Googolstars News
Researchers have found evidence of an extremely faint stellar stream in an ultra-diffuse galaxy about 115 million light-years away. Its shape, colour and nearby compact source point to a disrupting globular cluster, while dynamical modelling turns the faint arc into a new probe of the host galaxy’s dark matter halo.
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Researchers incorporated real lunar topography and crustal-thickness variations into models of the Moon’s response to gravitational waves. Simulated signals were generally stronger across the thick-crust highlands on the far side. The result can guide seismometer siting and target frequencies, but it remains a numerical and theoretical prediction—not an actual lunar detection of gravitational waves.
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Astronomers detected escaping helium in transit spectra of the habitable-zone rocky exoplanet LHS 1140 b, providing the first clear evidence that this super-Earth about 48 light-years away retains an atmosphere. The signal appeared only in the 2024 observation, and the study constrains only the upper atmosphere; the composition of the lower atmosphere remains unknown.
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NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio released a geoid visualization in July 2026 using the GOCO06s global gravity-field model. Heights ranging from about +85 metres near Iceland to −106 metres south of India were exaggerated 10,000 times, producing the potato-like appearance. The image maps a gravity equipotential surface; it is not Earth’s physical shape or a terrain map.
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An Icarus study reanalysed high-resolution New Horizons imagery and topographic data and identified six large landslides inside three impact craters on Pluto. The landforms show that gravity-driven slope movement helped shape Pluto, although the available data do not establish when the slides occurred.
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An international team led by Spain’s Centre for Astrobiology used the Yebes 40-metre and IRAM 30-metre radio telescopes to detect erythrulose in the interstellar medium for the first time, in the molecular cloud G+0.693−0.027 near the Galactic Centre. This four-carbon monosaccharide can form from simpler molecules on cold interstellar dust. The finding supports the idea that sugars could be delivered to young planets by asteroids or comets, but it does not show that life on Earth came from space.
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Brilliant Maps’ New True Size Comparison Tool compares Mercator outlines with equal-area outlines. Because the official tool cannot be embedded reliably, Googolstars built a native in-page version around the same core comparison and links clearly to the original.
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ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot filmed an aurora australis from the International Space Station. Bright green light ripples along the edge of Earth’s nightside atmosphere, framed by city lights and parts of the station.
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NASA's Perpetual Ocean 2 reconstructs global currents from ECCO-2 model output for 2021–2023. White trails show motion above 600 metres and blue trails show deeper water; this is a model visualization constrained by satellites, floats and in-situ measurements, not a live satellite image.
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DESI has completed its originally planned five-year 3D map of the universe. The data set is large enough to test hints that dark energy may evolve, but it is not yet a discovery that dark energy changes.
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Researchers used the shapes of nearly 800,000 galaxies in Webb COSMOS-Web images to reconstruct a dark-matter mass map sharper than earlier Hubble maps. The map clarifies how galaxies trace an unseen cosmic scaffold, while the dark-matter particle itself remains unidentified.
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Astronomy channel DudeLovesSpace filmed the same active region with two H-alpha solar setups, then combined the close-up and full-disc views into an 18-second timelapse. The finished video runs at about 280 times real time and was colourised in post-production; the uploader also notes that the Earth graphic should be half its displayed size.
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Astronomers used strong gravitational lensing and two-dimensional stellar dynamics to constrain the central mass of the Cosmic Horseshoe lens galaxy, about five billion light-years away. They infer a black hole of roughly 36 billion solar masses. Models with a central black hole are favoured at more than 5σ, demonstrating a way to weigh distant, weakly accreting black holes.
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