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The ALMA CMZ Exploration Survey has produced the largest image ever obtained with the ALMA telescope, spanning 650 light-years of the Milky Way's Central Molecular Zone and revealing the detailed molecular chemistry of the environment surrounding the galaxy's central supermassive black hole.
Read the releaseA peer-reviewed Chapman University study analyzing satellite data, hydrological models, and geospatial analysis at Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam found an estimated 41 to 6.2 billion cubic meters of seepage, up to 40mm of differential settlement, and potential downstream flood depths of 34.7 meters if the saddle dam were to breach.
Read the releaseA team from the University of Illinois and University of Chicago developed a method using the undetected gravitational-wave background from merging black holes to constrain the Hubble constant, producing results consistent with the Hubble tension region when combined with individual event measurements.
Read the releasePhysicists demonstrated that chiral phonons - corkscrew-pattern atomic vibrations in non-magnetic materials like quartz - can directly transfer orbital angular momentum to electrons, removing a key barrier to practical orbitronic computing devices.
Read the releaseMunich astronomers have imaged SN Winny, a superluminous supernova lensed into five copies by two foreground galaxies. Its time delays could yield a new, independent measurement of the Hubble constant.
Read the releaseUsing the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have produced the first three-dimensional map of Uranus's upper atmosphere, tracking temperatures, ion densities, and aurora locations up to 5,000 kilometers above the cloud tops while confirming the planet's unexplained decades-long cooling trend.
Read the releaseAbout 10% of Kuiper Belt planetesimals are shaped like two connected spheres. Michigan State University graduate student Jackson Barnes created the first simulation to naturally reproduce these contact binary shapes through gravitational collapse, showing that orbiting pairs of young planetesimals slowly spiral inward and fuse without losing their round shapes. The work appears in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Read the releaseA Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum team catalogued 1,114 previously unknown ridge segments in the lunar maria, bringing the global total to 2,634. The ridges average 124 million years old and form from the same compressional forces that drive lobate scarps in the highlands, indicating the M
Read the releaseA Washington State University study published in Human Performance analyzed NBA team data from the 2009-2010 to 2019-2020 seasons and found that teams with pay inequities among their five highest-minute players won fewer games - not because of reduced effort, but because of reduced coordination. The finding suggests workplace managers should focus on equitable compensation among top performers and on goals that emphasize synchronized team effort, not just individual output.
Read the releaseA remote sensing framework developed by Brazilian researchers mapped frost damage across more than 700,000 hectares of corn in Parana state with 96% accuracy, finding that 70% of the second-harvest crop sustained losses during the severe 2021 frost event. The model, validated against insurance and government data, offers a faster alternative to field-by-field inspection for quantifying climate-driven agricultural losses.
Read the releaseM31-2014-DS1 in the Andromeda Galaxy was once among that galaxy's most luminous stars. Between 2005 and 2023, telescopes watched it brighten in infrared, then fade to one ten-thousandth of its original visible brightness. Flatiron Institute-led researchers combined those observations with convection models to produce the most physically complete account of how a massive star collapses directly into a black hole - and why the dust glow will be visible for decades.
Read the releaseThe star M31-2014-DS1 brightened briefly in infrared, then faded until it became essentially invisible in optical wavelengths - leaving only a faint dust-shrouded remnant. Kishalay De and colleagues analyzed years of NEOWISE data to confirm the event as a failed supernova: a massive star that collapsed its core directly into a black hole without detonating. The findings appear in Science alongside evidence that an earlier candidate event, NGC 6946-BH1, followed the same pattern.
Read the releaseWhen massive stars die, they are supposed to explode. The star M31-2014-DS1 in the Andromeda Galaxy did not. It brightened in infrared light for about three years beginning in 2014, then faded dramatically and essentially disappeared. A Columbia-led team analyzing archival NEOWISE data identified it as the most compelling evidence yet for direct collapse - a star becoming a black hole without first detonating as a supernova.
Read the releaseThe star LHS 1903 hosts four planets: rocky, gaseous, gaseous, then rocky again - a sequence planet formation theory doesn't predict. Data from ESA's Cheops satellite revealed the anomalous outer rocky planet, which appears to have formed after its host system had largely run out of the gas considered essential for planet building, providing the strongest evidence yet for a decade-old alternative formation hypothesis.
Read the releaseMost galaxy mergers produce supermassive black hole pairs, but only widely separated ones have been confirmed. A new theoretical framework shows that as these binaries spiral closer, their combined gravitational field sweeps a diamond-shaped lensing zone across background stars, creating repeating brightness bursts whose timing and intensity encode the pair's mass and orbital decay rate.
Read the releaseOne of the longest stellar dimming events ever observed was likely caused by the gigantic saucer-like rings of either an unseen brown dwarf or 'super-Jupiter' blocking its host star's light, astronomers say. For decades the star – which sits 3,200 light-years from Earth and is about twice as big as our Sun – had been observed as stable, but at the end of 2024 it faded dramatically. It then remained this way for more than nine months, far longer than is normal for an event like this, sparking confusion among researchers and prompting speculation as to what could have caused such an "extremely rare" phenomenon. Now, in a new study published today in Monthly ...
Read the releaseMethane is a powerful greenhouse gas with strong heat-trapping capabilities. Although there is less methane in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide, the foremost greenhouse gas, researchers attribute 30% of modern global warming to methane. Observations show that methane levels have increased over time, but the factors driving changes in the rate of accumulation remain unclear. Methane stays in the atmosphere for approximately 10 years before it is broken down, or removed. Researchers need to know how much methane is removed to gauge what percentage of emissions are accumulating in the atmosphere, but the methane removal process is difficult ...
Read the releaseUNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Amino acids, the building blocks necessary for life, were previously found in samples of 4.6-billion-year-old rocks from an asteroid called Bennu, delivered to Earth in 2023 by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission. How those amino acids — the molecules that create proteins and peptides in DNA — formed in space was a mystery, but new research led by Penn State scientists shows they could have originated in an icy-cold, radioactive environment at the dawn of Earth’s solar system. According to the researchers, who published new findings today ...
Read the releaseIn remembrance of Peer Bork In a new study published in Cell, scientists in the Bork Group at EMBL Heidelberg reveal that microbes living in similar habitats are more alike than those simply inhabiting the same geographical region. By analysing tens of thousands of metagenomes, the team found that while most microbes adapt to a specific ecosystem, a rarer subset known as ‘generalists’ can thrive across very different habitats. Known for being ecologically tolerant, generalists are capable of ...
Read the releaseGas giants are large planets mostly composed of helium and/or hydrogen. Although these planets have dense cores, they don’t have hard surfaces. Jupiter and Saturn are the gas giants in our solar system, but there are many other gas giant exoplanets in our galaxy and some are many times larger than Jupiter. The largest gas giants blur the line between planets and brown dwarfs — those substellar objects, sometimes called “failed stars” because they do not fuse hydrogen. How do these gas giants form? Was it through core accretion, where solid cores gradually ...
Read the releaseA recent study, led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA and using modelling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The work, published in Nature Astronomy, provides new insights into how complex organic molecules and carbon are processed in some of the most extreme environments in the Universe. The study focuses on IRAS 07251–0248, ...
Read the releaseA supermassive black hole with a case of cosmic indigestion has been burping out the remains of a shredded star for four years — and it’s still going strong, new research led by a University of Oregon astrophysicist shows. Already, the jet shooting out of the black hole is a contender for one of the brightest, most energetic things ever detected in the universe. Scientists have now collected enough data on the unusual occurrence to predict that the stream of radio waves belching from the black hole will keep increasing exponentially before peaking in 2027. “This is really unusual,” said Yvette Cendes, an ...
Read the releaseSAN ANTONIO — February 4, 2026 — Dr. Stephen Fuselier has been appointed as vice president of the Space Science Division of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). A noted heliophysicist, Fuselier recently served as the co-chair of the National Academies of Solar and Space Physics Decadal Survey. NASA uses its recommendations to identify and prioritize the scientific questions and necessary observations required to answer them over the next 10 years. “I’m thrilled to lead SwRI’s Space Science Division,” Fuselier said. ...
Read the releaseAMHERST, Mass. — In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a “quasi-extremal primordial black hole,” explodes. In new research published by Physical Review ...
Read the releaseThe fight against climate change relies heavily on finding better ways to capture carbon dioxide before it escapes into our atmosphere. While carbon nanotubes have long been seen as a "wonder material" for this task, their internal structures are often locked away like a closed pipe. Now, a research team from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) has pioneered a deceptively simple way to pop those caps open and supercharge their adsorption capacity. In a study published in Carbon Research, the team reveals that a straightforward thermal treatment, essentially "baking" single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) in ambient air, can ...
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