Mars mission ends: NASA declares Maven dead after six months of silence

After six months of radio silence, NASA’s Maven spacecraft at Mars has been declared dead.

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‘BBQ sauce’ phase may link little red dots to quasars

Everyone knows that finding the right sauce recipe can make or break a barbecue, but now astronomers are using BBQSORS (pronounced “barbecue sauce”) as part of the recipe to explain quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe. These results were made possible by data from a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope.

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Chip-scale ‘acoustic atom’ controls sound waves to imitate atomic energy levels and advance computing

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What goes up must come down. Physical laws like these govern all of the natural world—except for the tiny internal components of today’s microprocessors, which operate according to the unique and complicated rules of quantum physics.

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S.C. officer fired after pointing gun at colleague in alleged confrontation over microwaved fish

Michael Debiase allegedly confronted another Myrtle Beach officer who was “warming up fish in the microwave, causing an odor,” according to an arrest warrant

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Ultrafast laser shrinks to chip scale, potentially lowering costs for diagnostics and atomic clocks

Ultrafast lasers emit pulses lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second). These flashes of light power applications from precision micromachining to eye surgery to optical frequency combs, the Nobel Prize-winning technology behind today’s most precise optical atomic clocks. Yet despite more than two decades of effort, ultrafast lasers have largely remained bulky, […]

Solar sails edge closer to reality, but interstellar travel is another story

From planetary rovers and asteroid sample return missions to the recent Artemis II flight above the far side of the moon, we are seemingly good at doing space. But our achievements still do not match many of our space dreams, science fiction or otherwise.

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Calif. police continue negotiations with man holding hostages under bomb threat

After more than 20 hours of negotiations and the release of two hostages, the barricaded man and several other hostages remain inside the building as of 9:30 a.m. on May 3

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Ex-N.Y. trooper sentenced up to 7.5 years in prison in pursuit crash death of 11-year-old

Monica Goods’s father fled a traffic stop after refusing to hand over his license to then-trooper Christopher Baldner; Baldner rammed the vehicle, leading to a crash that killed Monica

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Distant blazar OP 313 emits very high-energy gamma rays above 100 GeV

An international team of astronomers have employed one of the Large-Sized Telescopes (LSTs) at the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO) to observe a distant blazar known as OP 313. Results of the observational campaign, published May 26 on the arXiv preprint server, shed more light on the behavior and nature of this object.

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Astronomers uncover statistical evidence for recoiling supermassive black holes

Galactic collisions are events of breathtaking proportions. The supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at their centers plunge into a chaotic orbital dance that eventually coalesce into a single remnant. On their way to that point, they could eventually get “kicked” out of the center of their galaxy—and finding these “recoiling” black holes has been a challenge […]

Violating the 3rd law of black hole mechanics in vacuum gravity

Black holes, regions in space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, have been widely studied over the past decades, due to their unique and intriguing properties. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that black holes obey a set of rules, known as the laws of black hole mechanics. These rules somewhat resemble […]

Before SpaceX goes public, a scramble to get on bandwagon

As SpaceX prepares its long-awaited stock market debut, investors everywhere are scrambling to get a piece of the action—through investment funds, related company stocks, and even online prediction markets.

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Are JWST’s early, overmassive black holes just normal-range outliers?

Ever since the JWST revealed a population of SMBH in the early universe that were overmassive, scientists have been working hard to explain them. These black holes existed when the universe was only about 2 billion years old, during Cosmic Noon, and according to our models of black hole growth, there simply wasn’t enough time […]

How heavy can a neutron star get?

The physics of neutron stars are almost too fantastic to believe: something the weight of two suns compacted to a sphere the size of a city. Each teaspoon of its material would weigh billions of tons. If you’ve done any reading on the topic, you’ve heard these facts before. But despite the intense interest these […]

Violent rocket particles could reshape future spacecraft design

When rockets fire into space, the insides of their engines become an extreme environment where temperatures soar and tiny particles are thrown around at hypersonic speeds. These particles behave in ways that break long-held assumptions, according to new research that could help improve the durability, safety and performance of future space and defense technologies.

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