ESO's Very Large Telescope, an array of four 8.2m optical/infrared telescopes at Paranal Observatory in Chile used for diverse 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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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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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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MPIA astronomers used ALMA to image WISPIT 2b, a gas giant five times Jupiter's mass, interacting with the gas it formed in. Formation models have rested on simulations and indirect evidence, so a planet still feeding on its birth gas gives them a direct check.
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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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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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Stefan Gillessen's group pulled S301 out of Very Large Telescope monitoring begun in 2023, and its perihelion of twelve astronomical units sits close enough that frame dragging should register in the orbit after roughly another decade of tracking.
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The detection landed in the December 2024 window that two earlier papers predicted, and it landed at all because the companion is heavier than the models said; one more epoch on the far side would close a century-old case.
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A Nature Astronomy study of nine ancient galaxies finds faint stars that spectra had missed. The correction runs the wrong way for anyone hoping to explain away impossibly early giants.
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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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Astronomers report helium moving unexpectedly fast long after AT2024wpp peaked, which they read as surviving stellar structure. That complicates the tidy version of tidal disruption.
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