Above: Beta Pictoris is located about 60 light-years away towards the constellation of Pictor (the Painter's Easel) and is one of the best-known examples of a star surrounded by a dusty debris disc. This image, based on data from the Digitized Sky Survey 2, shows a region of approximately 1.7 x 2.3 degrees around Beta Pictoris. Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2.
The most recent issue of Free Astronomy Magazine (September-October 2026) is available for your reading and downloading pleasure in English, Italian, Spanish, French, Arabic, and Chinese at www.astropublishing.com (and facebook).
Many eyes on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope with its successful launch. For the interested but rushed (h/t Claude Sonnet 4.8):
p. 4 — Euclid discovers the most ancient quasar in the Universe. ESA's Euclid has found 31 new early-Universe quasars, an unprecedented haul, reaching back to when the cosmos was just 5% of its present age.
p. 8 — One million satellites pose grave threat to the night sky. With orbiting satellites already past 14,000 and proposals escalating toward a million, an ESO peer-reviewed study argues the constellations are pushing beyond what ground-based astronomy can absorb.
p. 18 — The 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time has officially started. Rubin Observatory has formally begun its decade-long LSST, showcased by a 1.7-gigapixel image of a star field in Lupus taken with the world's largest digital camera.
p. 22 — ALMA and VLA reveal vast reservoir of cool molecular gas in REBELS-25. The VLA and ALMA have made the first direct detection of a large cool molecular gas reservoir in a massive galaxy at redshift 7.31, seen only 700 million years after the Big Bang.
p. 26 — An intermediate-mass black hole tears apart a star. The VLA has caught a rare radio burst from an intermediate-mass black hole shredding a star, apparently the off-axis afterglow of a powerful jet.
p. 32 — The faintest planet ever imaged from Earth. A third planet, Beta Pictoris d, has been directly imaged — 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b and among the lightest exoplanets ever imaged from the ground.
p. 36 — A final look at Roman's primary mirror. Goddard engineers have completed the final inspection of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's primary mirror, whose silver coating was chosen for its near-infrared reflectivity, unlike Hubble's aluminium.
p. 38 — XMM-Newton & Chandra revise distance to the outer spiral arms. X-ray observations have revised the distance to the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, part of a broader Gaia-era reassessment of a galactic structure that is hard to map from inside the disc.
p. 42 — Galactic center: Euclid previews Roman. Euclid's new view of the Milky Way's heart serves as a preview of the kind of survey imaging Roman will deliver.
p. 46 — 3I/ATLAS might be older than the Sun. A Nature Astronomy study of the third known interstellar object suggests it may predate the Sun, and unlike 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov it lingered long enough for detailed compositional study.
p. 48 — Webb studies how planet survived death of its star. JWST observations of a planet that outlived its Sun-like host offer a glimpse of the far-future fate of systems like our own.
