How NASA made exoplanets into tourist destinations
“Like Luke Skywalker’s planet “Tatooine” in Star Wars, Kepler-16b orbits a pair of stars. Kepler-16b is a gas…
Physicists model vacuum tunneling in a 2D superfluid
Credit: CC0 Public Domain In 1951, physicist Julian Schwinger theorized that by applying a uniform electrical field to…
JWST reveals 3I/ATLAS’s coma is largely carbon dioxide
Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS. Credit: NASA/ESA All (or at least most) astronomical eyes are on 3I/ATLAS, our most…
Scientists find that ice generates electricity when bent
Flexoelectricity in ice electrification events. Credit: Nature Physics (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41567-025-02995-6 A study co-led by ICN2 reveals that…
Genetic tools identify lost human relatives from fossil records
Predicted phenotypic differences between AMHs, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI:…
Finding ‘Earth 2.0’ may be easier using a new telescope shape
Concept design for a rectangular space telescope, modeled after the Diffractive Interfero Coronagraph Exoplanet Resolver (DICER), a notional…
Microalgae are more significant for COâ‚‚ absorption in Southern Ocean than previously thought, study reveals
At the end of the last ice age, algal blooms of the species Phaeocystis absorbed large quantities of…
Optical resonator enables a new kind of microscope for ultra-sensitive samples
The new type of microscope makes light travel in a circle. That way it can interact multiple times…
Streams of gas might lead to the rapid formation of high-mass stars
The dust emission of the high-mass star forming region G336.018-00.827 ALMA1 at radio wavelengths. The star symbol indicates…
XRISM reveals slow-moving hot gas near black hole during faint X-ray phase
Conceptual illustration of a black hole X-ray binary. The strong gravity of the black hole (shown as a…
Ceres may have had long-standing energy to fuel habitability
Dwarf planet Ceres is shown in these enhanced-color renderings that use images from NASA’s Dawn mission. New thermal…
Watching how stars come into being using cosmic simulations
This simulation shows how the first galaxies in the universe came into existence. They were recently discovered by…