News

A newly discovered comet is diving towards the Sun. Will it become the spectacle of the century or disintegrate in the heat? On January 13, amateur astronomers in the Atacama desert spotted a faint object. Named C/2026 A1 (MAPS), it was quickly identified as a member of the legendary Kreutz Sungrazers—a family of comets that includes some of the brightest ever seen.

NWA 7034 is a masterpiece of Martian geology. New CT scanning technology allows us to look inside this 4.48-billion-year-old rock without crushing a single grain. Historically, studying meteorites meant destroying them—cutting, crushing, or dissolving samples to unlock their secrets. But a new paper by Estrid Naver (Technical University of Denmark) demonstrates a better way.

A black hole shredded a star years ago. But instead of fading, it's been "burping" out a radio jet that is growing exponentially brighter. Normally, when a black hole eats a star (a Tidal Disruption Event), it's a flash in the pan. The star gets shredded, flares up, and fades away.

Using TESS and Swift data, astronomers have detected rare, rhythmic pulses in the chaotic jets of distant galaxies. Blazars are the monsters of the universe: supermassive black holes shooting jets of plasma directly at Earth at nearly the speed of light. They are usually chaotic and unpredictable.

Deep in a gas-rich cosmic web, astronomers found something that shouldn't be there: a massive, dead galaxy shaped like a potato. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team led by Weichen Wang discovered a massive red galaxy dubbed "Red Potato." It sits in a node of the cosmic web (MQN01) that is overflowing with cool gas—the fuel for stars.

When a sun dies, it swells into a monster that devours its children. New research reveals the grim odds for planets hoping to survive the Red Giant phase.Billions of years from now, our sun will run out of hydrogen. It will not fade quietly. It will swell into a Red Giant, expanding its radius hundreds of times, engulfing Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth.

Is Dark Matter real, or is our understanding of gravity wrong? A new study suggests gravity itself might change shape at cosmic distances. For decades, astronomers have observed that galaxies spin too fast. According to Newton's laws, stars on the edges should fly off into space, yet they hold together. To explain this, physics postulated Dark Matter—invisible mass holding galaxies together. For decades, astronomers have observed that galaxies spin too fast. According to Ne

For 50 years, we thought we knew Jupiter's size. New radio data from the Juno spacecraft has just rewritten the textbooks. Since the Voyager missions of the 1970s, our understanding of Jupiter's shape has been based on just six measurements. Now, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science have used 26 new measurements from NASA's Juno spacecraft to create the most precise model of the gas giant ever made.

Toxic soil on Mars was supposed to kill our building bacteria. Instead, it made them build stronger. Mars is covered in Perchlorate, a toxic salt that poses a major challenge for future colonizers. Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) feared this chemical would kill the bacteria needed to manufacture "biocement" bricks from Martian soil.

A new survey has produced the clearest map yet of the Milky Way's magnetic field, revealing a structure far more complex than we ever imagined. Working at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO) in Penticton, BC, a team led by UBC Okanagan researchers has completed the DRAGONS survey.

Physicists have designed a new trap for "ultralight" dark matter using lasers and mirrors. The trick? Catching the universe breathing. Dark matter accounts for most of the universe's mass, yet we can't see it. One hypothesis suggests it isn't made of heavy particles, but ultralight waves that flow through the galaxy.

Ancient solar storms left radioactive fingerprints in trees around the world. But new research shows that trees are imperfect narrators of history. When massive solar storms—known as Miyake events—hit Earth, they bombard the atmosphere with high-energy particles, creating radioactive carbon-14. Trees absorb this carbon and lock it into their annual growth rings, preserving a record of the event.