May 2026 Release Highlights

Database Contents

For a snapshot of NED's holdings at the time of this release, please see current holdings.

References and New Data

330,912 sources from 2,321 references including:
  • 12,952 galaxies and spectroscopic redshifts from Dwarf Galaxies with Radio-excess Active Galactic Nuclei in the Very Large Array Sky Survey (Eberhard, J-M., et al.,2025ApJ...978..158E)
  • 9,466 galaxies and spectroscopic redshifts from Identifying Dust-lane Spheroidal Galaxies in DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys Using Semisupervised Methods (Luo, Z., et al., 2025ApJS..280...69L)
  • 7,408 sources from LATIS Data Release: ~4200 Spectra of z ~ 2-3 Galaxies, Redshifts, and Intergalactic Medium Tomography Maps(Newman A. B., et al., 2025ApJS..281...32N)
  • 7,107 Lyman-alpha galaxies with redshifts from A gradient boosting and broadband approach to finding Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies beyond narrowband surveys (Vale, A., et al., 2025A&A...701A.223V)
  • 6,780 galaxies with redshifts from Investigating the Star Formation Characteristics of Radio Active Galactic Nuclei (Zhang, B.. et al., 2025ApJ...978....9Z)
  • 2,311 sources and redshifts from Beyond MACS: physical properties of extremely X-ray luminous clusters at z > 0.5 (Ebeling, H., et al., 2025MNRAS.537.2662E)

Cross-IDs and New Objects

  • 292,930 sources from the literature cross-matched with NED objects.
  • 37,982 new NED objects including galaxies, quasars, clusters of galaxies, supernovae, globular clusters as well as unidentified radio, visual, infrared, X-ray, and gamma-ray sources.
  • 1,343 of the ingested sources are Supernovae from the Transient Name Server through April 2026.

Redshifts

  • 231,587 additional redshifts
  • 55,196 more objects with redshifts

Local Volume Sample Update

The NED Local Volume Sample (NED-LVS) is a vetted subset of over 2 million objects in NED with distances out to 1000 Mpc. The latest version (April 2026) includes fiducial angular diameters (major axis a, b/a, and PA) for galaxies to facilitate rapid identification of transient event hosts and other science use cases. Our analysis shows that the selection method employed provides statistically similar values across surveys, diameter definitions, and filters. See the full description for details.

Database and Software Updates

  • New APIs: New application program interfaces (APIs) have been released providing access to more data and services than available previously. The API is stateless and follows modern RESTful principles. Responses include query details, results metadata and data formatted in the IVOA VOTable version 1.5 format. See the new NED API specification document for details.
  • NOTICE: Legacy NED URLs (e.g., /cgi-bin/objsearch) used as "web APIs" are now deprecated, and as of January 2026 the database contents they access is no longer being updated. We encourage the community to update web links and applications as soon as possible to use the new APIs and ensure you are accessing the latest NED content and services.
  • ByParams search layered on TAP: The user interface to Search for Objects By Parameters has been replaced with a new implementation layered on NED's VO Table Access Protocol (TAP) service. This consolidates services and provides a step toward providing database access for users via ADQL queries (extensions to SQL) with UI assistance and the ability to access more data tables via TAP in future NED releases.

For highlights in previous releases, please see Archived Release Notes.

Last Change: 2026-05-20