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Did this star eat its planets? A new study offers clues on ‘chemical paradox’ of a binary system

Astronomers have investigated a puzzling binary star system in which two stars that may have formed together now show dramatically different chemical compositions. The new study, uploaded to the arXiv preprint server on May 29, hints at the possibility that one of the stars may have swallowed its own planets.

Generally, in binary systems, the two stars form from the same molecular cloud and, as a result, have the same age and chemical composition. Any differences in their metallicity, astronomers say, hint at an event involving mass transfer or engulfment of planetary components or other internal processes. HD 81,809 is one such peculiar system in which the stars are both sun-like G stars but are at different stages of evolution.

The primary star, HD 81809A, has crossed the main-sequence phase, depleted its hydrogen fuel in the core but hasn’t turned into a giant star yet—it is now a subgiant. On the other hand, the secondary star, HD 81809B, is still a main-sequence star. It has lithium enrichment and there is a difference in iron content between the two stars—the primary is metal-poor with an iron abundance of −0.57 dex, while the secondary has roughly solar metallicity around 0.00 dex.

Critical Te-104 decay measurements may help answer century-old alpha particle formation question

University of Tennessee, Knoxville physicists and their colleagues have made critical measurements of the lifetime and decay energy of tellurium-104 (Te-104), an important step in answering a century-old question and understanding how hundreds of nuclei decay. The results are published in Nature.

Professor Robert Grzywacz led the experimental team at the Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF) at RIKEN in Japan. He explained how the results match decades-old predictions that tellurium-104 is a special case in alpha decay, a process where an alpha particle (a strongly bound system of two protons and two neutrons) tunnels through the barrier surrounding the nucleus where it resides. Though alpha radioactivity was discovered more than 125 years ago, where the particle comes from is still a mystery, especially in nuclei that have large numbers of protons and neutrons.

“Alpha decay is the oldest decay mode,” Grzywacz said. “The big question is how the alpha particle forms in heavy nuclei, which are known to have uniform matter distribution. There must be a mechanism which causes local ‘clump’ or ‘cluster’ formation.”

Light pulses uncover Higgs mode that reshapes perovskite crystal symmetry

Waves of light and sound interact to drive electronic and structural changes in a perovskite crystal. At the atomic scale, nothing is ever truly still. Materials that appear perfectly rigid and motionless to the naked eye are in fact swarms of vibrating atoms. This motion is generally random and uncoordinated, but with the right input, the atoms in certain materials will start to move together, vibrating in sync.

These collective vibrations are a form of sound called phonons, and when tuned just right, they can influence a material’s structure and behavior in dramatic and useful ways. Researchers are working to understand and control this effect to optimize material properties and even access hidden phases of matter.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are using light to drive phonon activity in a class of materials called metal halide perovskites, whose customizable structures and photosensitivity hold promise for use in next-generation solar cells, advanced sensors and quantum information technologies.

RNA-guided transposon mechanics show use of figure-eight intermediate and direct-transfer route

IS110 transposons are a large, diverse family of bacterial insertion sequences (IS elements)—small, mobile DNA elements that can move from one genomic location to another. They have recently attracted broad interest due to the finding that some of these transposons use a bridge RNA (bRNA) to recognize both donor DNA and target DNA.

Upon this discovery, researchers hoped that bRNA-guided transposon systems could offer a genome-editing strategy distinct from classical CRISPR-Cas nucleases and thereby enable programmable DNA integration. However, it remained unclear how IS110 elements insert donor DNA into target sites and whether these elements rely on one or multiple reaction pathways.

Now, a new study led by Xue Chaoyou from the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with Lou Huiqiang at China Agricultural University and RAO Shuquan from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, answers these questions by showing that RNA-guided IS110 transposons use two mechanistically distinct pathways to mobilize DNA.

Magnetic field helps binary star systems form, new simulations indicate

New simulations show that interactions with a magnetic field can work to decrease the distance between still forming binary protostars. These results can help explain the characteristics of the binary star systems observed in the Milky Way. The results can also be extrapolated to binary black holes, giving insights into how supermassive black holes evolve.

The work is published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Stars form from clouds of interstellar gas that collapse into dense regions known as molecular cloud cores. Multiple stars form close together simultaneously, and in some cases two stars will become gravitationally bound to each other, forming a binary star system.

Physicists discover attractive forces between molecular condensates may cause running off

Inside cells, certain functions are carried out by locally adjusting molecular composition. This condensation of material results in the formation of dense droplets that can dynamically rearrange. Because of this, interactions between such dense regions determine the shaping of condensates. Scientists from the Department of Living Matter Physics at MPI-DS recently developed a model that can describe such phase separation dynamics based solely on attraction. The work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“It’s natural to think that a system with only attractive forces would form one large, stationary condensate,” explained Jacopo Romano, first author of the study.

“However, instead we observed an unexpected emergent property of chasing dynamics resulting in movement and propulsion,” he said.

Hackers Exploit Critical Everest Forms Pro WordPress Plugin Flaw to Take Over Sites

Threat actors are actively exploiting a critical security flaw in Everest Forms Pro, a WordPress plugin with about 4,000 active installations, to execute arbitrary code, leading to a complete site compromise.

The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026–3300 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution bug impacting all versions of the plugin up to, and including, 1.9.12. A patch for the flaw was released on March 18, 2026, with version 1.9.13.

“This is due to the Calculation Addon’s process_filter function concatenating user-submitted form field values into a PHP code string without proper escaping before passing it to eval,” Wordfence said.

Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager CVE-2026–20245 Flaw Actively Exploited — No Patch Available

“A vulnerability in the CLI of Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, formerly SD-WAN vManage, could allow an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root by supplying a crafted file to the affected system,” Cisco said in an advisory.

The network security company said the vulnerability is the result of insufficient validation of user-supplied input, which an attacker could exploit by uploading a crafted file to the affected system. This, in turn, could permit the attacker to perform command injection attacks and elevate their privileges as the root user.

“To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker must have netadmin privileges on the affected system,” Cisco added. “This would require valid credentials or exploitation of CVE-2026–20182 or CVE-2026–20127. Cisco is not aware of successful exploitation by other methods.”

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