Science

The shipping industry is planning to swap some fossil fuels for green ammonia – but that could create a major new source of nitrogen pollution

Most people don’t adhere to their New Year’s fitness resolutions. These science-backed tips can make you the exception

At his best, Iain M. Banks could be extraordinarily stylish, inventive and downright funny. So how does his genre-redefining science fiction stand up to the test of time? Emily H. Wilson rereads the greats

From windswept craters to frigid ice caps, explore Martian landscapes through the eyes of NASA’s orbiters, probes and rovers

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