astronomy

NASA shared a James Webb Space Telescope image of the Cat's Head Nebula, named for its feline-like shape resembling a cosmic cat sitting with its back to the viewer.

NASA's aging Swift Observatory, a truck-sized space telescope launched nearly 22 years ago, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on Wednesday after rescue attempts failed, with NASA saying the risk of harm from surviving components is low (about 1 in 2,100).

NASA shares November 2026 skywatching tips, highlighting the Taurid and Leonid meteor showers, a close Mars-Jupiter pairing, a supermoon, and Voyager 1 reaching the one light-day milestone from Earth.

ESO astronomers using the Very Large Telescope discovered a two-ring debris disk around white dwarf J1328-1450, offering a preview of how our own solar system may look after the Sun exhausts its fuel. The ring structure hints at at least two surviving planetary objects sculpting the material.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, will become the first human-made object to travel one light-day (about 16 billion miles) from Earth on Nov. 18, 2026. The article explains light-distance measurements and notes Voyager 1 is headed toward star AC+79 3888, passing within 1.7 light-years in 40,000 years.

A study in RAS Techniques and Instruments finds that cooling white dwarfs can appear pink, green, and purple rather than white, with color driven by atmospheric density and trace elements from shredded planets and asteroids accreted onto the star.

Breakthrough Listen and the SETI Institute are deploying agentic AI on the Allen Telescope Array, powered by NVIDIA Holoscan, to autonomously steer the instrument and process terabits per second of sensor data in real time — already achieving the first real-time AI detection of a pulsar in the Crab Nebula.

NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes captured an eerie star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, located about 7,500 light-years away, just in time for Halloween.

An explainer on the science and engineering behind capturing the first images of a black hole, focusing on the techniques used to photograph such extreme cosmic objects.

Astronomers using the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile identified a possible new dwarf planet, provisionally named 2026 ED138, a bright trans-Neptunian object roughly 600-1,500 km across located about 46 AU from the Sun.

astroterm is a lightweight terminal-based star map written in C that renders real-time positions of stars, planets, constellations, and moon phases as ASCII graphics, configurable by date, time, and location, and available across major package managers.

Tabletop Whale blogger Eleanor Lutz shares a code tutorial for her geologic map of the Moon, the final installment in her Atlas of Space series, detailing the challenges of merging six planetary datasets into a cohesive visualization.

OmniSpectra 提出一种波长原生的光谱基础模型，采用连续坐标与物理约束解码器实现跨仪器表征学习，仅用 12.2M 参数即在八个巡天数据集上超越更大的基线模型，表明物理结构编码可以替代参数规模。

NASA reports that astronomers used the Chandra X-ray Observatory to determine the "Treble Clef" radio wave formation was likely caused by a supermassive black hole outburst followed by a collision of two galaxy clusters.

Wired 的观测指南介绍猎户座流星雨（源自哈雷彗星碎片）将于 10 月 21-22 日达到峰值，每小时可达 20 颗，并列出本月土星冲日等其他天象。

该论文区分了表征相似性的两种度量——原生余弦几何与线性可恢复性，并在五个模型族的天文数据集嵌入上发现，模型规模主要提升线性对齐后的邻域对应，而非原生几何收敛。

A trio of faint, 'ghostly' galaxies provides new observational hints about the nature of dark matter, suggesting what it might — and might not — be.

A hobbyist reports that autonomous Claude/GPT agents running on their PC discovered 104 new eclipsing binary stars and devised a novel search method using TESS and Gaia data with minimal human expertise. The findings are written up in a draft paper submitted to AAVSO.

Una foto publicada por NASA muestra una escalera de piedra en el Desierto de Atacama en Chile que parece conectar visualmente con la Vía Láctea, destacando otro paisaje asombroso del país.

Scientists say that worlds more habitable than Earth likely exist beyond our solar system, highlighting ongoing research into exoplanet habitability and the search for life-friendly conditions.