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NASA/ESA space observatory in orbit since 1990, capturing high-resolution optical and ultraviolet images of galaxies and star clusters.
No evidence-backed relationships are recorded.
Cosmologists' simulations suggest primordial magnetic fields may have sped hydrogen formation, shifting the 67 km/s/Mpc rate read from the CMB. That gives the 6 km/s/Mpc Hubble tension a physical cause.
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Harley Katz's team at the University of Chicago ran three years of simulations showing the Milky Way assembling from thousands of smaller galaxies. Published across six papers, the models can now be checked against what Webb actually records.
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Hubble observations suggest the core of NGC 4693, a Virgo Cluster spiral about 55 million light-years away, turns out of step with its arms and bulge. Both explanations on offer point to outside influence, though nothing reported yet settles which applies.
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Hubble imaging and Gaia orbits separate a third population of ancient star clusters in the galaxy's inner regions, evidence of a dwarf galaxy swallowed about 11.8 billion years ago.
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3 publishersReality
Katalyst's Link spacecraft never got close enough to grab the sinking telescope. Swift now reenters later this year, and on-orbit rescue remains a demonstration, not a planning assumption.
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6 publishersReality
NASA's next flagship survey telescope will watch hundreds of millions of stars for one-off gravitational blips. That is how you count Earth-mass planets you will never get to look at a second time.
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13 publishersReality
Saturn's northern hexagon has looked the same for more than 40 years, so a second polygon that only shows up in images from 2023 onward hands atmospheric modellers a formation they can watch happen rather than a finished structure to explain.
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10 publishersReality
NASA says the Wide Field Instrument and the coronagraph are both working in space. The two published accounts of the milestone disagree about when science observations start and how long the mission runs.
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University of Utah astronomers observed 29 massive stars in six dwarf galaxies with Hubble and found winds weaken sharply below a fifth of solar metallicity. None of the stars sits in an early galaxy, so the link to Webb's early galaxies remains an inference.
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NASA pointed the telescope at galaxy cluster MACS J0417 on September 19 to catch a second appearance of supernova Athena, predicted before early March 2027, and the timing would constrain both the cluster's mass and the expansion rate.
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The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope should return its first images in early 2027, and its Wide Field Instrument will deliver them over at least 100 times the sky Hubble frames in a single pointing.
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The Utah-led TEMPOS survey took ultraviolet spectra of 29 massive stars in six nearby dwarf galaxies, and at the lowest metallicities the winds slow far faster than the trend measured in more metal-rich stars.
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The new Hubble picture of NGC 4698 shows arms that stop short of the glowing center and a bulge tilted out of the disk, while the case that a small merger built that geometry rests on one short tail of hydrogen.
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3 publishersReality
The LSST Camera's first image released for science stacks hundreds of exposures of the COSMOS field, where Hubble worked two decades ago, and Rubin's deputy director calls the field a testing ground for the ten-year survey.
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Ignacio Trujillo's team spent two June nights hunting starlight in a gas cloud near the galaxy M94 and found none, which tightens the ceiling on any stars there without settling where the hydrogen came from.
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Every dollar of the $4.3bn observatory rode one vehicle from one provider, which is the concentration number to carry into any space-sector position, whatever the science eventually turns out to be worth.
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The telescope's first proposal round came back twelvefold oversubscribed. Hubble and Webb have posted the same result for years: the figure describes how much telescope time exists, not Roman's standing in particular.
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The experimental instrument riding alongside Roman's survey camera carries the first deformable mirrors NASA has flown, and its science teams have pre-committed to a test that tells them whether the fault is theirs.
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The nine-month rescue vehicle failed upstream of the grapple, so the flight tested attitude control rather than capture, and mission planners still have no servicing result they can bank on.
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Astronomers modelled a ribbon of stripped stars around a faint dwarf galaxy to weigh its dark matter, the first time the trick has worked anywhere but the Milky Way.
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Product · August 24, 2026 · 1 publisher
Science · August 17, 2026 · 1 publisher