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More and more details about 3I/ATLAS are filtering through the scientific process as time goes on. Our third known interstellar visitor attracted the attention of some of the world’s most powerful observatories when it was discovered in July 2025, and some of those telescopes found something peculiar—the isotopes it contained appeared different. A new paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters (and available as a preprint on arXiv) by Kenji Furuya of the RIKEN Pioneering Research Institute in Japan and his co-authors shows that the isotopic discrepancy is likely due to the “low metallicity” of the stellar nursery in which 3I/ATLAS was born.
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An international team of astronomers from ASTRON, JIVE, the University of Amsterdam and other institutions has found the first so-called “microblazar” in the Milky Way. This stellar system is composed of a massive star and a black hole with a jet that is pointed toward Earth. The researchers also identified the region where the jet hits a molecular cloud as a place where particles are accelerated to ultra-high energies, likely up to petaelectronvolts. This would make microblazars one of the most powerful particle accelerators in the galaxy. The research was appears in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
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Most kids learn in elementary school that the seasons are caused by Earth rotating on a tilted axis during its yearly orbit around the sun. The substantial tilt, about 23.5 degrees, is thought to be the result of an ancient planetary body, Theia, smashing into Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, in the same cataclysmic collision that formed the moon.
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The crash occurred as state troopers pursued a vehicle that fled a traffic stop; the vehicle crashed head-on into a concrete barrier, killing four occupants and an unborn baby
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Reliably verifying the location of a device connected to the internet or other networks is important for various real-world applications. For instance, it could be valuable for authorizing financial transactions, securing communications and controlling who can access specific databases or services.
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Understanding the origin, acceleration and propagation of high-energy cosmic rays has been a century-old mystery in astrophysics. Recently, joint observations from China’s Einstein Probe (EP) satellite and the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) showed an extraordinarily long X-ray tail near a pulsar about 4,600 light-years (27 quadrillion miles) from Earth—one that had never before been seen in full. The tail extends about 42 light-years (250 trillion miles) and stretches in the same direction as ultrahigh-energy gamma-ray emission detected by LHAASO, with the two showing a close spatial match.
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A University of Iowa-led research team has reported in a new study the most detailed observations to date of the bow shock at Jupiter, our solar system’s gas giant. The findings from NASA’s Juno mission reveal key differences between Jupiter’s bow shock and Earth’s. They also may lead to a better understanding of the physics of how shocks function in even more powerful energy releases, such as those from dying stars. The research is published in Nature Communications.
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Students in Cornell’s Space Systems Design Studio (SSDS) have released mission results for two unique light-sail experiments. These sails are slightly larger than a pizza box and harness momentum from photons to accelerate to high velocities. With ChipSats onboard—gram-scale spacecraft that fit in the palm of your hand—the sails can become free-flyers. They origami-fold into CubeSats for launch and completely separate when deployed, allowing them to be far smaller and lighter than traditional solar sails. The ChipSats provide all ground communications and steering capabilities for a fraction of the mass and cost.
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The man yelled at Salt Lake City officers and pulled out a knife as he fled; he refused to drop the knife, and after a TASER deployment, the officers fired shots
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When NASA’s Perseverance rover reached the inner edge of Mars’ Jezero Crater in September 2023, mission scientists were surprised by what they found. The geologic area, called the “Margin Unit,” stretches along the shoreline of an ancient Martian lake, so they expected sedimentary rocks, which would have formed as layers of sand piled on top of each other over millennia. Composed of clay and silt, sedimentary rocks on Earth are good at preserving past microbial life. The scientists were especially intrigued by strong signals of carbonate minerals detected by Mars orbiters. On Earth, carbonates frequently form in shallow ocean and lake environments capable of supporting life.
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Where is Earth’s center of mass? The answer seems trivially obvious. It’s right in the middle of the planet. Ah, but that kind of thinking won’t get you a paper in the Geophysical Journal International. It’s also not a trivial question. Knowing Earth’s center of mass to within millimeters reveals some interesting facts about our planet.
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The sun’s magnetic fields are a twisty, curvy, ever-changing mess. In particular, our star’s polar regions host areas called polar coronal holes, which contain invisible magnetic highways that stretch into interplanetary space. But there’s a lot we don’t know about how those highways actually work, particularly how they give the particles that form the fast solar wind an extra “kick” that sends them zooming at hundreds of kilometers per second.
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The trooper allegedly took confidential data from multiple systems, including NCIC and Flock, and shared it with other people over text and Snapchat
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Using data from the Japan–led XRISM (X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission) observatory, astronomers have directly observed a giant star’s outflow, called a stellar wind, being captured by its compact companion and providing the power source for strong X-ray flares. The research is part of NASA’s exploration of the extreme universe to better understand how the cosmos works.
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Researchers in China have extended the lifetime of entanglement in a room-temperature, solid-state system by up to a factor of 240. Led by Shuo Ren and Rui-Jian Liang at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, the team transferred entangled states from the electron spins of solid-state defects to the spins of surrounding atomic nuclei, which are far more resilient to noise. The research has been published in Physical Review Letters.
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