Category Astronomy/Space

A Jupiter-sized world just 7.5 light-years away is cloudy, chemically complex and, it turns out, more like home than anyone expected. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, Brittany Miles, assistant astronomer at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, led a team that spent 11 hours staring at WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf, collecting a spectrum of its light every 15 minutes.

The result is the most detailed time-series portrait ever taken of this frigid world—and the first direct confirmation that water clouds on another body are changing thickness over time, just like we...

Using data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys, with help from artificial intelligence, an international team of scientists has discovered 70 new gravitational lenses—rare cosmic alignments that act as natural magnifying glasses. The new lenses further expand one of the largest collections of confirmed lenses to date and will allow scientists to study dark matter, galaxy evolution and the structure of the universe.

In August 2026, the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys tea...

An undergraduate astrophysics student at UC Berkeley has found three unusual galaxies—cataloged as Shapiro Dwarf Galaxies I, II and III. Each galaxy is far from other galaxies and has stopped making stars, a combination that is extremely rare. The discovery, published in The Astrophysical Journal, provides compelling observational evidence of a long-held astronomical theory.

“Dwarf galaxies exist both in isolation and as satellites around larger galaxies like our own Milky Way,” said Julian Shapiro, the study’s sole author, who conducted his research while still in high school...

An international team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), of which the U.S...