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European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an intergovernmental research organization operating major ground-based telescopes in Chile for astronomical research.
Astronomers attribute EP250704a, a half-second gamma-ray burst followed by 10 minutes of X-rays, to two neutron stars colliding. The event gives them a test case for the hundreds of X-ray flashes Einstein Probe has logged since its 2024 launch, some of them still unexplained.
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Astronomers spectroscopically confirmed 70 new gravitational lenses among candidates a neural network picked out of DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys images. Phys.org's report sets the search among projects built on 13 years of survey releases, so it vouches for the method more than for August's 5.6-trillion-pixel map.
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Astronomers reporting in Nature have found S301, the Milky Way's fastest known star, on a tight, eccentric orbit around the black hole Sgr A*. Its passes come close enough for the black hole's rotation to bend its path, so the team sees the star as a route to measuring that spin.
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Elias 2-24 b sits in a disk gap 55 times Earth's distance from its star, where formation models ask for at least five million years to build a Jupiter. Keck coronagraph images from 2018 and 2020 put it under a million years old.
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Einstein Probe recorded nearly ten minutes of X-ray light from a July 2025 neutron-star merger whose gamma-ray burst lasted about half a second. The team links the long glow to a newborn magnetar, a reading that so far rests on this single event.
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ESO astronomer Elisa Garro's team found Garro 04, a 5-billion-year-old disk cluster 32,800 light-years away that fits neither the open nor the globular class. The authors take it as a sign that more small, faint clusters are still missing from the inner-galaxy count.
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Astronomers find white dwarf RXJ0528+2838 has sustained a bow shock for at least 1,000 years with no disc to power it. Its strong magnetic field may account for part of that, and the team says an unexplained energy source may supply the rest.
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Most stars change too slowly for anyone to watch. Sakurai's Object has moved through a whole stage of stellar death in three decades, and the new measurement says it is recovering more gradually than some models predicted.
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Lithium is destroyed too easily to keep the record for long, so a team at the University of Sao Paulo turned to beryllium, and found it enriched in one member of a solar-type pair alongside the metals that build rocky planets.
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A paper accepted by Astrophysical Journal Letters puts the spill from Reflect Orbital's beams at 80 kilometers. The FCC approved the demonstration satellite in July.
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A SPHERE/VLT detection at 6 sigma places a faint companion at the separation two papers predicted for December 2024. Confirmation waits on catching it on the far side.
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