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Category: space – Page 2

Prebiotic molecules central to life’s earliest metabolic processes—chemical reactions in cells that change food into energy—may have been born in deep space long before Earth existed, according to new research from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Chemistry.

Scientists in the W. M. Keck Research Laboratory in Astrochemistry have recreated the found in dense interstellar clouds and discovered a way for the complete set of complex carboxylic acids—critical ingredients in modern metabolism—to form without life on timescales equivalent to a few million years.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focused on molecules such as those in the Krebs cycle, a fundamental metabolic pathway used by nearly all living organisms. These molecules, which help break down nutrients to release energy, may have , forming in the icy, low-temperature environments of interstellar space.

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A new analysis of the sky has finally confirmed where the missing half of the Universe’s visible matter has been hiding.

In the space around galaxies, it lurks as huge, invisible clouds of ionized hydrogen. Normally, this would be impossible to see – but a large international team of astronomers and astrophysicists has developed a technique that reveals its hiding places, out there in the darkness amidst the stars.

Survey programs confirm the missing half of the Universe’s material takes the form of an intergalactic mist of hydrogen expelled farther from the active cores of galaxies than anybody previously thought.

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By breaking a decades-old paradigm and rethinking the role that the dimension of time plays in physics, researchers from the University of Rostock and the University of Birmingham have discovered novel flashes of light that come from and go into nothingness—like magic at first glance but with deep mathematical roots that protect against all kinds of outside perturbations. Their findings have now been published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Time is the strange dimension: Unlike its spatial siblings, it is a one-way street as the clock only ever ticks forward and never backward. Scientists have long been aware of time’s quirks, with the British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington musing about this “arrow of time” in his 1927 lectures. Nevertheless, whether it be because of or despite its uniqueness, time as a dimension for physics to play out in has long received far less attention than space.

Recently though, rapid progress in the research on so-called spatiotemporal crystals, objects with repeating patterns in time and space, has inspired a rethinking of the role time should play in our understanding of physics. Additionally, this has spawned the question of whether the uniqueness of time can be more than a mere quirk and instead lead to new effects ultimately useful in applications.

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A new kind of microscope called ELVIS is heading to the International Space Station to change how we study life in space. By creating stunning 3D holograms of cells, it allows scientists to observe how organisms adapt to microgravity and other extreme conditions. This could help us understand whe

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When a planet’s orbit brings it between Earth and a distant star, it’s more than just a cosmic game of hide and seek. It’s an opportunity for NASA to improve its understanding of that planet’s atmosphere and rings. Planetary scientists call it a stellar occultation and that’s exactly what happened with Uranus on April 7.

Observing the alignment allows NASA scientists to measure the temperatures and composition of Uranus’s stratosphere—the middle layer of a planet’s atmosphere—and determine how it has changed over the last 30 years since Uranus’s last significant occultation.

“Uranus passed in front of a star that is about 400 light years from Earth,” said William Saunders, planetary scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and science principal investigator and analysis lead, for what NASA’s team calls the Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025.

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In the context of minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), the prevailing assumption is that subjectivity is entirely absent in pure awareness. This conclusion is based on the dissolution of specific properties of subjectivity, such as the first-person perspective and self-localization in space. However, while these properties are integral to subjectivity, their absence does not negate the existence of subjectivity itself. Some individuals report experiencing a bare witness or a sense of presence that might be a default property of consciousness, with other properties(FPP) being content-induced.

Similarly, MPE is often considered timeless due to the lack of change(zero content). We propose that the very persistence of awareness—being aware of itself as the only content—could serve as a rudimentary marker for the passage of time. Imagine an opera singer holding a note: while there’s no pitch change, the experience of the sustained note creates persistence of same experience and duration. Likewise, the persistence of awareness in MPE might provide a minimal sense of time.

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Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars.

“A big question in the Central Molecular Zone of our galaxy has been, if there is so much dense gas and cosmic dust here, and we know that stars form in such clouds, why are so few stars born here?” said astrophysicist John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the principal investigators. “Now, for the first time, we are seeing directly that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in suppressing star formation, even at small scales.”

Detailed study of stars in this crowded, dusty region has been limited, but Webb’s advanced near-infrared instruments have allowed astronomers to see through the clouds to study young stars like never before.

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Neutron star mergers are collisions between neutron stars, the collapsed cores of what were once massive supergiant stars. These mergers are known to generate gravitational waves, energy-carrying waves propagating through a gravitational field, which emerge from the acceleration or disturbance of a massive body.

Collisions between neutron stars have been the topic of many theoretical physics studies, as a deeper understanding of these events could yield interesting insights into how matter behaves at extreme densities. The behavior of matter at extremely high densities is currently described by a known as the equation of state (EoS).

Recent astrophysics research has explored the possibility that EoS features, such as or a quark-hadron crossover, could be inferred from the gravitational wave spectrum observed after neuron stars have merged. However, most of these theoretical works did not consider the effects of magnetic fields on this spectrum.

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