Space and Astronomy Megathread (MERGED) - Part 1

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Crossing Saturn's Ring Plane
Image Credit: NASA, ESA, JPL, ISS, Cassini Imaging Team; Processing: Fernando Garcia Navarro

 

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NASA confirms Earth has a new 'mini moon' that will accompany us for the next 50 years

Astronomers detect the new quasi-satellite 2025 PN7, a small asteroid that will accompany Earth until 2083.

www.earth.com

 

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Andromeda and Friends
Image Credit & Copyright: Piotr Czerski

 

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Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka
Image Credit & Copyright: Aygen Erkaslan

 

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NASA’s Artemis 2 moon rocket comes together | Space photo of the day for Nov. 21, 2025

The Orion crew module gets stacked onto the Space Launch System in preparation for the upcoming Artemis 2 mission in early 2026.

www.space.com

 

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3I/ATLAS: A View from Planet Earth
Image Credit & Copyright: Rolando Ligustri

 

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Andromeda and Friends
Image Credit & Copyright: Piotr Czerski

 

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Dione and Rhea Ring Transit
Image Credit & Copyright: Christopher Go

 

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Part of the Sun Just Broke Off and Scientists Are Completely Baffled by This Mysterious Phenomenon

 

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Globular Cluster M15 Deep Field
Image Credit & Copyright: Alvaro Ibanez Perez

 

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Comet Lemmon and the Milky Way
Image Credit & Copyright: Lin Zixuan (Tsinghua U.)

 

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A Dark Seahorse in Cepheus
Image Credit & Copyright: Jordi Jofre

 

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After 20 years of trying, astronomers finally saw this flare.

For the first time, scientists have detected a mid-infrared flare from Sagittarius in A* – the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. It lasted just 40 minutes, but what it revealed could reshape our understanding of black holes and the magnetic chaos around them.

The flare was caught by the James Webb Space Telescope, using its ultra-sensitive mid-infrared instruments. Until now, astronomers had seen flares from this black hole in radio, near-infrared, and X-ray – but the middle of the infrared spectrum was missing. This detection fills a long-standing observational gap.

So what caused the flare?

Models suggest it was triggered by magnetic reconnection – when two twisted magnetic field lines around the black hole snapped together and released a burst of energy. That energy launched relativistic electrons (nearly at the speed of light), which spiraled through magnetic fields and emitted synchrotron radiation – the light JWST captured.

Even more exciting, scientists saw how the flare’s spectral index changed over time – direct evidence of synchrotron cooling, where high-speed particles lose energy as they emit light. That let them measure the strength of magnetic fields near the event horizon with unprecedented clarity.

These observations, backed by simulations run on Canadian supercomputers, help unlock how black holes feed, flare, and shape the galaxies around them.

Mid-infrared extinction toward the Galactic center

We determine the mid-infrared (MIR, $\sim$5~μm--22~μm) extinction towards the Galactic center using MIRI/MRS integral field unit (IFU) observations of the central $3''\times3''$ region (near 5~μm) to $7''\times7''$ region (near 22~μm). To measure the MIR extinction, we employ two approaches...

arxiv.org