WST recently turned up hundreds of free-floating rogue planets in the Orion Nebula, 42 in binary configurations. How two Jupiter-mass objects could end up orbiting one another has puzzled astronomers, but now a team of researchers thinks they know it happens. Large, hot stars in the Orion Nebula blasted the outer layers of smaller stars, eroding them away and preventing them from gaining enough mass to ignite fusion in their cores - even binary stars.

A new space-based telescope aims to address a key solar mystery.

The theory of black holes has several mathematical oddities. Recent research shows our understanding of rotating black holes might not be as strong as we thought.

NASA's TESS mission has turned up thousands of exoplanet candidates in almost as many different star systems. But if one or two planets show up in a system, that means it's aligned with Earth, and that means we should be able to see even more in the same system. In a new paper, astronomers calculate which planetary systems have room for more exoplanets, creating a list of priority targets for further study.

Black holes are incredible powerhouses, but they might generate even more energy thanks to an unusual effect known as frame dragging.

As we saw with JWST, it's difficult and expensive to launch large telescope apertures, relying on origami techniques to unfold the full mirror. A new paper proposes that telescope mirrors could be made out of a thin polymer that's only 200 micrometers thick. It could be rolled up inside a rocket fairing and then unrolled once it gets to space. This could allow apertures vastly larger than anything currently in space, with several working together as an interferometer.

The spectra of distant galaxies shows that dying sun-like stars, not supernovae, enrich galaxies the most.