Category Archives: Phys.org

The mass extinction at the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods was catastrophic, wiping out much of life on Earth. Vertebrate groups that dominated at the time, such as dinosaurs and many large marine reptiles, fell victim to the effects of the asteroid impact about 66 million years ago. However, the catastrophe did not affect all organisms to the same extent: turtles, for example, survived with only minimal losses. Their chance of survival was apparently linked to their diet: species with a preference for hard-shelled organisms survived the catastrophic event.

A team of NASA researchers is developing new types of optical masks that could help enable the many orders of magnitude of starlight suppression needed for future space observatories to pick out very faint habitable exoplanets from the far brighter glare of their stellar hosts.

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered a new red galaxy at a redshift of approximately 11.45. The newfound galaxy, which received designation EGS-z11-R0, turns out to be the most distant red galaxy detected to date. The discovery was detailed in a paper published March 18 on the arXiv pre-print server.

NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer) mission has taken a new observation of a supernova, RCW 86, helping fill in a fuller picture of what other telescopes have observed.

Pulsars are ultra-dense, rapidly spinning, and highly magnetized remnants of dead stars. They act like cosmic lighthouses, sending out regular pulses of radio waves and sometimes gamma rays in beams that sweep across the sky. A special class called millisecond pulsars spins hundreds of times per second and is among the most precise clocks in the universe. For decades, astronomers believed that a pulsar’s radio signals are only produced close to the star’s surface, near its magnetic poles.

It may well take years to prove, but a pair of University of Miami astrophysicists could be on the verge of a cosmic breakthrough that will confirm the existence of primordial black holes and the role they play in one of cosmology’s greatest mysteries.

NASA’s Artemis 2 lunar mission is set to be the first crewed flyby of the moon in more than half a century, and could launch as soon as April 1.

The four astronauts selected for the Artemis 2 moon mission will be the first to travel there in more than five decades.

More than half a century after the groundbreaking Apollo program’s last crewed flight to the moon, three men and one woman are preparing for a lunar journey set to turn a new page in American space exploration.

Jason Jenkins was driving to work before dawn when a bright green streak beamed across the sky.

A study published in The Journal of Wildlife Management found varying risks to species due to mercury pollution across the United States’ National Wildlife Refuge System, the world’s largest network of lands and waters conserved specifically for fish, wildlife, and their habitats.

Astronomers at the University of Warwick have validated over 100 exoplanets, including 31 newly detected planets, using a new artificial intelligence tool applied to data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), a space mission that monitors the sky for the subtle dimming of starlight caused when planets pass in front of their host stars.

Could the rules of the options market be quietly costing you ten times more than your stock trades? A recent study in The Review of Financial Studies uncovers how current market rules protect high profits for option wholesalers and create significant financial incentives for brokers to favor option trading over stocks. The work is titled “Payment for Order Flow and Option Internalization.”

NASA’s chief on Tuesday said the US space agency will invest $20 billion to develop a base on the moon, while suspending its plans to create the lunar orbital space station known as Gateway.

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), which include GPS, are traditionally used for positioning, timing, and mapping information. In an open-access study published Feb. 27 in Geophysical Research Letters, MIT Haystack Observatory scientists report using existing GNSS satellites, in conjunction with 13 stations installed on the Ross Ice Shelf (RIS) in Antarctica, to measure atmospheric turbulence above the ice shelf that may have contributed to an unusual extensive surface melting in January 2016.

Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal.

NASA’s chief on Tuesday said the US space agency “intends to pause” its Gateway project that would have created a space station in orbit around the moon, instead shifting focus toward “building a lunar base.”

Astronomers have observed two planets forming in the disk around a young star named WISPIT 2. Having previously detected one planet, the team has now employed European Southern Observatory (ESO) telescopes to confirm the presence of another. These observations, and the unique structure of the disk around the star, indicate that the WISPIT 2 system could resemble a young solar system.

A new data visualization illustrates how an experimental NASA technology can provide extra lead time to communities in the path of a tsunami. Called GUARDIAN (GNSS Upper Atmospheric Real-time Disaster Information and Alert Network), the software detects slight distortions in satellite navigation signals to spot hazards on the move.

For the last few decades, researchers have been studying what the universe looked like in its first seconds. It is generally accepted that the universe expanded exponentially in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers use ns, the scalar spectral index, to characterize how primordial density fluctuations were distributed across different length scales in the early universe. The value of ns is a central observable in inflationary cosmology, since different inflationary scenarios predict distinct values for this quantity, making it a powerful discriminator between models.