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. 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 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 A study by Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) analyzes Instagram discourse that associates the ideal of being a good mother with exclusive breastfeeding and fosters guilt among women who cannot or do not wish to breastfeed, often because of the difficulty of balancing it with other daily responsibilities. These discourses are gaining visibility in a context in which the phenomenon of "instamoms"—many with hundreds of thousands of followers—has increased the platform's impact on how motherhood is conceived. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-breastfeeding-bottle-ideal-good-mother.html Social Sciences Tue, 21 Jul 2026 20:40:01 EDT news703857047 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 Earth is divided into two halves: the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Both reflect equal amounts of sunlight (albedo) even though they have different landmasses and weather patterns, especially cloud distribution. Why this is so is an ongoing mystery waiting to be solved. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-earth-hidden-east-west-symmetry.html Earth Sciences Thu, 04 Jun 2026 12:00:06 EDT news699787932 The long, puzzling dwarf planet Ceres, in reality the first named asteroid, has surface features that are much more complex than previously thought. Or at least that's the conclusion of a recent paper presented at the European Geosciences Union 2026 General Assembly in Vienna. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ceres-surface-complex-previously-thought.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:10:01 EDT news699602461 A new Earthset image has been captured by the crew of Artemis II, 58 years since the iconic Earthrise photograph taken by the crew of Apollo 8. Over these past six decades, the climate has changed dramatically. https://phys.org/news/2026-04-earthrise-earthset-planet-climate-photo.html Environment Tue, 07 Apr 2026 19:40:01 EDT news694782541 New observations by a team of US astronomers have cast fresh doubt on whether the lunar surface could host abundant water ice. Publishing their results in Science Advances, a team led by Shuai Li at the University of Hawaii at Manoa has shown that relatively pure ice (making up more than about 20–30% of the surface material) is likely absent from the moon's permanently shadowed regions. https://phys.org/news/2026-03-shadowcam-abundant-lunar-ice.html Astronomy Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:20:03 EDT news693221849 A team of scientists from around the world has created the first system that can predict when and where extremely powerful solar storms, called superflares, are most likely to happen. These storms can disrupt power grids, communications, and satellites, and even pose dangers to astronauts in space. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-solar-eruptions-sun-side-validate.html Astronomy Tue, 24 Feb 2026 19:20:01 EST news691166641 On Jan. 31, 1958, Explorer 1 became the first satellite launched by the United States. Its primary science instrument, a cosmic ray detector, was designed to measure the radiation environment in Earth orbit. Though its final transmission was in May 1958, it continued to revolve around Earth more than 58,000 times. As those looping orbits continued, NASA was busy building other groundbreaking instruments to observe and better understand Earth's systems. https://phys.org/news/2026-02-years-sun-earth-energy.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 19 Feb 2026 18:40:03 EST news690725431 To reduce air pollution associated with ocean transport, the International Maritime Organization tightened restrictions on sulfur content in ship fuel, resulting in an 80% reduction in emissions by 2020. That shift created an inadvertent real-world experiment in how man-made aerosols influence cloud formation over the ocean. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-cleaner-ship-fuel-clouds-climate.html Earth Sciences Thu, 29 Jan 2026 11:32:33 EST news688908722 Domestic pigeons have surprising cultural significance. They inspired Charles Darwin in his thinking about evolution, delivered wartime messages to save lives, and have symbolic meaning around the world. https://phys.org/news/2026-01-ive-wild-pigeon.html Plants & Animals Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:00:22 EST news687013202 An international team, involving researchers from the University of Seville, the Andalusian Institute of Earth Sciences in Granada and the University of Huelva, has identified the first fossilized vertebrate footprints from the Quaternary period in fossil dune deposits in Murcia, attributed to the elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus, known as the straight-tusked elephant. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-prehistoric-elephant-footprints-documented-murcia.html Paleontology & Fossils Wed, 17 Dec 2025 18:50:10 EST news685197782 Tropical cyclones can unleash extensive devastation, as recent storms that swept over Jamaica and the Philippines made unmistakably clear. Accurate weather forecasts that buy more time to prepare are crucial for saving lives and are rooted in a deeper understanding of climate systems. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-scientists-climate-pattern-tropics.html Earth Sciences Mon, 24 Nov 2025 15:00:01 EST news683202777 There are no confirmed exomoons, moons orbiting distant exoplanets in other solar systems. There are a few candidates, but none have passed the threshold and been accepted as confirmed. But they must exist. Moons are common in our solar system, so it would be extremely weird if they didn't exist elsewhere. https://phys.org/news/2025-11-habitable-zone-planets-red-dwarfs.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:54:04 EST news682012441 The asteroid belt is found orbiting between Mars and Jupiter and is a vast collection of rocks that is thought to be a planet that never formed. When our solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago, the material in this region should have coalesced into a planet; however, Jupiter's gravitational influence prevented this from happening, stirring up the region so that collisions became destructive rather than constructive. What remains today contains only about 3% of the moon's mass scattered across millions of kilometers. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-asteroid-belt.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 29 Sep 2025 12:56:04 EDT news678369362 A new poll of 2,143 California adults conducted by University of California, Irvine researchers reveals overwhelming bipartisan support for stricter regulations on children's use of digital technology, including school smartphone restrictions and social media age limits. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-poll-reveals-californians-stricter-tech.html Education Wed, 10 Sep 2025 05:56:05 EDT news676702562 A Southwest Research Institute-led team has reported the first detection of gas on the distant dwarf planet Makemake, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). This discovery makes Makemake only the second trans-Neptunian object, after Pluto, where the presence of gas has been confirmed. The gas was identified as methane. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-methane-gas-dwarf-planet-makemake.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 09 Sep 2025 13:29:03 EDT news676643341 New NASA research has found that Ceres may have had a lasting source of chemical energy: the right types of molecules needed to fuel some microbial metabolisms. Although there is no evidence that microorganisms ever existed on Ceres, the finding supports theories that this intriguing dwarf planet, which is the largest body in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, may have once had conditions suitable to support single-celled lifeforms. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-ceres-energy-fuel-habitability.html Astrobiology Wed, 20 Aug 2025 16:56:03 EDT news674927761 As the climate warms and regional drying becomes more frequent, peatlands—some of the planet's most important carbon sinks—are increasingly under threat. But a study led by an international team including scientists from the University of Bristol has shown peatland ecosystems may have a natural defense through the combined forces of plant changes and microbes. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-ancient-alliance-woody-microbes-potential.html Earth Sciences Mon, 04 Aug 2025 11:30:08 EDT news673523772 NASA's Athena Economical Payload Integration Cost mission, or Athena EPIC, is a test launch for an innovative, scalable space vehicle design to support future missions. The small satellite platform is engineered to share resources among the payloads onboard by managing routine functions so the individual payloads don't have to. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-nasa-scalable-satellite-tech-sensors.html Space Exploration Mon, 21 Jul 2025 11:50:03 EDT news672316784 Scientists may have found a new way to detect some of the universe's most mysterious objects, primordial black holes (PBHs), using Hawking radiation. This groundbreaking approach relies upon watching for their radiation signatures as they pass through the solar system. This technique could finally help us to solve one of cosmology's biggest puzzles: what makes up the invisible dark matter that comprises 85% of all matter in the universe. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-primordial-black-holes-hawking.html Astronomy Fri, 27 Jun 2025 14:22:04 EDT news670252921 What methods can be used to identify subsurface oceans on the five largest moons of Uranus: Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, and Miranda? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a team of scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) investigated potentially using radio science on the Uranus Orbiter and Probe (UOP) concept mission, which was designated as a high priority Flagship-class mission by the 2023–2032 Planetary Science Decadal Survey. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-flyby-mission-strategies-oceans-uranus.html Space Exploration Fri, 27 Jun 2025 11:54:04 EDT news670244041 We might not currently have any technology that would make a space elevator viable on Earth. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't work on other bodies around the solar system. One of the most interesting places that one could work is around Ceres, the Queen of the Asteroid Belt, and potentially one of the biggest sources of resources for humanity's expansion into space. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-space-elevator-ceres.html Space Exploration Thu, 19 Jun 2025 06:46:04 EDT news669534362 The cloud fraction diurnal variation (CDV) regulates the Earth system's radiative budget and balance, influencing atmospheric variables such as temperature and humidity, as well as physical processes like precipitation and tropical cyclones. However, significant simulation biases of CDV exist in climate models. To date, most model evaluations have focused on the daily mean cloud fraction (CFR), while the CDV has received less attention. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-revealing-bias-characteristics-cloud-diurnal.html Earth Sciences Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:50:03 EDT news669397802 Noise pollution from deep-sea mining carries an invisible risk for sea life, warn researchers, urging greater transparency from the industry to help mitigate the harms. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-pacific-ocean-life-noisy-deep.html Environment Fri, 13 Jun 2025 08:46:05 EDT news669023162 Climate models that give a low warming from increases in greenhouse gases do not match satellite measurements. Future warming will likely be worse than thought unless society acts, according to a new study published in Science. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-climate-sensitivity-greenhouse-gases-align.html Environment Thu, 12 Jun 2025 16:00:15 EDT news668962802 How can humanity use the developing Lunar Gateway as an appropriate starting point for advancing human space exploration beyond the moon? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a team of researchers evaluated a myriad of ways that Lunar Gateway could be used as a testbed for future technologies involving sending humans to Mars and Ceres. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-mars-ceres-lunar-gateway-springboard.html Space Exploration Mon, 02 Jun 2025 15:14:04 EDT news668096042 How can fission-powered propulsion help advance deep space exploration, specifically to the outer planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a pair of researchers from India investigated the financial, logistical, and reliability of using fission power for future deep space missions. This study has the potential to help scientists, engineers, and future astronauts develop next-generation technologies as humanity continues to expand its presence in space. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-advancing-deep-space-nuclear-propulsion.html Space Exploration Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:55:44 EDT news668084139 Asteroids are the ancient remnants of our solar system's birth, rocky fragments that never formed into planets. Most of these celestial wanderers inhabit the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where Jupiter's immense gravitational influence prevents them from assembling into a single world. Ranging from house-sized boulders to Ceres, a dwarf planet nearly 1,000 kilometers across, asteroids preserve pristine records of the early solar system's composition and conditions. https://phys.org/news/2025-05-china-tianwen-asteroid-sample.html Planetary Sciences Thu, 29 May 2025 10:30:05 EDT news667732622