Paranormal News Network

Planet 9 volunteers double known population of brown dwarfs

A new paper from NASA’s Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project announces that volunteers have essentially doubled the number of known brown dwarfs, with over 3,000 new discoveries made over the past 10 years since the project began. Brown dwarfs are balls of gas the size of Jupiter, less massive than stars. There’s one for every three or four stars near the sun.

Close Juno flyby unlocks sharp new image of Jupiter moon Thebe

NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this view of Thebe, the second largest of Jupiter’s inner moons, during a close pass on May 1, 2026. The spacecraft’s Stellar Reference Unit (SRU) captured this image from a distance of approximately 3,100 miles (5,000 kilometers) at a resolution of about 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) per pixel.

Watch as NASA’s Curiosity Rover frees its drill from a rock

This series of images shows NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as it got a rock stuck to the drill on the end of its robotic arm, and—after waving the arm and running the drill a few times—finally detached the rock. The imagery showing the entire process was captured by the black-and-white hazard cameras on the front of Curiosity’s chassis and by navigation cameras on its mast (head).

Three billion years ago, Earth’s life relied on a rare metal

A collaborative team of scientists has discovered that life on Earth over three billion years ago relied on the metal molybdenum, which was incredibly scarce in the environment at the time. The study, published in Nature Communications, is the first to show that molybdenum was used by ancient life this far back in our planet’s history.

Inexpensive material compresses light, paving the way for photonic microcircuits in the terahertz range

A two-dimensional lamellar crystal composed of atomically thin layers of lead iodide (PbI2) could be used to manufacture a new generation of circuits that use light and mechanical vibrations (rather than electrons) to transmit information in the terahertz frequency range.

Elastic rules may explain why nematic crystals look ordered and disordered at once

Electronic nematicity is a phase of some crystalline solids in which electrons’ collective properties, such as charge or spin densities, organize themselves into ordered patterns, lowering the crystal’s rotational symmetry. This phase is found across a wide range of diverse materials, making nematicity crucial to understanding emergent solid-state phenomena, such as unconventional superconductivity and magnetism.

Video: Calif. law enforcement officers trap street takeover bikers on Bay Bridge, seizing 80 vehicles

More than 100 Oakland, San Francisco and CHP officers participated in the operation that trapped riders in between agencies on the bridge, leading to multiple arrests

Astronomers map lifetime of over 100,000 molecular clouds across 66 galaxies

An international team of astronomers has analyzed the data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to investigate giant molecular clouds in nearby galaxies. The new study, presented April 27 on the arXiv preprint server, unveils crucial information regarding the lifetime of more than 100,000 such clouds across 66 galaxies.

JWST pins down the origins of a planetary odd couple

Across the Milky Way galaxy, a planetary odd couple is circling a star some 190 light years from Earth. A normally “lonely” hot Jupiter is sharing space with a mini-Neptune, in a rare and unlikely pairing that’s had astronomers puzzled since the system’s discovery in 2020.

Blue Origin moon lander completes testing at NASA vacuum chamber

Also known as Endurance, MK1 is an uncrewed cargo lander. It’s a commercial demonstration mission to advance Human Landing System capabilities in support of NASA’s Artemis program. The tests in Chamber A represent a public-private partnership model, with Blue Origin conducting work through a reimbursable Space Act Agreement.

Magnetic fields can ‘revive’ superconductivity in nickelates, research reveals

A research team led by Professor Denver Li Danfeng, Associate Dean (Research and Postgraduate Education) of the College of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK), has achieved a significant advance in superconducting materials.

Understanding how lasers can rapidly magnetize fusion plasmas

The mechanism that can cause a rapidly expanding plasma—the superhot state of matter harnessed in fusion energy systems—to spontaneously generate its own magnetic fields was identified through a new set of simulations. This improves our understanding of naturally occurring plasmas in our universe and advances the development of fusion systems based on an approach called direct-drive inertial fusion.

BWC: Texas civilian officer shot in face with pellet gun while responding to day-old burglary report

The Fort Worth Civilian Response Unit officer, who was not armed with a gun, was struck by pellets on his face and eye as he ushered a bystander to safety

Secret Service agents shoot man who opened fire at them near Washington Monument

The unidentified man attempted to flee when uniformed officers with the Secret Service approached him; he then fired at the officers, who returned fire

We might have massively underestimated Io’s thermal output

Io is a world of extremes. It is by far the most volcanically active world in our solar system. Being continually squeezed in the never-ending tug-of-war between Jupiter and its larger satellites will do that to a moon. As a result, Io has over 400 “paterae”—volcanic depressions that spew lava up onto its surface. And, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv and utilizing data from Juno’s Jupiter InfraRed Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) tool, we have been massively underestimating the power output of those paterae for decades.