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Category: space – Page 3

A white dwarf’s cosmic feeding frenzy revealed by NASA

Using NASA’s IXPE, astronomers captured an unprecedented view of a white dwarf star actively feeding on material from a companion. The data revealed giant columns of ultra-hot gas shaped by the star’s magnetic field and glowing in intense X-rays. These features are far too small to image directly, but X-ray polarization allowed scientists to map them with surprising precision. The results open new doors for understanding extreme binary star systems.

Scientists have, for the first time, used NASA’s IXPE (Imaging X-ray Polarization Explorer) to investigate a white dwarf star. The mission’s ability to measure the polarization of X-rays allowed astronomers to closely examine EX Hydrae, a type of system known as an intermediate polar. These observations provided new insight into the physical structure and behavior of powerful binary star systems.

During 2024, IXPE spent nearly a full week observing EX Hydrae. This white dwarf system lies about 200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra. The results of the study were published in the Astrophysical Journal. Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge led the work, with additional contributors from the University of Iowa, East Tennessee State University, the University of Liége, and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University.

The shape of things to come: How spheroid geometry guides multicellular orbiting and invasion

As organisms develop from embryos, groups of cells migrate and reshape themselves to form all manner of complex tissues. There are no anatomical molds shaped like lungs, livers or other tissues for cells to grow into. Rather, these structures form through the coordinated activity of different types of cells as they move and multiply.

No one is sure exactly how cells manage this collective construction of complex tissue, but a study by Brown University engineers could offer some new insights.

The study, published in Nature Physics, looked at how human epithelial cells behave as spherical aggregates confined inside a collagen matrix. The research revealed surprising ways in which cell clusters first rotate collectively within the confined space, then eventually reconfigure their surroundings to allow individual cells to venture out of the sphere.

Reentry and disintegration dynamics of space debris tracked using seismic data

Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop tools that can be used to determine the trajectory, size, nature, and potential impact locations of reentering debris in near real time. This is a critical step toward mobilizing appropriate response operations (7). In this work, we have demonstrated that open-source seismic data are capable of fulfilling this requirement.

Past work has demonstrated the sensitivity of seismometers to reentry-generated shockwaves and explosions of natural meteoroids [for example, (8–10)]. However, the trajectories, speeds, and fragmentation chains of artificial spacecraft falling from orbit are distinct from those of natural objects entering from beyond the Earth‒Moon system. This means that the patterns of debris fallout that artificial spacecraft produce are also potentially more complex; for example, some components such as fuel tanks are structurally reinforced and hence more likely to survive and impact the ground, whereas others (such as solar panels) are deliberately designed to demise during reentry. Therefore, techniques used for natural objects require modification.

Hubble Images of 3I/ATLAS During Its Rare Alignment with the Sun-Earth Axis on January 22, 2026

Good news. The rare cosmic alignment between the interstellar visitor 3I/ATLAS, the Earth and the Sun, was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope on January 22, 2026.

A new set of six 170 second exposures, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope between 13:10:30 and 13:43:33 UTC on January 22, 2026, were just posted here. The exposures display brightness maps of the glowing halo surrounding 3I/ATLAS. The glow is elongated by about 100,000 kilometers in the direction of the Sun, a length scale which is about ten times larger than the Earth’s diameter.

In a new paper that I published with Mauro Barbieri here, we alerted astronomers to this “full Moon phase” of 3I/ATLAS when observers from Earth will see it from the direction of the Sun to within an extremely small misalignment angle of just 0.012 radians. This rare alignment resulted in a brightness surge whose magnitude and growth rate are dictated by the composition and structure of the particles shed by jets of 3I/ATLAS. No new data other than the Hubble images was made public as of yet.

The Computational Unconscious: How Information Theory Reframes Psychoanalytic Depth

Read “” by Myk Eff on Medium.

When Freud first mapped the territories of the unconscious, he could only speak in the metaphors available to him — hydraulic pressures, economic systems, topographical layers. Yet the phenomena he described possess a striking affinity with concepts that would not emerge until decades later, when Claude Shannon formalized information theory and computing science revealed the architecture of data itself. What if the mechanisms Freud, Jung, and their successors laboriously documented are, at their foundation, information processing operations? What if repression is encryption, condensation is compression, and the deepest strata of the psyche represent not mystical depths but maximal data density?

The proposition is not merely metaphorical. Consider Freud’s description of repression in Repression (1915): the mechanism whereby the ego refuses admittance to consciousness of ideational content that threatens its equilibrium. Freud wrote that repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious (p. 147). Yet this keeping at a distance operates through a curious transformation. The repressed content does not vanish; it persists, inaccessible yet influential, distorting thought and behavior through its very concealment.

This is precisely analogous to encrypted data. Encryption transforms information into a form that resists interpretation without the proper key, yet the information remains fully present, its structure intact but rendered opaque. The encrypted file occupies space, exerts influence on system resources, and can corrupt or destabilize processes that attempt to access it incorrectly. Similarly, repressed material occupies psychic space and generates symptoms — failed decryption attempts, as it were — when consciousness approaches without the therapeutic key.

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