Science & Research
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UC Irvine-Led Team Revises Nearby Exoplanet GJ 3378b to a Lighter, More Earth-Like Mass Inside the Habitable Zone
A UC Irvine-led study cut GJ 3378b's estimated mass and orbital period, placing the nearby super-Earth more solidly within its star's habitable zone.
Euclid Discovers 31 Ancient Quasars, Setting a New Redshift Record for the Most Distant Quasar Ever Reported
ESA's Euclid telescope has found 31 quasars from the universe's first billion years. EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, at redshift 7.77, breaks a record that stood since 2021, and the haul more than doubles the known quasars at redshift 7 or above.
Webb Finds Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS May Be 10 to 12 Billion Years Old, With 30 Times the Deuterium of Solar System Comets
James Webb's NIRSpec spectrograph measured isotopic ratios in interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it left the inner solar system, pointing to an origin during the universe's 'cosmic noon.'
NASA's Lucy Reveals Asteroid Donaldjohanson Is a Wobbling, Peanut-Shaped Relic of a 155-Million-Year-Old Collision With Traces of Past Water
Science paper details the bilobate asteroid Lucy flew past in 2025: a slow end-over-end tumble, a 26.5-day wobble, and iron-rich clays that hint at ancient liquid water.
Birmingham Physicist Builds a Cold-Atom 'Mini-Universe' to Test the Problem of Time, Showing Time Can Emerge From Internal Entropy
Giovanni Barontini used 24,000 ultracold rubidium atoms to test whether time can be defined from a system's internal disorder rather than an external clock.
Oxford Physicists Build a New Family of Schrödinger's Cat States From Highly Non-Classical Components
Using a single trapped strontium-88 ion, an Oxford group built cat states whose components are themselves squeezed and trisqueezed states, reporting Wigner negativity and greater quantum resourcefulness than standard cat or Fock states.
NASA's Juno Catches Jupiter's Bow Shock Accelerating Electrons to Near-Light Speed, Yielding a Scaling Law for Cosmic Ray Origins
Juno detected electrons reaching 1 MeV in Jupiter's foreshock, and the authors derive a scaling law linking shock size to maximum particle energy.
China's FAST Telescope Finds a Millisecond Pulsar in an Almost Perfectly Circular Orbit, a Rare Window Into Binary Evolution
PSR J1810-0623 spins 220 times a second and circles a white dwarf every 15.4 days on an orbit with an eccentricity of just 0.000015, one of the roundest pulsar binaries known.
Webb Spectrum of GLIMPSE-17775 Delivers Strongest Evidence Yet That 'Little Red Dots' Are Black Hole Stars
A 40-plus-line JWST spectrum of a gravitationally lensed little red dot, including a 16-line 'iron forest,' best fits a supermassive black hole cloaked in dense gas, astronomers report in The Astrophysical Journal.
Northwestern Team Detects the Milky Way Black Hole's Long-Predicted Wind, Ending a 50-Year Search
ALMA observations reveal a cone-shaped cavity carved into cold gas around Sagittarius A*, the first clear evidence of a wind blowing from the galaxy's central black hole.
JWST Maps a Dawn-Dusk Divide on Ultra-Hot Jupiter WASP-121 b, Where the Evening Sky Runs Hotter and Water Falls Apart
A rotational-transit study in Nature Astronomy finds WASP-121 b's evening terminator is hotter and more expanded than its morning side, with upper-atmosphere water broken into its constituent atoms.
Physicists Propose the Amaterasu Particle Is Heavier Than Iron, Reframing the Universe's Most Energetic Cosmic Rays as Ultraheavy Nuclei
A Penn State-led study in Physical Review Letters argues that the highest-energy cosmic rays, including the Amaterasu particle, may be nuclei heavier than iron that lose energy slowly enough to reach Earth.