A team of international astronomers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to watch the Jupiter-sized exoplanet WD 1856 b transit its ‘dead’ host star, a white dwarf, measuring the planet’s mass and temperature and even detecting its atmosphere. The researchers found that the planet is significantly warmer than expected and determined how it most likely reached its very tight orbit around the white dwarf. 

Gas giant orbits its dead star so closely that it takes just 1.4 days to complete a full revolution. At this proximity, planet shouldn’t have survived its star’s red giant phase. Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astrophysicists measured the planet’s atmosphere, mass and temperature. They found the planet orbited at a safe distance when its star died and migrated closer billions of years after its death.

The European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton and NASA’s Chandra X-ray space telescopes have spotted the aftermath of three bright explosions echoing through the outer spiral arms of our galaxy, the Milky Way. By measuring the distance to these echoes, they find the outer arms to be up to 10% further away than we thought.

Researchers have shed new light on why some distant galaxies suddenly stop forming stars.

For the first time, NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission has identified a planet orbiting a distant star thanks to its warping of space-time. Unlike the star-hugging transiting planets TESS regularly reveals, the newfound microlensing world is a super-Jupiter orbiting far from its host star.

A new European Southern Observatory (ESO) study has found that current proposals to launch over 1.7 million satellites into orbit, including extremely bright ones, would have “devastating consequences for astronomy.” According to the study, no more than 100 000 faint satellites, below naked eye visibility, should orbit Earth, to safeguard our ability to observe the night sky with modern telescopes. The study is the first to compute the extent to which large and bright satellite constellations — which have also raised concerns about their impacts on health and the environment — would affect astronomical observations by making the night sky brighter.

Astronomers are drowning in data, and now they can step inside it! A new open-source software suite called iDaVIE (immersive Data Visualisation Interactive Explorer) lets researchers use virtual reality to explore massive 3D astronomical datasets, such as Radio HI data cubes, in a fully immersive environment. Built on the Unity engine and SteamVR, iDaVIE allows scientists to import, render, select, crop, and analyse complex multidimensional data in real time, then export results directly back into their existing analysis pipelines. The tool has already proven useful for verifying radio data from major surveys conducted with the MeerKAT, ASKAP, and APERTIF telescopes, helping researchers refine detection masks and pinpoint new astronomical sources. By making it easier to navigate high-dimensional data intuitively, iDaVIE reduces the mental burden of traditional data inspection, freeing scientists to focus on discovery rather than data wrangling. With the release of Version 1.0, the developers plan further upgrades, including support for larger datasets, enhanced rendering, automated video generation, and collaborative multi-user features, aiming to make immersive visualisation a standard tool for tackling the big-data challenges of modern astronomy and other scientific domains.

A nanosatellite designed and built almost entirely by USC students is set to launch in July aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, carrying technologies that could shape the future of autonomous space operations.