An experimental green rocket thruster has successfully ignited at room temperature using electricity instead of a preheated catalyst bed, according to research reported in Space: Science & Technology. The system passes electrical current directly through ammonium dinitramide (ADN) propellant to generate Joule heat, offering a potential path around the lengthy warm-up times and severe durability … Read more
Astronomers have discovered that star clusters do not always form with the same balance of small and large stars, challenging a foundational assumption used for more than half a century to measure galaxies, according to University of Missouri researchers who analyzed data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The finding shows that a key … Read more
According to special relativity, a photon crossing a billion light-years accumulates no elapsed time along its path, experiencing zero proper time between its emission and absorption. While observers on Earth measure a journey lasting a billion years, the photon’s path contains no elapsed time, exposing how differently the universe treats light, motion, and time. Time … Read more
A violent asteroid collision roughly 800 million years ago likely triggered a bombardment of the inner solar system, according to research led by the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). The breakup of a parent body in the main asteroid belt, which formed the Eulalia asteroid family, sent a cascade of debris toward Earth, the Moon, and … Read more
When two black holes collide, they do not simply vanish into silence; they ring like a struck bell, shedding energy through gravitational waves in a process known as “ringdown.” According to a review, scientists are now using these fading vibrations to perform “black hole spectroscopy,” turning the aftermath of cosmic mergers into a precision laboratory … Read more
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured a high-resolution image of Centaurus A, a galaxy located 11 million light-years from Earth. The observation, marking the fourth anniversary of the telescope’s mission, reveals new details of a galactic merger that occurred 2 billion years ago, including the mechanics of its supermassive black hole and ongoing … Read more
New research suggests dark matter may not have required a cold, calm start to facilitate the formation of the universe. A study indicates that dark matter particles could have originated at near-light speeds—behaving as “hot” matter—before cooling sufficiently to seed the cosmic structures, such as galaxies, that we observe today. This finding challenges the four-decade-old … Read more
Astronomers have identified a new millisecond pulsar, designated PSR J0125−5854, using the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA). The pulsar, which exhibits a rotation period of 24.6 milliseconds, is located between 1,600 and 3,200 light-years from Earth and is believed to exist within a binary system alongside a white dwarf star. What is a millisecond pulsar? Pulsars … Read more
Scientists have identified a massive, dense anomaly buried hundreds of miles beneath the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin, a discovery that suggests a violent origin for the lunar surface’s largest scar. According to research published in Geophysical Research Letters, the mass—weighing at least 2.18 × 10¹⁸ kilograms—likely consists of metallic debris from an ancient asteroid impact … Read more
Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have captured the movement of optical singularities—dark points within a light field—that appear to travel faster than the speed of light. Published in the journal Nature, the study tracks these phenomena within hexagonal boron nitride (hBN), revealing that these points can exceed light speed without violating Einstein’s theory … Read more