A team of astronomers recently identified a red giant star with an unseen binary companion after examining data from the Large Sky Area MultiObject Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope (LAMOST) and the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE). Although the companion object can’t be observed visually, astronomers can see the gravitational effects it has on the red giant star.

A star’s explosive demise has added a shiny new feature to NGC 1433, a barred spiral galaxy approximately 50 million light-years away in the southern constellation Horologium (the Pendulum Clock). New images of supernova SN 2026ahvu from the U.S. Department of Energy–fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam) and the Gemini South telescope capture the explosion against its galactic surroundings, recording an event that is changing in appearance from night to night.

If people ever think about cleaning up space debris, they typically think of something equivalent to a giant garbage truck in the sky, collecting lost astronaut tools and dead satellites, then hauling them back down to Earth to be deposited in a landfill. But dealing with space debris doesn’t work that way, and a new paper by Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, available as a preprint on arXiv, makes a good argument as to why. We typically cover Turyshev for his work on the solar gravitational lens idea.