A peer-reviewed journal of astronomy and astrophysics published by the American Astronomical Society.
Simulations of the El Gordo collision, over two quadrillion solar masses, fit two-state self-interacting dark matter better than noninteracting dark matter. Phys.org's account calls the result a possible solution, not a definite one.
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Astronomers writing in The Astrophysical Journal in June 2026 propose that a collision of two galaxies left DF2, DF4 and DF9 with little dark matter. An author says the pattern counts against gravity-only explanations, though the candidate particles stay open.
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Astronomers on the LBT YP Project measured primordial helium at 24.58% of early matter by mass, against 24.67% from Planck's cosmic microwave background data. The agreement counts as a check on the Big Bang model only once helium made later by stars is separated from the original helium.
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Raghvendra Sahai's team used ALMA to find a ring of radius about 16,950 Earth-sun distances around the preplanetary nebula IRAS 06530. The team says it records the star's last flare-up, but the spectra show no gas faster than 16.5 km/s, below the fast outflows a binary-jet origin should produce.
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Researchers from over a dozen institutions simulated Earth-mass planets in 70 Ophiuchi and found stable habitable-zone orbits over 10 million years. The same radial-velocity data exclude Jupiter-mass-or-larger planets out to about 5 AU from the primary star.
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Brittany Miles's team used 11 hours of JWST spectra to watch water clouds thicken and thin on WISE 0855, the coldest known brown dwarf. The same spectra separate those cloud changes from gases stirred up by convection, two signals that older photometry blended together.
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Gemini North imaging shows the streaks of Pa 30, the probable remnant of the 1181 supernova, are knots of gas strung like pearls. Because it is the Milky Way's only known Type Iax remnant, astronomers plan to use its features to look for more like it.
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SPHEREx spectra of 37 brown dwarfs in The Astrophysical Journal trace water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane across the full temperature range. Lead author Zafar Rustamkulov says models struggle to match objects whose clouds are thinning.
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Canada's CHIME telescope has detected the faint radio glow of hydrogen from about 9 billion years ago using only its own observations. The University of British Columbia says that opens a cheaper path to studying dark energy, once the hydrogen maps are turned into a history of cosmic expansion.
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Julian Shapiro, a UC Berkeley undergraduate, reports in The Astrophysical Journal three isolated dwarf galaxies that have stopped forming stars. He argues a large neighbor stripped them and threw them outward, but whether they are truly isolated still rests on distance estimates awaiting follow-up.
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Kate Su's team combined Webb and Spitzer spectra to sort 21 extreme debris disks around young stars into silica-rich and silica-poor groups. NASA says the minerals encode how violent each dust-making collision was, a possible check on Moon-formation ideas.
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Gemini North images show the streaks of Pa 30, left by the 1181 'zombie' supernova, are chains of gas knots that could each hold Neptune's orbit 10 times. The knots look close to uniform in size, so models of rare Type Iax explosions now have a specific pattern to reproduce, and the team has yet to try.
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UC Riverside simulations find an Earth-mass planet could orbit stably in the habitable zone of 70 Ophiuchi's larger star, about 5 parsecs away. A stable orbit is the first test a habitable world must pass, so the result tells planet hunters where in this pair to look.
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Kate Su's team used Webb and Spitzer spectra of 21 extreme debris disks to infer that about a third come from vaporizing impacts between Mars-sized bodies. Silica marks those violent cases, and it turns up only around stars younger than 300 million years.
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Mayura Balakrishnan and colleagues separated three overlapping X-ray sources in Chandra data to make the first uncontaminated maps of Sgr A East. The cleaner signal gives a baseline for testing whether the remnant has heated the gas around the Milky Way's central black hole.
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CHIME, a Canadian radio telescope, detected the 21 cm glow of distant hydrogen in 94 nights of its own data, without checking against any other telescope. The team sees a cheaper route to studying dark energy, though so far the paper establishes only that the signal is real.
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Astronomers led by the University of Michigan ruled out planets of Jupiter's mass or more within 5 AU of 70 Oph A and 0.5 AU of 70 Oph B. The nearby binary remains a candidate target for future habitable-planet observatories, now with a measured limit on giants in its inner regions.
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CHIME, a Canadian radio telescope, detected the faint glow of hydrogen from a universe about 5 billion years old using 94 nights of its own data. Any test of dark energy theories comes later, from years of archived observations still to be analysed.
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A Syracuse-led team says a star that arrives already rotating fast cannot be spun up much further, which lets each weaker pass finally look weaker. Four of about ten known repeaters fade.
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A University of Washington team ran roughly 15,000 streams through four clump-free Milky Way analogues for five billion years and got the gaps and kinks usually read as subhalo signals. The host galaxy is now a control.
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Science · September 9, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers
Science · September 16, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers