Astronomers have created a galactic masterpiece: an ultra-detailed image that reveals previously unseen features in the Sculptor Galaxy. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), they observed this nearby galaxy in thousands of colours simultaneously. By capturing vast amounts of data at every single location, they created a galaxy-wide snapshot of the lives of stars within Sculptor. “Galaxies are incredibly complex systems that we are still struggling to understand,” says ESO researcher Enrico Congiu, who led a…

NASA spacecraft make progress in final commissioning, preliminary science operations SAN ANTONIO — June 10, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Craig DeForest discussed the latest accomplishments of NASA’s PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission during a media event at the 246th American Astronomical Society meeting in Anchorage, Alaska. As the spacecraft constellation completes commissioning, early PUNCH data showed coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, as they erupted from the Sun and traveled across the inner solar system….

Using advanced computational modelling, a research team led by the University of Oxford, working in partnership with the Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon, has achieved the first-ever real-time, three-dimensional simulations of how intense laser beams alter the ‘quantum vacuum’—a state once assumed to be empty, but which quantum physics predicts is full of virtual electron-positron pairs. Excitingly, these simulations recreate a bizarre phenomenon predicted by quantum physics, known as vacuum four-wave mixing. This states that the combined…

An international team of astronomers, including researchers from the University of Liège and collaborators in UK, Chile, the USA, and Europe, has discovered a giant planet orbiting the smallest known star to host such a companion The host star, TOI-6894, is a red dwarf with only 20% the mass of the Sun, typical of the most common stars in our galaxy. Until now, such low-mass stars were not thought capable of forming or retaining giant planets. But as published today…