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Science news: space, biology, climate, medicine and the research changing how we live.
Scanning electron microscopy and X-ray tomography of ash and lapilli from Etna, Stromboli and La Palma's Cumbre Vieja found sutures, welded clasts and re-broken crystals that record repeated fragmentation. The size of what comes out, which sets how far ash travels and how long airports close, depends on the healing as much as the breaking.
The JADES overdensity, four times denser than its surroundings, holds nearly half of all star formation in its patch of sky. Lyman-alpha light that should be swallowed by neutral hydrogen leaks out strongest at its core, the signature of an ionized cavity about 6 megaparsecs across.
A new three-way diagnostic separates starlight, black-hole radiation and shocks pixel by pixel. It suggests active black holes can trigger star formation as well as choke it.
Two known mechanisms did the damage, but only if the first one fired at the exact moment the solar wind crushed the magnetosphere. Standard forecasting models miss that timing entirely.
VT J1906+0849 is the brightest transient in the entire VLA Sky Survey. Its brightness temperature is up to 10 billion kelvin, gas near it moves at thousands of kilometers per second, and it flared again in late 2025. Nothing in the catalog of known galactic sources fits.
A new feasibility study in Frontiers in Space Technologies finds power is easy at the lunar poles and water is the wall. A village of 1,000 could last for centuries; the 'self-growing cities' pitched by Musk and Bezos could not.
David Kipping's search of LP 890-9c is by far the most sensitive exomoon hunt ever done. It rules out anything the size of Europa, Rhea or Umbriel, and it shows JWST has no noise floor stopping it from finding moons that small.
X-rays flared on schedule during AT 2016blu's March 2026 outburst and were absent in Chandra data from 2001–02. The star is the first known luminous blue variable with a compact companion.
A DLR team mapped surface roughness across the whole planet and found the roughest regions show the fewest contraction scarps. Correcting for what impacts buried brings Mercury's cooling history back in line with physics.
The first stellar occultation ever planned and observed with JWST shows Chariklo's inner ring getting denser while its outer ring thins out. Rings around small bodies were supposed to be stable.
JAXA says the July 5 flyby of asteroid Torifune produced the first successful laser-ranging measurement of an asteroid, a technique that sharpens the orbit predictions planetary defense depends on.
Max Planck and University of Colorado researchers tied the energy of the 300 strongest flares of 2010–2016 to the size of the active regions that produced them, then applied the relationship to 400 years of sunspot records. The biggest spot ever logged could, statistically, have fired a burst beyond anything ever measured on our star.
Massive stars elsewhere in the galaxy come in pairs about 69% of the time. In the S cluster around Sagittarius A*, only 43% do. Tracking 100,000 simulated binaries shows tidal forces destroy or merge roughly the right number, which points to the stars forming where they are.
A Paris-Saclay team used Mars Express and MRO spectrometers to rule out liquid water and CO2 geysers at Sisyphi Cavi. The timing points to slabs of carbon dioxide frost sliding downhill on a cushion of sublimating gas, like an air-hockey puck.
Kyoto University researchers say the asteroid's parent body concentrated nitrogen as its briny water froze or evaporated, acting as a slow chemical reactor.
Twin stars form from the same cloud and should match chemically. HD 129171 does not — and the element that proves it is one stars cannot make themselves.
A 1.4-mile core through the roots of an ancient mountain range holds a chemical logbook of life switching on and off underground.
Jan Mayen has been seismically active for as long as anyone has watched it. Forty years of satellite images show nothing like the debris field the March 2025 quake produced.
PSR J1227-4853 spins 592 times a second. Indian astronomers found 235 giant pulses in 174 hours of observation, some 10,000 times brighter than the star's ordinary signal.
The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys released their 11th data set on Monday, covering roughly three-quarters of the sky. More than 160 scientists and four telescopes built it, and anyone can open it in a browser.
DR20 includes half a million black hole spectra, 1.5 million Milky Way stars and the survey's first optical spectroscopy from the Southern Hemisphere — all of it free to anyone who wants it.
Southwest Research Institute modeling that accounts for how strong the colliding rock actually was found the Moon can form intact almost immediately — if Earth and Theia were cold enough.
A new tidal model run out over 4.5 billion years finds the missing Venusian moon needs no catastrophe to explain. The planet killed it, in as little as 30 million years.
Isar Aerospace's 28-meter Spectrum rocket lifted off from Andoya, Norway shortly after 8 p.m. GMT Sunday. The company says it is the first privately developed rocket to reach orbit from continental Europe.
Jose Maria Moreno Madrid found De Tellescopiis Stellarum, written by the Spanish Dominican friar Ignacio Munoz. If the attribution holds, Galileo was building four-lens designs at least 13 years before the earliest known example.
The European and Japanese probes separated from their transfer module on Saturday, with no help possible from Earth. ESA calls the arrival sequence the most operationally difficult ever attempted at a planet.
Working from OSIRIS-REx samples, researchers measured the asteroid's surface strength at under one pascal and built a framework linking that strength to the size and shape of individual grains.
AF3-ReD adds a repulsive term between successive AlphaFold3 predictions so the model cannot keep returning the same structure. On ATP synthase's F1-beta subunit it recovered the open state, the closed state, and the intermediates between them.
A $30 million rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin weeks after launch and never recovered its pointing. After 22 years of catching gamma-ray bursts, Swift is falling about five miles a month.
UC Riverside geophysicists say ground-deformation data can map the patches where strain piles up before a great earthquake. The method says where, not when.