing-the-limits-of-the-observable/ . 

By Tom Metcalfe , Eos/AGU.  Excerpt: Tiny crystals in Earth’s crust may have recorded meteorite and comet impacts as our planet traveled through the spiral arms of the Milky Way over more than 4 billion years, according to new research. ...The key to the latest research was in the ratios of isotopes—forms of the same chemical element that have different numbers of neutrons—in the oxygen atoms of zircon’s silicate group. The relative levels of oxygen isotopes in samples of zircon crystals can tell geologists whether the crystals formed high in the crust, perhaps while interacting with water and sediments, or deeper within Earth’s mantle. ...The scientists evaluated the data’s “ kurtosis ,” or the measure of how flat or peaked a distribution is. ...The researchers determined that periods of high oxygen isotope kurtosis corresponded to times when our solar system was crossing the dense spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy. Such crossings occurred roughly every 187 million years on aver...

By Daniel Clery , Science.  Excerpt: For years, astronomers thought it was the Milky Way’s destiny to collide with its near neighbor the Andromeda galaxy a few billion years from now. But a new simulation finds a 50% chance the impending crunch will end up a near-miss, at least for the next 10 billion years. ...It’s been known that Andromeda is heading toward our home Galaxy since 1912, when astronomer Vesto Slipher noted that its light is blue-shifted.... ...It wasn’t until the era of orbiting observatories that astronomers could judge Andromeda’s overall velocity in 3D.... It was, they calculated, heading pretty much straight at the Milky Way at a speed of 110 kilometers per second. ...A  study from 2008  suggested a Milky Way–Andromeda merger was inevitable within the next 5 billion years...ending up in...the resulting elliptical, which the researchers dub “Milkomeda.” The Milky Way, seen today as a bright band across the sky, would be replaced by a “milky blob” markin...

By Dennis Overbye , The New York Times.  Excerpt: Since the James Webb Space Telescope began operating two years ago, astronomers have been using it to leapfrog one another millions of years into the past, back toward the moment they call cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies were formed. Last month, an international team doing research as the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or JADES, said it had identified the earliest, most distant galaxy yet found — [JADES-GS-z14-0] a banana-shaped blob of color measuring 1,600 light-years across. It was already shining with intense starlight when the universe was in its relative infancy, at only 290 million years old, the astronomers said. ...the wavelength of light from JADES-GS-z14-0 had been stretched more than 15-fold by the expansion of the universe (a redshift of 14 to use astronomical jargon), similar to the way a siren’s pitch becomes lower as it speeds away. That means light has been coming toward us for 13.5 billion ...