Category Archives: Phys.org

Well, it’s July 12, which means (a) the Steam Summer Sale is over and (b) it’s really hot outside in the northeastern U.S. This week, researchers discovered a cool new fish and named it after Darth Vader. An analysis of the DART mission suggests that while it proved that an impactor could alter the trajectory of an asteroid, it ejected boulders in unpredictable directions that could complicate other impactor missions. And archaeologists uncovered a rock art panel that could depict an elite individual from the First Dynasty.

Sand and dust storms affect about 330 million people in over 150 countries and are taking an increasing toll on health, economies and the environment, the U.N. World Meteorological Organization says.

When the news started to spread on July 1, 2025, about a new object that was spotted from outside our solar system, only the third of its kind ever known, astronomers at Michigan State University—along with a team of international researchers—turned their telescopes to capture data on the new celestial sighting.

The European Space Agency (ESA) successfully established a transmission-reception optical link with NASA’s Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) experiment onboard its Psyche mission, located 265 million kilometers away, using two optical ground stations developed for this purpose in Greece.

NASA has selected three instruments to travel to the moon, with two planned for integration onto an LTV (Lunar Terrain Vehicle) and one for a future orbital opportunity.

Parasitic, egg-eating worms might sound like the stuff of nightmares, but they’re simply a fact of life for blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay.

There’s nowhere to park right now at the International Space Station for NASA’s next Commercial Crew Program launch, but a slot should clear next week, allowing for the launch of Crew-11 as early as July 31.

A mystery interstellar object discovered last week is likely to be the oldest comet ever seen—possibly predating our solar system by more than 3 billion years, researchers say.

In physics, there are two great pillars of thought that don’t quite fit together. The Standard Model of particle physics describes all known fundamental particles and three forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. Meanwhile, Einstein’s general relativity describes gravity and the fabric of spacetime.

On June 14 and 16, technicians installed solar panels onto NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, one of the final steps in assembling the observatory. Collectively called the Solar Array Sun Shield, these panels will power and shade the observatory, enabling all the mission’s observations and helping keep the instruments cool.

Names are a strange thing in astronomy. Sometimes scientists come up with grandiose, simple name, like the Extremely Large Telescope. Other times, they come up with unique sounding names, like quasars. And sometimes they come up with names that, while descriptive in some sense, are completely misleading in others.

To mark its third year of highly productive science, astronomers used the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope to scratch beyond the surface of the Cat’s Paw Nebula (NGC 6334), a massive, local star-forming region.

Our two-person team loaded the car with a GPS, a drone, notebooks, sample bags, a trowel and a flat spatula lovingly called a scoopula. Then we drove 30 minutes in our rented truck from Yuma, Arizona, to the Algodones Dunes, a sandy field bordering California, Arizona and Mexico. The day was sunny, with a strong breeze. Turning off the highway, we carefully headed onto a gravelly path that acted as our road.

Imagine a space telescope with a mirror stretching 50 meters across! That’s larger than the width of a U.K. soccer field and nearly eight times wider than the James Webb Space Telescope. Now imagine that this enormous mirror is made not of precisely manufactured glass segments, but of liquid floating in space. This might sound like science fiction, but it’s the cutting-edge concept behind the Fluidic Telescope (FLUTE), a joint NASA-Technion project that could revolutionize how we explore the universe.

The question of how life began has captivated humanity for millennia. Now, a team of scientists are preparing to use NASA’s upcoming Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) to test different theories about life’s origins by studying planets beyond our solar system.

In his speech for the College of Agriculture, Health and Natural Resources (CAHNR) this past spring, keynote speaker Rodney Butler ’99 (BUS), Chairman of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, told an abbreviated version of the Indigenous creation story of Skywoman.

Argentinian astronomers have employed the upgraded Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (uGMRT) to perform high-resolution radio observations of a nearby spiral galaxy designated NGC 4527. Results of the observational campaign, published July 2 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the nature of this galaxy, suggesting that it hosts an active galactic nucleus.

Women and ethnic minority groups are still significantly underrepresented in astronomy and geophysics despite attempts to bring about change over the past decade, research has shown.

US President Donald Trump on Wednesday tapped Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to serve as interim head of space agency NASA, weeks after pulling the nomination of a tech billionaire who was an ally of SpaceX boss Elon Musk.

The discovery of more than 15,000 kilometers of ancient riverbeds on Mars suggests that the Red Planet may once have been much wetter than previously thought.