https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. It's well established that the universe is expanding, but there's serious disagreement among scientists over how fast it's happening. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-hubble-tension-magnetic-fields-universe.html Astronomy Sun, 15 Feb 2026 11:30:01 EST news689869346 A study led by the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), CSIC-INTA, using modeling techniques developed at the University of Oxford, has uncovered an unprecedented richness of small organic molecules in the deeply obscured nucleus of a nearby galaxy, thanks to observations made with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). https://phys.org/news/2026-02-jwst-uncovers-rich-chemistry-nearby.html Astronomy Fri, 06 Feb 2026 11:18:34 EST news689599081 Cosmic rays are extremely fast, charged particles that travel through space at nearly the speed of light. The Amaterasu particle was detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment in the U.S. It is the second-highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed, carrying around 40 million times more energy than particles accelerated at the Large Hadron Collider. Such particles are exceedingly rare and thought to originate in some of the most extreme environments in the universe. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-amaterasu-particle-cosmic.html Astronomy Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:50:20 EST news689518201 Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has discovered a new massive and quiescent red galaxy, which they dubbed "Red Potato." The discovery was reported in a research paper published January 28 on the arXiv pre-print server. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-red-potato-galaxy-astronomers.html Astronomy Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:40:01 EST news689419747 Where starlight doesn't reach, new things are born: For the first time, an international research team has directly measured the effect of cosmic radiation in a cold molecular cloud. The observation shows how charged high-energy particles influence the gas in these lightless regions where stars are formed. Dr. Brandt Gaches, head of the Emmy Noether Group Towards the Next Generation in Cosmic Ray Astrochemistry at the University of Duisburg-Essen, was part of the effort to propose and observe these effects with the James Webb Space Telescope and provided support through astrochemical models of cosmic-ray chemistry. The findings are published in Nature Astronomy. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-cosmic-brought-ionization-dark-cloud.html Astronomy Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:30:01 EST news689348270 In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a "quasi-extremal primordial black hole," explodes. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-black-hole-physicists.html Astronomy Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:10:06 EST news689341987 A Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how the chemical building blocks of life may have formed long before Earth existed. Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate in materials and plasma physics in the School of Physics, used a simple mix of gases—nitrogen, carbon dioxide and acetylene—to mimic the harsh and dynamic environments around stars and supernova remnants. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-student-cosmic-lab-life-earth.html Astronomy Mon, 02 Feb 2026 09:40:02 EST news689247438 A team of researchers studying the uncertainties associated with a phenomenon known as cosmic birefringence has developed a method to reduce uncertainties in its observational measurements, according to a new study published in Physical Review Letters on January 27. The study is the first to quantitatively address the uncertainty surrounding the birefringence angle, which is a crucial observational quantity that could provide clues to unknown physical theories breaking the universe's left-right symmetry, and to understanding dark matter and dark energy. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-subtle-rotations-ancient-decoding-universe.html Astronomy Wed, 28 Jan 2026 11:14:25 EST news688821241 Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international team of astronomers has mapped a magnetic highway driving a powerful galactic wind into the nearby galaxy merger of Arp 220, revealing for the first time that its fast, molecular outflows are strongly magnetized and likely helping to drive metals, dust, and cosmic rays into the space around the galaxy. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-magnetic-superhighways-starburst-galaxy.html Astronomy Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:38:27 EST news688747081 Researchers from the South Pole Telescope project team looked deep into the center of the Milky Way, discovering powerful, surprising bursts of light from two accreting white dwarf systems. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-south-pole-telescope-energetic-stellar.html Astronomy Tue, 20 Jan 2026 14:58:27 EST news688143481 Curtin University researchers have demonstrated a new way to uncover the ancient history of Australia's landscapes, which could offer crucial insights into how our environment responds to geological processes and climate change and even where deposits of valuable minerals may be found. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-cosmic-clock-reveals-australian-landscapes.html Earth Sciences Sat, 17 Jan 2026 12:10:06 EST news687614974 Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time—shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-wormholes-weve-reveal-deeper-universe.html General Physics Thu, 15 Jan 2026 15:40:41 EST news687714002 Australia's iconic red landscapes have been home to Aboriginal culture and recorded in songlines for tens of thousands of years. But further clues to just how ancient this landscape is come from far beyond Earth: cosmic rays that leave telltale fingerprints inside minerals at Earth's surface. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-cosmic-clock-tiny-crystals-reveals.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:20:01 EST news687615081 At times, the sun ejects energetic material into space, which can have consequences for space-based and even ground-based electronic technology. Researchers aim to understand this phenomenon and find ways to forecast it, including how ejected material evolves as it travels through the solar system. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-path-solar-weather-paved-cosmic.html Astronomy Tue, 13 Jan 2026 10:00:12 EST news687455581 You can't see, feel, hear, taste or smell them, but tiny particles from space are constantly raining down on us. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-invisible-visible-space-particles-handheld.html General Physics Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:08:18 EST news687013681 Scientists are a step closer to solving one of the universe's biggest mysteries as new research finds evidence that two of its least understood components may be interacting, offering a rare window into the darkest recesses of the cosmos. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-dark-neutrinos-interact-standard-universe.html Astronomy Wed, 07 Jan 2026 09:58:35 EST news687002281 Using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), an international team of astronomers has discovered a spectacular bipolar outflow from the disk of a nearby galaxy known as ESO 130-G012. The finding was reported in a paper published December 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-askap-spectacular-outflow-nearby-galaxy.html Astronomy Tue, 30 Dec 2025 08:00:01 EST news686204640 The shape of the universe is not something we often think about. My colleagues and I have published a new study that suggests it could be asymmetric or lopsided, meaning not the same in every direction. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-universe-lopsided.html Astronomy Tue, 23 Dec 2025 08:28:28 EST news685700882 How common are Earth-like planets in the universe? When I started working on supernova explosions, I never imagined that my research would eventually lead me to ask a question about the origin of Earth-like planets. Yet that is exactly where it brought me. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-cosmic-rays-nearby-supernova-earth.html Astronomy Sun, 21 Dec 2025 15:00:01 EST news685011574 Southwest Research Institute's novel Compact Dual Ion Composition Experiment (CoDICE) instrument aboard NASA's Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) spacecraft has successfully collected first-light data. IMAP launched in September to help researchers better understand the boundary of the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds and protects our solar system. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-interstellar-probe-instrument.html Astronomy Tue, 16 Dec 2025 22:20:04 EST news685120580 Our universe is filled with galaxies, in all directions as far as our instruments can see. Some researchers estimate that there are as many as 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. At first glance, these galaxies might appear to be randomly scattered across space, but they're not. Careful mapping has shown that they are distributed across the surfaces of giant cosmic "bubbles" up to several hundred million light-years across. Inside these bubbles, few galaxies are found, so those regions are called cosmic voids. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow us to measure these voids with new precision, which can tell us about the history of the universe's expansion. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-nasa-roman-telescope-thousands-newfound.html Astronomy Mon, 15 Dec 2025 14:55:31 EST news685032902 Rocky planets like our Earth may be far more common than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Science Advances. It suggests that when our solar system formed, a nearby supernova (the massive explosion of a star near the end of its life) bathed it in cosmic rays containing the radioactive ingredients to make rocky, dry worlds. This mechanism could be ubiquitous across the galaxy. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-supernova-immersion-earth-planets-common.html Astrobiology Sun, 14 Dec 2025 13:00:01 EST news684768937 The European Space Agency's Swarm mission detected a large but temporary spike of high-energy protons at Earth's poles during a geomagnetic storm in November. It did this not with the scientific instruments for measuring Earth's magnetic field, but with its 'star tracker' positioning instruments—a first for the Swarm mission. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-swarm-rare-proton-spike-solar.html Astronomy Thu, 11 Dec 2025 10:55:21 EST news684672899 Observations of the formation of light-nuclei from high-energy collisions may help in the hunt for dark matter. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-alice-mystery-nuclei-survival.html General Physics Wed, 10 Dec 2025 12:36:34 EST news684592561 Star clusters are of great importance in any galaxy: they are the birthplace of new stars, often containing massive stars of 10 solar masses or more. Such massive stars often drive powerful winds; the combined action of all stars in the cluster then leads to the formation of a "superbubble"—a cavity in the interstellar medium. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-westerlund-evidence-particle-outflow-young.html Astronomy Wed, 10 Dec 2025 11:26:27 EST news684588361 Astronomers are a step closer to cracking one of the secrets of dark energy—the mysterious force believed to be causing the universe's accelerated expansion. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-ancient-supernova-key-universe-mysterious.html Astronomy Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:18:08 EST news684580659 Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious particles in the universe, often called "ghost particles" because they rarely interact with anything else. Trillions stream through our bodies every second, yet leave no trace. They are produced during nuclear reactions, including those that take place in the core of our sun. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-ghostly-solar-neutrinos-caught-carbon.html General Physics Wed, 10 Dec 2025 09:00:10 EST news684508634 What can mapped drainage systems on Mars teach scientists about the red planet's watery past? This is what a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences hopes to address as a team of scientists from the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) conducted a first-time mapping study involving Martian river basins. This study has the potential to not only gain insight into ancient Mars and how much water existed there long ago, but also develop new methods for mapping ancient river basins on Mars and potentially other worlds. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-mars-massive-watersheds.html Planetary Sciences Sat, 06 Dec 2025 09:10:01 EST news684147950 The first step on the moon was one of humanity's most exciting accomplishments. Now scientists are planning return trips—and dreaming of Mars beyond. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-mars-cosmic-rays.html Space Exploration Tue, 02 Dec 2025 12:32:05 EST news683901098 Dark matter and its impact on cosmology have puzzled physicists for nearly a century. At Perimeter Institute, two researchers are trying to better understand how one potential dark matter candidate, self-interacting dark matter (SIDM), could impact how cosmic structures evolve. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-code-scientists-dark-halos.html Astronomy Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:30:06 EST news683817945