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Astronomers analyzed the positions and arrangement of celestial objects in Vincent van Gogh's painting The Starry Night and concluded they correspond to an actual sky configuration visible on a particular date. The researchers point to the painting as evidence of the artist's deep, recurring engagement with real astronomical observations rather than purely imagined scenes.
Megan Donahue, an MIT graduate from the class of 1985, grew up on a Nebraska farm and developed an early interest in physics through reading at her local library. She later used MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program to gain experience in x-ray imaging, a technique she now applies to her research on galaxy clusters.
A researcher at Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy reported a senior colleague's mistreatment of a female administrator in 2021, but instead faced an internal investigation and accusations against himself. After a five-year legal battle, an employment tribunal ruled in August that he had been retaliated against for raising a matter of public interest, and the university has accepted the judgment and pledged to review its procedures.
An amateur astronomer reportedly used Anthropic's Claude AI to help analyze astronomical data, leading to a potential new exoplanet discovery. The finding highlights how AI tools are increasingly being applied to sift through large astronomical datasets outside traditional research institutions.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics to Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for his role in building the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica and detecting high-energy neutrinos originating beyond our galaxy. Halzen, speaking by phone from Italy at a Stockholm news conference, said he was surprised by the honor and credited the many researchers who joined his project.
Physicist Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for founding the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and for discovering high-energy neutrinos originating from deep space. IceCube, built below the Antarctic ice, detects rare interactions between neutrinos and atoms, capturing particles emitted by cosmic events like supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. Halzen noted the project succeeded within two years of operation, despite initial skepticism from the physics community.
Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for leading development of IceCube, the cubic-kilometre neutrino detector at the South Pole. The observatory achieved a landmark result in 2017 by tracing a high-energy neutrino back to a blazar, marking the first confirmed source identification of its kind and advancing 'multi-messenger' astronomy, which combines neutrinos, cosmic rays, light and gravitational waves to study cosmic events.
Planetary scientist Paul Byrne posted a 12-year sequence of real telescope images showing four exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, orbiting a star 133 light-years away. The images capture the planets visibly moving along their orbits around their host star over the decade-plus timespan.
Ali Alobaidly's composite of the Shark Nebula, built from 28 hours of observation in the Kuwait desert, won the 2025 ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. Category winners included Miguel Claro's sunspot image from Portugal, Stefano Pellegrini's star-trail shot from Botswana, Petr Horalek's Moon-Venus timelapse from the Czech Republic, and Radoslav Sviretsov's aurora photo over an Icelandic church.
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified a widespread class of compact, reddish objects dating to the universe's first billion years, dubbed 'little red dots.' Researchers say these objects have puzzled the field since their discovery, and new analysis is now offering possible explanations for what they are.
Astronomers analyzing James Webb Space Telescope data have identified an unusual celestial object that some researchers believe could be a so-called 'black hole star,' a rare hybrid where a black hole is enshrouded in thick gas that mimics stellar light. The classification remains tentative, with further observation needed to confirm whether the object fits this proposed new category.
Researchers at Curtin University analyzed 76 million radio images over 29 days using a prototype SKA-Low station and detected 112,534 unauthorized emissions from 1,806 Starlink satellites within the exact frequency band needed to study cosmic dawn hydrogen signals. The leakage, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes not from intentional Starlink transmissions but from unplanned electronic interference radiating through satellite hardware, including periodic 13-kHz tones near 137 MHz.