For decades, the motions of stars near the center of our Milky Way Galaxy have been treated as some of the clearest evidence for a supermassive black hole. But Dr. Valentina Crespi from the Institute of Astrophysics La Plata and colleagues suggest that a radically different kind of compact object — one made of self-gravitating
Recreating a piece of the universe in a bottle might sound like science fiction, but it’s exactly what Linda Losurdo did. Losurdo, a doctoral student in materials and plasma physics at the University of Sydney, used simple gases and electricity to recreate conditions usually found in the vicinity of stars and supernovas to produce a
Satellites have tracked week-by-week changes in sea level for 33 years, and NASA has now opened the record. That public stream exposes sudden bumps and dips that can worsen coastal flooding well before yearly averages show the change. Weekly sea level record goes public NASA posted weekly maps from NASA Sea Surface Height
If a plagiarized paper by an author who claims he didn’t write it disappears from a journal’s website with no notice, did it ever exist in the first place? It’s not just a philosophical question for the researcher whose published paper turned up in another journal under someone else’s name. As a master’s student in
Some 400 million years ago, long before dinosaurs or even trees had evolved, an enigmatic organism towered over the landscape like a prehistoric monolith. Now, new research makes the case that the ancient life form is not a plant, animal or fungi and instead may be a completely unknown form of multicellular life. “What we
New research suggests that dark matter, the universe’s most puzzling and mysterious substance, may not exist. But removing dark matter from our cosmological models could hinge on the possibility that gravity behaves differently on very large scales, one scientist says. Dark matter has been a thorn in the side of physicists because, despite outweighing ordinary
A brief, high-energy signal recorded last year has become a focal point in astrophysics. The event, lasting ten seconds, came from a time when the universe was only a fraction of its current age. It has now been confirmed as the most distant supernova observed to date. The signal’s exceptional distance, traced back more than
Jupiter hasn’t shrunk, but our best measurement of it just did. Using fresh data from NASA’s Juno spacecraft, scientists say the solar system’s largest planet is slightly smaller and squatter than decades-old estimates suggested, reports Smithsonian Magazine. The revised dimensions, published in Nature Astronomy, trim roughly 15 miles off Jupiter’s polar height and about
A long-standing boundary in organic chemistry has just been crossed. At the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers have synthesized a class of molecules that had, until now, remained a theoretical impossibility. Their creation marks a turning point in how chemists think about structural constraints at the molecular level. The focus is a rare class
Surprisingly, a toxic compound found on Mars could help bacteria produce brick-like substances that could be used to assemble habitats on the Red Planet. In 2025, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science showed how the bacterium Sporosarcina pasteurii, which is commonly found in Earth soils, could help create bricks out of regolith on the