Physicists have confirmed a 200-year-old prediction about how heat crosses boundaries in matter heated to 200,000°C—more than 35 times hotter than the surface of the Sun—with direct consequences for inertial confinement fusion research, according to findings published by C.H. Allen and collaborators in Nature Communications. Fourier’s Toll Booth and Interfacial Thermal Resistance in Extreme Matter … Read more
Physicists at Penn State have proposed a new framework to calculate the entropy of black holes, moving beyond the 50-year-old paradigm established by Stephen Hawking. By replacing “event horizons” with “dynamical horizons,” the research team provides a method to measure thermodynamics in black holes that are actively merging, growing, or evaporating, according to a study … Read more
Solar storm risks to Earth’s infrastructure may be significantly underestimated because there is no known upper limit to how the planet responds to solar wind, according to a study published in Nature. Research led by Nithin Sivadas of NASA and Maria Walach from Lancaster University suggests that previous beliefs in a “leveling off” of atmospheric … Read more
Astronomers have identified a third giant planet, Beta Pictoris d, orbiting the young star Beta Pictoris using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Unlike traditional imaging that relies on direct light, researchers discovered the planet by detecting a unique chemical fingerprint of carbon monoxide in its atmosphere. This discovery, detailed by lead author Aidan Gibbs in … Read more
Physicists from Georgia State University (GSU) and Bolivia’s Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) have deployed a low-cost cosmic-ray detector at the Chacaltaya high-altitude observatory. This installation integrates Bolivia into the global gLOWCOST network, a project designed to monitor space-weather phenomena that threaten Earth’s power grids and infrastructure by tracking muon particles from the upper … Read more
A decades-old mystery in particle physics has reached a turning point: a new study published in Physical Review Letters effectively rules out dark matter as the source of a long-standing “seasonal” signal. By combining data from the ANAIS-112 and COSINE-100 experiments, researchers have demonstrated that the annual modulation previously reported by the DAMA/NaI experiment does … Read more
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has officially started the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a 10-year effort to create the most detailed and comprehensive record of the universe’s history. Using the world’s largest digital camera, the project aims to map potentially billions of galaxies, find asteroids, and analyze the solar system … Read more
NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) has successfully measured the magnetic fields of PSR J1101−6101, a pulsar located within the Lighthouse Nebula. By analyzing X-ray polarization, researchers found lower magnetic turbulence than previously modeled, providing new insights into how extreme, high-speed celestial objects function, according to a study published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal. Mapping … Read more
Data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) indicates that 55 Cancri e, a super-Earth located 41 light-years away, is likely a hydrogen-rich lava world. According to a study published in Nature Astronomy, the planet’s atmosphere is linked to its molten interior, suggesting that volcanic outgassing plays a primary role in shaping its chemical composition. … Read more
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured high-resolution imagery of LH 95, a stellar nursery located in the Large Magellanic Cloud. According to NASA, this region serves as a critical laboratory for studying star formation, housing approximately 2,500 pre-main-sequence stars that are actively accumulating mass but have not yet initiated nuclear fusion. These observations allow astronomers … Read more