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. The Roman Space Telescope is designed to directly image exoplanets using complex optomechanical systems developed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy https://phys.org/news/2026-08-roman-telescope-aims-image-exoplanets.html Astronomy Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:00:01 EDT news706962003 Planets form from disks of gas and dust around young stars, but the gas needed for growth does not last forever. New observations from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) now offer a new view of how this gas escapes and how the process changes as young planetary systems develop. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-jwst-reveals-planets.html Astronomy Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:50:01 EDT news706897742 During a coronal mass ejection (CME), the sun hurls billions of tons of magnetized plasma into space. These eruptions are among the most powerful events in the solar system, and when they are aimed toward Earth, they can seriously threaten the satellites and power grids we depend on. For now, it remains notoriously difficult to predict how these eruptions evolve over time—and, in turn, whether they might be heading toward us. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-interplanetary-spacecraft-capture-coronal-mass.html Space Exploration Fri, 21 Aug 2026 08:50:42 EDT news706521006 It's nearly 170 million years old. It's more than 2.5 times the size of Earth. And it's the first exoplanet discovered and cataloged by researchers with the Wisconsin Center for Origins Research (WiCOR). https://phys.org/news/2026-08-mega-earth-gj-523b-massive.html Astronomy Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:40:04 EDT news706181881 Neptune's moon and ring system stand out among the giant planets because of the strange imbalance between its one very large moon and its many tiny moons. Its largest moon, Triton, makes up more than 99% of the mass of all satellites orbiting the planet while orbiting retrograde compared with Neptune's rotation. The predominant theory is that Triton is a captured Kuiper Belt object that caused a major disruption in Neptune's early moon system. Now, a new study published in Science Advances provides spectroscopic evidence to support this theory. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-neptune-tiny-moons-story-triton.html Planetary Sciences Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:20:01 EDT news704628891 Researchers have helped unravel the mystery of why certain pairs of stars pulse with regular, long-period bursts of radio waves. The particular class of objects observed comes in pairs that always include a compact dead star, called a white dwarf, locked in orbit with an M dwarf, a red star smaller than our sun. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-synchronized-star-pairs-unleash-radio.html Astronomy Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:00:04 EDT news705846361 For decades, astronomers lumped brown dwarfs into a single category defined by mass alone—too big to be classified as planets but too small to become stars. However, this definition ignores the two very different mechanisms that can form them: the direct collapse of gas clouds and formation within the accretion disks of massive stars. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-tess-rare-brown-dwarf-orbiting.html Astronomy Thu, 13 Aug 2026 17:00:06 EDT news705841178 A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra's research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like a cosmic nursery, giving birth to planets more massive than Jupiter. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-supermassive-black-holes-massive-planets.html Astronomy Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:11:08 EDT news705831033 High-energy particles in Earth's radiation belt can appear to spread out randomly, even when they are moving in a "predictable" way. This is because spacecraft observations naturally blur the fine-scale structure of the particle population, a new study reveals. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-spacecraft-conceal-particles-earth-space.html Astronomy Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:20:06 EDT news705226201 Researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation National Solar Observatory (NSF NSO), the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany, and the High Altitude Observatory (HAO) in the U.S. have made a discovery in solar physics. New images of the sun's surface taken with the world's largest solar telescope, the NSF Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, built and operated by the NSO in Hawaii, along with sophisticated computer simulations, reveal tiny plasma vortices that had never before been visible. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-tiny-vortices-sun-surface.html General Physics Wed, 05 Aug 2026 11:00:01 EDT news705066601 Named for the mythical valley where the god Dionysus was raised in secret by nymphs, the asteroid 44 Nysa inhabits the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Through observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have determined it to be the largest and brightest known member of a rare category of asteroids called "E-types," made of unusually bright, enstatite-rich material similar to some rare meteorites found on Earth. Separately, models built from how its brightness flickers as it spins hinted it might have an elongated, lopsided shape, often seen in large asteroid pairs. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-asteroid-nysa-rare-lobed-formation.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 04 Aug 2026 08:00:03 EDT news704977595 In a billion years, the sun will start to run out of fuel and expand to become a red giant. Earth's oceans and atmosphere will be burned away, and Earth will likely be engulfed by the sun altogether. The sun will then shrink to a dim white dwarf, and all light and warmth in the solar system will diminish. In a hundred trillion years, the galaxy's ability to produce stars will be exhausted, and everything will turn dark. However, there's a way for life to escape this fate—and what's more, we wouldn't need to leave the planet to do it. We just need to build some safeguards. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-earth-habitable-sun-dies.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 03 Aug 2026 16:40:03 EDT news704969045 Since 2016, an ordinary-looking F-type star called KIC 8462852, nicknamed Tabby's star, has behaved anything but ordinarily. In a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on July 6, researchers revisited this star to find out what is really causing its irregular dimming. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-hour-dip-tabby-star-decade.html Astronomy Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:00:05 EDT news704472236 Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers obtained high-contrast coronagraphic images of the protoplanetary disk around the young, nearby star TW Hydrae. Results of the observational campaign, published July 27 on the preprint server arXiv, shed more light on the nature of this disk. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-webb-reveals-warped-nearby-tw.html Astronomy Sun, 02 Aug 2026 13:20:01 EDT news704715812 In 1989, the Voyager 2 mission discovered six new moons orbiting Neptune, including five tiny ones that orbit just outside the planet's main rings. Because of their small sizes and locations, these satellites have been difficult to study from Earth. Now, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of Caltech researchers has observed Neptune's rings and three of those moons—Larissa, Galatea and Proteus—and found that their composition is unique among outer solar system bodies. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-neptune-moons-shattered-ancient-icy.html Space Exploration Thu, 30 Jul 2026 10:00:06 EDT news704623381 By analyzing data from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and conducting new radial velocity measurements, U.K. and French astronomers have found evidence that the mysterious Tabby's star may be orbited by an object about nine times more massive than Jupiter. The new findings are published on the preprint server arXiv. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-tabby-star-orbited-planetary-mass.html Astronomy Tue, 28 Jul 2026 10:00:03 EDT news704450067 Mercury was long considered the exception to the rule that magnetic planets have radiation belts similar to Earth's Van Allen belts, but a new study by University of Michigan Engineering and the University of California, Berkeley, suggests otherwise—Mercury occasionally has such a layer of radiation in its magnetic field. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-mercury-reveals-short-belts-sun.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:40:06 EDT news704381641 Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons, has long fascinated scientists because of what may lie beneath its frozen shell: a global ocean of liquid water. That hidden ocean has made Europa one of the most compelling places in the solar system to study the conditions that might support life. But new research led by Rutgers scientist Lujendra Ojha suggests one of the most promising shortcuts to Europa's ocean may be far more complicated than previously thought. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-europa-hidden-ocean-difficult-scientists.html Astrobiology Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:00:03 EDT news704105234 A careful statistical comparison of observations recorded by NASA's Juno mission and the Planetary Science Institute's Io Input Output observatory (IoIO) shows that IoIO observations reliably predict the density of Jupiter's plasma disk, an important part of Jupiter's magnetosphere, according to a new Geophysical Research Letters paper co-authored by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Jeff Morgenthaler. Jian-Zhao Wang of the University of Colorado Boulder is the paper's lead author. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-io-volcanic-output-40day-plasma.html Astronomy Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:40:03 EDT news704109602 NASA's Juno mission has provided the first measurements of the temperature below the surface of Jupiter's moon Io, revealing significant heating within the shallow subsurface of the most volcanically active world in the solar system. Collected during two close flybys, the data also show that most of Io's surface is remarkably smooth and composed of material with very low density. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-juno-temperature-jupiter-fiery-moon.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 22 Jul 2026 13:07:19 EDT news703943161 Observations made with the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) have revealed evidence for a moon-like object in the CD-35 2722 system. Unlike moons in our solar system, the newly found object does not orbit a planet, raising questions about what to name it. Instead, it circles a brown dwarf, an object larger than a planet, that orbits the CD-35 2722 star. If confirmed, this could be the first "moon" discovered outside our solar system. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-jupiter-mass-exomoon-orbiting-brown.html Astronomy Wed, 22 Jul 2026 11:00:03 EDT news703842182 The spacecraft aced its encounter with Mars. Now, mission scientists are studying a trove of data from the flyby in preparation for its arrival at asteroid Psyche in 2029. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-nasa-psyche-mission-mars-flyby.html Planetary Sciences Sat, 18 Jul 2026 14:51:26 EDT news703605061 A rare CO chondrite meteorite was the probable impacter that struck Earth 66 million years ago, wiping out 75% of Earth's species, including nonavian dinosaurs. These findings are published in Science Advances. Researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Paris, Brussels and Vienna, used advanced nickel isotope analysis of samples to narrow down the composition of the deadly Cretaceous-Paleogene meteorite. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-class-oddball-meteorite-dinosaurs.html Biotechnology Fri, 17 Jul 2026 14:00:11 EDT news703496174 Researchers in the U.S. have carried out the most stringent tests to date of the idea that an ultraviolet glow in the atmospheres of giant planets could partly arise through the indirect interaction between dark matter and ordinary matter. Led by Carlos Blanco at Penn State University and Rebecca Leane at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the team's results place some of the tightest constraints yet on the strength of this interaction. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-giant-planets-dark-detectors.html Astronomy Fri, 17 Jul 2026 10:20:06 EDT news703496425 Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a giant planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet, hiding within one of the most intensely studied planetary systems in the Milky Way galaxy. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-webb-telescope-hidden-planet-famous.html Astronomy Thu, 16 Jul 2026 10:40:03 EDT news703405527 Scientists have painted the most detailed portrait yet of the planetary system orbiting Barnard's Star—the sun's closest neighbor after Alpha Centauri, just under six light-years from Earth. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-astronomers-nearby-planets-small-strange.html Astrobiology Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:20:01 EDT news703340046 A Southwest Research Institute-led study has proposed a connection between a specific collision in the main asteroid belt and an inner-solar-system-wide bombardment episode that may have had measurable biological and geological consequences on Earth. The research suggests that the catastrophic breakup of the Eulalia parent body could be linked to an impact shower that struck the terrestrial planets about 800 million years ago. The work is published on the arXiv preprint server. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-asteroid-breakup-solar-bombardment-million.html Planetary Sciences Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:00:12 EDT news703338887 A team of astronomers has discovered a third planet orbiting the star Beta Pictoris. The new planet, Beta Pictoris d, is 100 times fainter than Beta Pictoris b—the first planet discovered in the same system—and is among the lightest exoplanets ever imaged from the ground. After spotting the planet using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT), the team found it had been hiding in archival observations spanning more than a decade. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-faintest-planet-imaged-earth-years.html Astronomy Wed, 15 Jul 2026 08:00:06 EDT news703174094 Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries. Modern historians have generally assumed they were housekeepers, in charge of domestic tasks and household meals, and segregated from the productive business of the farm. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-ancient-roman-farm-women-wine.html Archaeology Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:40:11 EDT news703245669 Scientists have detected evidence of landslides on Pluto for the first time. A paper published in the journal Icarus reports that images taken by the New Horizons spacecraft during a flyby revealed six large landslides in three impact craters. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-massive-landslides-icy-pluto.html Astrobiology Mon, 13 Jul 2026 15:30:02 EDT news703172932