Space & Time News

October 7, 2023

Top Headlines

Scientists Discover the Highest Energy Gamma-Rays Ever from a Pulsar

Oct. 5, 2023 — Scientists have detected the highest energy gamma rays ever from a dead star called a pulsar. The energy of these gamma rays clocked in at 20 tera-electronvolts, or about ten trillion times the energy of visible light. This observation is hard to ...

Down Goes Antimatter! Gravity's Effect on Matter's Elusive Twin Is Revealed

Sep. 27, 2023 — For the first time, in a unique laboratory experiment at CERN, researchers have observed individual atoms of antihydrogen fall under the effects of gravity. In confirming antimatter and regular matter are gravitationally attracted, the finding rules ...

Study Sheds New Light on Strange Lava Worlds

Sep. 27, 2023 — In a new study, scientists have shown that sweeping molten oceans have a large influence on the observed properties of hot rocky Super-Earths, such as their size and evolutionary ...

Did Life Exist on Mars? Other Planets? With AI's Help, We May Know Soon

Sep. 25, 2023 — Scientists have discovered a simple and reliable test for signs of past or present life on other planets -- 'the holy grail of astrobiology.' Researchers report that, with 90% accuracy, their artificial intelligence-based method distinguished modern ...

Latest Headlines

updated 9:03pm EDT

Astronomers Discover First Step Toward Planet Formation

Oct. 6, 2023 — Astronomers have gotten very good at spotting the signs of planet formation around stars. But for a complete understanding of planet formation, we also need to study examples where planet formation ...

Pulsars May Make Dark Matter Glow

Oct. 6, 2023 — The central question in the ongoing hunt for dark matter is: what is it made of? One possible answer is that dark matter consists of particles known as axions. A team of astrophysicists has now shown ...

Plot Thickens in Hunt for Ninth Planet

Oct. 5, 2023 — A pair of theoretical physicists are reporting that the same observations inspiring the hunt for a ninth planet might instead be evidence within the solar system of a modified law of gravity ...

Large Mound Structures on Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth May Have Common Origin

Oct. 3, 2023 — A new study posits that the large, approximately 5-kilometer-long mounds that dominate the appearance of the larger lobe of the pristine Kuiper Belt ...

A Prehistoric Cosmic Airburst Preceded the Advent of Agriculture in the Levant

Oct. 3, 2023 — Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth’s atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent ...

Study Quantifies Satellite Brightness, Challenges Ground-Based Astronomy

Oct. 3, 2023 — The ability to have access to the Internet or use a mobile phone anywhere in the world is taken more and more for granted, but the brightness of Internet and telecommunications satellites that enable ...

Bursts of Star Formation Explain Mysterious Brightness at Cosmic Dawn

Oct. 3, 2023 — In the James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) first images of the universe’s earliest galaxies, the young galaxies appear too bright, too massive and too mature to have formed so soon after the ...

Ethical Guidelines Needed Before Human Research in Commercial Spaceflight Is Ready for Liftoff

Sep. 28, 2023 — Before human research is conducted during commercial spaceflights, it should be 'ethically cleared to launch,' according to a global team of ...

Extreme Weight Loss: Star Sheds Unexpected Amounts of Mass Just Before Going Supernova

Sep. 27, 2023 — A newly discovered nearby supernova whose star ejected up to a full solar mass of material in the year prior to its explosion is challenging the ...

New Proof for Black Hole Spin

Sep. 27, 2023 — The supermassive black hole at the heart of galaxy M87, made famous by the first picture of a black hole shadow, has yielded another first: the jet shooting out from the black hole has been confirmed ...

Earlier Headlines

Summaries
Headlines

New 'Assembly Theory' Unifies Physics and Biology to Explain Evolution and Complexity

Oct. 4, 2023 — An international team of researchers has developed a new theoretical framework that bridges physics and biology to provide a unified approach for understanding how complexity and evolution emerge in ...

Colliding Neutron Stars Provide a New Way to Measure the Expansion of the Universe

Oct. 2, 2023 — In recent years, astronomy has seen itself in a bit of crisis: Although we know that the Universe expands, and although we know approximately how fast, the two primary ways to measure this expansion ...

Novel Bacterial Proteins from Seafloor Shine Light on Climate and Astrobiology

Sep. 27, 2023 — Researchers have unveiled a remarkable discovery: the identification of novel bacterial proteins that play a vital role in the formation and stability of methane clathrates, which trap gigatons of ...

New Insights Into the Atmosphere and Star of an Exoplanet

Sep. 25, 2023 — A new study of the intriguing TRAPPIST-1 exoplanetary system has demonstrated the complex interaction between the activity of the system's star and its planetary ...

Hidden Supermassive Black Holes Reveal Their Secrets Through Radio Signals

Sep. 25, 2023 — Astronomers have found a striking link between the amount of dust surrounding a supermassive black hole and the strength of the radio emission produced in extremely bright ...

Astronomers Discover Newborn Galaxies With the James Webb Space Telescope

Sep. 22, 2023 — With the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers are now able to peer so far back in time that we are approaching the epoch where we think that the first galaxies were created. ...

Astronomers Find Abundance of Milky Way-Like Galaxies in Early Universe, Rewriting Cosmic Evolution Theories

Sep. 22, 2023 — Galaxies from the early Universe are more like our own Milky Way than previously thought, flipping the entire narrative of how scientists think about structure formation in the Universe, according to ...

Carbon Source Found on Surface of Jupiter's Moon Europa

Sep. 22, 2023 — Astronomers using data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have identified carbon dioxide in a specific region on the icy surface of ...

Shh! Quiet Cables Set to Help Reveal Rare Physics Events

Sep. 21, 2023 — Newly developed ultra-low radiation cables reduce background noise for neutrino and dark matter ...

New Mars Gravity Analysis Improves Understanding of Possible Ancient Ocean

Sep. 20, 2023 — The first use of a novel method of analyzing Mars' gravitational force supports the idea that the planet once had an extensive northern ocean. In doing so, the method defines the scope of what ...

Black Holes Eat Faster Than Previously Expected

Sep. 20, 2023 — While previous researchers have hypothesized that black holes eat slowly, new simulations indicate that black holes scarf food much faster than conventional understanding suggests. Some quasars ...

Tag Team of the James Webb Space Telescope and ALMA Captures the Core of the Most Distant Galaxy Protocluster

Sep. 20, 2023 — An international research team has used the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array to observe the most distant galaxy protocluster to date, 13.14 billion ...

New Recipes for Origin of Life May Point Way to Distant, Inhabited Planets

Sep. 19, 2023 — Life on a faraway planet -- if it's out there -- might not look anything like life on Earth. But there are only so many chemical ingredients in the universe's pantry, and only so many ways ...

New Findings Suggest Moon May Have Less Water Than Previously Thought

Sep. 18, 2023 — A team recently calculated that most of the Moon's permanently shadowed regions (PSRs) are at most around 3.4 billion years old and can contain relatively young deposits of water ice. Water ...

Groundbreaking Research Shows That the Limits of Nuclear Stability Change in Stellar Environments Where Temperatures Reach Billions of Degrees Celsius

Sep. 18, 2023 — New research is challenging the scientific status quo on the limits of the nuclear chart in hot stellar environments where temperatures reach billions of degrees ...

Engineered Compound Shows Promise in Preventing Bone Loss in Space

Sep. 18, 2023 — Mice treated aboard the International Space Station showed significantly reduced bone ...

Brilliant Galaxies of Early Universe

Sep. 15, 2023 — Scientists have used data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) as part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) Survey to change the way we think about the universe and its distant ...

Snaps Supersonic Outflow of Young Star

Sep. 14, 2023 — Herbig-Haro (HH) objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars, formed when stellar winds or jets of gas spewing from these newborn stars form shock waves colliding with nearby gas and dust ...

Carbon Atoms Coming Together in Space

Sep. 14, 2023 — Lab-based studies reveal how carbon atoms diffuse on the surface of interstellar ice grains to form complex organic compounds, crucial to reveal the chemical complexity in the ...

Electrons from Earth May Be Forming Water on the Moon

Sep. 14, 2023 — Planetary scientists have discovered that high energy electrons in Earth's plasma sheet are contributing to weathering processes on the Moon's surface and, importantly, the electrons may ...

Wednesday, October 4, 2023