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Neurologist Adam Zeman's excellent exploration of the power and complexity of our imaginations literally needs more space to house all its riches

Our Future Chronicles column explores an imagined history of inventions and developments yet to come. In its latest instalment, Rowan Hooper reveals how by 2029, we had learned how to make synthetic spider silk, leading to a revolution in clothing

Feedback explores the upsides (and downsides) of Publish or Perish, a game that simulates the experience of building a career in scientific research

This month marks a year since the malaria vaccine rollout began. Here's what we still need in order to beat a disease as old as ancient Egypt, says Azra Ghani

A series of events, from the California wildfires to evidence we passed 1.5 degrees last year, suggests wild weather will become even more common

Night-time collisions with robotic lawnmowers are a significant animal welfare and conservation problem for hedgehogs as these often suffer serious or even fatal injuries. In order to make the operation of robotic lawnmowers hedgehog-safe, researchers are developing special hedgehog dummies and standardized tests to prevent fatal collisions.

New observational data and simulation models have confirmed a new type of planet unlike anything found in the Solar System. This provides another piece of the puzzle to understand how planets and planetary systems form.

Hot Jupiters are giant planets initially known to orbit alone close to their star. During their migration towards their star, these planets were thought to accrete or eject any other planets present. However, this paradigm has been overturned by recent observations, and the final blow could come from a new study demonstrating the existence of a planetary system, WASP-132, with an unexpected architecture. It not only contains a Hot Jupiter but also an inner Super-Earth and an icy giant planet.

A team of researchers has succeeded in exploring the limits of the so-called island of stability within the super-heavy nuclides more precisely by measuring the super-heavy rutherfordium-252 nucleus, which is now the shortest-lived known super-heavy nucleus.

By combining data from the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys and the Gemini South telescope, astronomers have investigated three ultra-faint dwarf galaxies that reside in a region of space isolated from the environmental influence of larger objects. The galaxies, located in the direction of NGC 300, were found to contain only very old stars, supporting the theory that events in the early Universe cut star formation short in the smallest galaxies.

An international team of engineers has developed an innovative, scalable method for creating topography-patterned aluminum surfaces, enhancing liquid transport properties critical for applications in electronics cooling, self-cleaning technologies and anti-icing systems.

Methane from the destroyed Nord Stream pipelines spread over a large part of the southern Baltic Sea and remained for several months.

A milestone in graphene research: Chemists have succeeded in controlling the passage of halide ions by deliberately introducing defects into a two-layer nanographene system. Their paper shows new perspectives for applications in water filtration or sensor technology.

Water is the essence of life. Every living thing on Earth contains water within it. The Earth is rich with life because it is rich with water. This fundamental connection between water and life is partly due to water’s extraordinary properties, but part of it is due to the fact that water is one of the most abundant molecules in the Universe. Made from one part oxygen and two parts hydrogen, its structure is simple and strong. The hydrogen comes from the primordial fire of the Big Bang and is by far the most common element. Oxygen is created in the cores of large stars, along with carbon and nitrogen, as part of the CNO fusion cycle.

Because of its origin, we’ve generally thought that oxygen (and correspondingly water) grew in abundance over time. From the first stars to the present day, each generation cast oxygen into space in its dying moments. So, while water was rare in the early Universe, it is relatively common now. But a new study suggests that isn’t the case.

Astronomers categorize stars into populations depending on their age and metallicity, where “metals” are any elements other than hydrogen and helium. The youngest and most metal-rich stars, such as the Sun, are called Population I. Older stars with fewer metals are Population II. The oldest stars, the very first stars to appear in the Universe, are known as Population III. Though we haven’t observed Pop III stars directly, they would have been enormous stars made entirely of hydrogen and helium. The first seeds of everything we see around us, from oceans to trees to beloved friends, formed within these first stars. A new study on the arXiv argues that Pop III stars also flooded the cosmos with water.

In their study, the team modeled the explosions of small (13 solar mass) and large (200 solar mass) early stars. The large stars would have been the very first stars formed from primordial clouds, while the smaller stars would have been the first stars to form in early stellar nurseries. Not quite Pop III stars, but with very low metallicity. When the smaller stars died, they exploded as typical supernovae, but when the large stars died, they exploded as brilliant pair-instability supernovae.

Based on simulations, these stars would have greatly enriched the environment with water. The molecular clouds formed from the remnants of these stars had 10 to 30 times the water fraction of diffuse molecular clouds seen in the Milky Way today. Based on this, the team argues that by 100 to 200 million years after the Big Bang, there was enough water and other elements in molecular clouds for life to form.

Whether life actually did appear in the Universe so early is an unanswered question. There is also the fact that while water formed early, ionization and other astrophysical processes may have broken up many of these molecules. Water might have been plentiful early on, but the Universe entered a dry period before Pop II and Pop I stars generated the water levels we see today. But it’s possible that much of the water around us came from the very first stars.

Reference: Whalen, Daniel J., Muhammad A. Latif, and Christopher Jessop. “Abundant Water from Early Supernovae at Cosmic Dawn.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.02051 (2025).

The post The First Supernovae Flooded the Early Universe With Water appeared first on Universe Today.

Genetic evidence from Iron Age Britain shows that women tended to stay within their ancestral communities, suggesting that social networks revolved around women

Scientists are scrambling to understand how climate change may be interfering with the winds that carry our weather, with potentially catastrophic consequences

The Chinese social media apps Red Note and Lemon8 have become popular alternatives for TikTok users ahead of a US government ban on TikTok. But government restrictions loom over those apps too

There’s plenty of action at the center of the galaxy, where a supermassive black hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*) literally holds the galaxy together. Part of that action is the creation of gigantic flares from Sgr A*, which can give off energy equivalent to 10 times the Sun’s annual energy output. However, scientists have been missing a key feature of these flares for decades – what they look like in the mid-infrared range. But now, a team led by researchers at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics and the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy has published a paper that details what a flare looks like in those frequencies for the first time.

Astronomers have been observing Sgr A* since the 1990s and have known about the flares, which were initially seen as variances in the SMBH’s brightness. It has been observed with all manner of telescopes, including the Chandra X-ray observatory and, perhaps most famously, the Event Horizon Telescope, which was responsible for the famous first image of M87*, another black hole at the center of the Messier galaxy. EHT also released an image from Sgr A* itself in May of 2022.

So far, those observations have been in visible light through infrared and from far infrared up through X-rays. There has always been a gap in the middle of the infrared range. Several factors explain this gap.

Fraser talks about imaging Sgr A*

First, Sgr A* is relatively weak in the mid-infrared range compared to other ranges, so it doesn’t stand out as much against the background noise of the universe. Second, much of the mid-infrared emissions get obscured by the dust cloud surrounding the SMBH at the galaxy’s center, blocking it from detectors at Earth 28,000 light years away. Third, there were technological limitations to infrared sensors themselves. There were ground-based telescopes that could have detected the signal, but the Earth’s atmosphere blocked even more of it.

That required scientists to wait for the long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). When it finally launched in late 2021, it was only a matter of time before they would get observational time to watch Sgr A* and hopefully observe a flare with the most powerful infrared detector ever launched into orbit. 

JWST did indeed get observational time with Sgr A* and saw a flare, representing the first-ever recording of a flare in the mid-infrared range. But the research team didn’t stop there – they were also watching with several other telescopes for confirmation of the JWST signal.

Fraser talks about other features of Sgr A*

They didn’t find any in the X-ray range with Chandra, though that was probably because the flare wasn’t strong enough to emit a significant amount of X-rays. But they did see a signal from the Sub-Millimeter Array (SMA) in Hawai’i, which detected radio waves following along about 10 minutes behind the detected mid-infrared signal.

That confirmation was necessary because it allowed the experimentalists to provide even more insight about the same flare to the theoreticians. Their job is then to confirm the models and simulations of what causes the flares in the first place. The current theory is that they occur when magnetic field lines in the SMBH’s accretion disk join up and emit massive amounts of radiation in a process known as synchrotron emission. In synchrotron emission, a bunch of charged particles – typically electrons – get pushed down the magnetic field lines like they were part of a massive particle accelerator.

The data from JWST fits nicely into that theory. However, there appear to be additional unanswered questions about whether that feature was specific to Sgr A* or whether it could be observed for other SMBHs such as M87*. For now, that remains to be seen, though given the interest in this particular black hole in this specific wavelength, while this might have been the first study published on the topic, it probably won’t be the last.

Learn More:
CfA – Scientists Make First-Ever Detection of Mid-IR Flares in Sgr A*
von Fellenberg et al – First mid-infrared detection and modeling of a flare from Sgr A*
UT – Echoes of Flares from the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole
UT – A Black Hole Emitted a Flare Away From us, but its Intense Gravity Redirected the Blast Back in our Direction

Lead Image:
This artist’s conception of the mid-IR flare in Sgr A* captures the variability, or changing intensity, of the flare as the black hole’s magnetic field lines approach each other. The byproduct of this magnetic reconnection is synchrotron emission. The emission seen in the flare intensifies as energized electrons travel along the SMBH’s magnetic field lines at close to the speed of light. The labels mark how the flare’s spectral index changes from the beginning to the end of the flare.
Credit: CfA/Mel Weiss

The post Astronomers See Flares Coming from the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole appeared first on Universe Today.

My hospital just reinstituted mask mandates for all staff working with patients. They also advise patients to wear masks while in the hospital, but have not made it a requirement. I still have a stash of N95 masks so it was easy, and all too familiar, for me to comply, but I admit it created an unpleasant flash-back. All things considered, I […]

The post COVID Is Still Here, But Changing first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Middle-aged mice fed golden oyster mushrooms had healthier hearts, suggesting an antioxidant in the fungi protects against the effects of ageing