The week astronomy got sharper, and the fight over the view began

The Sun, seen finer than ever

An international team using the US National Science Foundation’s Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has released the highest-resolution image ever taken of the Sun’s visible surface [1][2]. The telescope sits near the summit of Haleakala on Maui and carries a 4-metre mirror [2]. The observation was made at 416 nanometres, in violet light [2].

The picture showed something long suspected and never directly seen: tiny swirling vortices along the edges of magnetic patches on the Sun’s surface [1][2]. Researchers identified them as Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, the churn that appears when two fluids slide past each other at different speeds [1]. The gaps between the swirls measure roughly 50 to 65 kilometres [2]. NASA’s picture-of-the-day entry described the finest details in the frame as city-sized [3].

The team argues the swirls may help explain why the Sun’s outer atmosphere is so much hotter than its surface [2]. The findings were published in Nature [1]. “The Inouye Solar Telescope delivers resolving power enabling discoveries once beyond our reach,” said Jacqueline Keane, a programme director at the National Science Foundation [2].

Three black holes in one young galaxy

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope found a galaxy 12.5 billion light-years away with three growing supermassive black holes [4][5]. Two of them sit about 620 light-years apart and appear close to merging [5]. It is the first such trio identified in a young galaxy, according to a paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics [4].

The team, led by Hannah Ubler of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, first noticed an odd shape in the galaxy’s central light [5]. Two separate patches of fast-moving hydrogen gas gave the pair away [5]. A third was found out in the galaxy’s outskirts, more than 5,500 light-years from the other two [5].

Sharpness is why this is a 2026 result rather than a 2006 one. Hubble lacked Webb’s sensitivity and its ability to pull light apart by wavelength, and at Hubble’s resolution the whole galaxy would have been a few pixels wide [4].

Webb also delivered a stranger find. A team writing in Nature described an object they call a black hole star, roughly 30 billion light-years away [6]. It shines like a star but releases about 100 billion times more energy than any star can [6]. It appears to be a black hole wrapped in dense gas [6]. If confirmed, it may explain the little red dots that have puzzled Webb astronomers for years [7].

Two vast catalogues land at once

The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe yet built: 5.6 trillion pixels, nearly 4 billion objects, three-quarters of the sky [8]. It combines more than 263,000 telescope exposures gathered over 13 years [8]. Earlier versions have already been cited in more than 1,800 papers [8].

Separately, the German-led eROSITA X-ray telescope published a catalogue of nearly 2 million X-ray sources, close to doubling the known high-energy sky [9]. More than 1.9 million are point sources, mostly feeding supermassive black holes [9]. NASA also published a side-by-side comparison of Hubble and the coming Roman telescope, whose wide field is meant to survey what Hubble can only sample [10].

And a fight over what the sky looks like

The US Federal Communications Commission has approved the launch of Earendil-1, an 18-square-metre mirror satellite built by Reflect Orbital to bounce sunlight to the ground [11]. The company wants a fleet of up to 50,000 [11]. Astronomers estimate the satellite would appear as bright as Venus from outside its beam, and four times brighter than the Moon inside it [11]. Two national astronomy bodies warn of harm to observations, to wildlife and to the eyes of anyone looking through a telescope at the wrong moment [11].

That sits alongside filings from SpaceX, Amazon and Blue Origin to launch more than a million orbiting data centres over the next decade [12]. If built, launches and re-entries would rise about a hundredfold against today [12].

On the pads

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he is “extremely confident” Artemis 3 will fly in 2027, with stacking of the SLS rocket already under way [13]. Rocket Lab won a $397 million Space Force contract for a fleet of flat, stackable satellites to track airborne threats [14]. Its Neutron rocket, though, may slip past this year; the company told regulators the window for a 2026 debut “is narrowing” [15]. Japan’s H3 rocket flew for the ninth time, lofting the Michibiki 7 navigation satellite [16]. Virgin Galactic pushed its next commercial flight to February 2027 [17]. And on 12 August, the first total solar eclipse over mainland Europe in decades turned day to night across Spain [18].