Cosmic Rays News

August 5, 2025

Top Headlines

Mojave Lichen Defies Death Rays—could Life Thrive on Distant Exoplanets?

June 24, 2025 — Lichen from the Mojave Desert has stunned scientists by surviving months of lethal UVC radiation, suggesting life could exist on distant planets orbiting volatile stars. The secret? A microscopic “sunscreen” layer that protects their vital ...

This Mind-Bending Physics Breakthrough Could Redefine Timekeeping

June 11, 2025 — By using a clever quantum approach that involves two "hands" on a clock one moving quickly and invisibly in the quantum world, the other more traditionally scientists have found a way to boost timekeeping precision dramatically. Even better, this ...

Black Holes Could Act as Natural Supercolliders -- And Help Uncover Dark Matter

June 5, 2025 — Supermassive black holes might naturally replicate the colossal energies of man-made particle colliders possibly even revealing dark matter offering a cosmic shortcut to discoveries that would ...

Particles Energized by Magnetic Reconnection in the Nascent Solar Wind

June 3, 2025 — Scientists have identified a new source of energetic particles near the Sun. These definitive observations were made by instruments aboard NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which detected the powerful phenomena as the spacecraft dipped in and out of the ...

Webb Reveals the Surprising Origin of Ultra-Hot Exoplanet WASP-121b

June 2, 2025 — WASP-121b may have been born in a frozen zone and later migrated into its current inferno-like orbit. A surprise discovery of methane in the wrong place suggests intense vertical winds are reshaping how we understand planetary ...

When Lightning Strikes: Gamma-Ray Burst Unleashed by Lightning Collision

May 29, 2025 — A multi-sensor detection of an intense gamma-ray flash, which occurs when two lightning leaders collided, has been observed. Observations across a wide radiation spectrum enabled precise measurement of the electric current produced during this ...

Cosmic Mystery Deepens as Astronomers Find Object Flashing in Both Radio Waves and X-Rays

May 28, 2025 — A team of international astronomers have discovered a new cosmic object emitting both radio waves and ...

Ongoing Surface Modification on Jupiter's Moon Europa Uncovered

May 28, 2025 — A series of experiments support spectral data recently collected by the James Webb Space Telescope that found evidence that the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa is constantly changing. Europa's surface ice is crystallizing at different rates in ...

'Raindrops in the Sun's Corona': New Adaptive Optics Shows Stunning Details of Our Star's Atmosphere

May 27, 2025 — Scientists have produced the finest images of the Sun's corona to date. To make these high-resolution images and movies, the team developed a new 'coronal adaptive optics' system that removes blur ...

Saturn's Moon: Mysterious Wobbling Atmosphere Like a Gyroscope

May 22, 2025 — The puzzling behavior of Titan's atmosphere has been revealed. The team has shown that the thick, hazy atmosphere of Saturn's largest moon doesn't spin in line with its surface, but instead wobbles like a gyroscope, shifting with the ...

Gas Location Drives Star Formation in Distant Galaxies

May 21, 2025 — In the intriguing realm of star-forming galaxies, the key factor isn't the total amount of gas but rather its strategic distribution within the ...

'Cosmic Joust': Astronomers Observe Pair of Galaxies in Deep-Space Battle

May 21, 2025 — Astronomers have witnessed for the first time a violent cosmic collision in which one galaxy pierces another with intense radiation. Their results show that this radiation dampens the wounded galaxy's ability to form new ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:21pm EDT

Underground Life on Mars? Cosmic Rays Could Make It Possible

Aug. 3, 2025 — Cosmic rays from deep space might be the secret energy source that allows life to exist underground on Mars and icy moons like Enceladus and Europa. New research reveals that when these rays interact ...

Astronomers Detect Life’s Building Blocks Around a Young Star

Aug. 2, 2025 — Astronomers using ALMA have discovered complex organic molecules, including potential precursors to life's building blocks, in the protoplanetary disc of a young star, V883 Orionis. This finding ...

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Finds Hidden Barrier That Explains the Sun’s Mysterious Heat

Aug. 2, 2025 — NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has flown closer to the Sun than ever before, offering the first direct glimpse into the turbulent solar atmosphere. ...

NASA’s Roman Telescope Will Catch 100,000 Explosions — and Rewrite the Universe’s Story

July 22, 2025 — NASA’s Roman Space Telescope is set to embark on a deep-sky survey that could capture nearly 100,000 cosmic explosions, shedding light on ...

NASA’s IXPE Tracked a Rare Pulsar—and Found an Unexpected Power Source

July 20, 2025 — Astronomers studying a rare neutron star system have uncovered a surprising source of powerful X-rays. Using NASA s IXPE telescope and data from other observatories, an international team found that ...

NASA Probe Flies Into the Sun and Captures the Origins of Solar Storms

July 11, 2025 — In its closest-ever dive into the Sun’s atmosphere, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has returned stunning new images and data that bring scientists closer to solving one of the Sun’s biggest ...

Ice in a Million-Degree Fermi Bubble Reveals the Milky Way’s Recent Eruption

July 9, 2025 — Astronomers using the Green Bank Telescope spotted surprisingly cold, dense hydrogen clouds embedded inside the Milky Way’s vast, super-hot Fermi ...

Can One Vanishing Particle Shatter String Theory — and Explain Dark Matter?

July 5, 2025 — Scientists are on the trail of a mysterious five-particle structure that could challenge one of the biggest theories in physics: string theory. This ...

Record-Breaking 10-Billion-Year Radio Halo Just Rewrote the Universe’s Origin Story

June 28, 2025 — A newly discovered radio halo, 10 billion light-years away, reveals that galaxy clusters in the early universe were already steeped in high-energy ...

What the Universe Tried to Hide: The 21-Centimeter Signal Explained

June 22, 2025 — Scientists are peering into the universe's mysterious Cosmic Dawn using the faint whispers of hydrogen radio waves emitted over 13 billion years ago. These signals, particularly the elusive ...

Massive Thread of Hot Gas Found Linking Galaxies — and It’s 10 Times the Mass of the Milky Way

June 19, 2025 — Astronomers have uncovered a colossal, searing-hot filament of gas linking four galaxy clusters in the Shapley Supercluster a discovery that could finally solve the mystery of the Universe s missing ...

Impossible Signal from Deep Beneath Antarctic Ice Baffles Physicists

June 14, 2025 — A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes ...

Magnetic Mayhem at the Sun’s Poles: First Images Reveal a Fiery Mystery

June 16, 2025 — For the first time in history, we re seeing the Sun from an angle no one ever has: from above and below its poles. Thanks to the European Space Agency s Solar Orbiter and its tilted orbit, scientists ...

Webb Space Telescope Reveals Starburst Galaxies That Lit Up the Early Universe

June 13, 2025 — Data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has revealed dozens of small galaxies that played a starring role in a cosmic makeover that transformed the early universe into the one we know ...

Sun’s Secret Storms Exposed: NASA's Codex Unveils a Turbulent Corona

June 12, 2025 — NASA s CODEX experiment aboard the International Space Station is revealing the Sun like never before. Using advanced filters and a specialized coronagraph, CODEX has captured images showing that the ...

From the Andes to the Beginning of Time: Telescopes Detect 13-Billion-Year-Old Signal

June 11, 2025 — Astronomers have pulled off an unprecedented feat: detecting ultra-faint light from the Big Bang using ground-based telescopes. This polarized light scattered by the universe's very first stars ...

Sun Unleashes Monster Solar Storm: Rare G4 Alert Issued for Earth

June 10, 2025 — A violent solar eruption on May 31 launched a coronal mass ejection (CME) hurtling toward Earth, triggering a rare G4-level geomagnetic storm alert. Captured in real-time by U.S. Naval Research ...

Biggest Boom Since the Big Bang? Astronomers Record 25x Supernova Brightness

June 17, 2025 — Astronomers have identified a new kind of cosmic explosion extreme nuclear transients so powerful they outshine typical supernovae by orders of magnitude and stay bright for years. Triggered when ...

Astronomers Just Found a Giant Planet That Shouldn’t Exist

June 11, 2025 — Scientists have discovered a giant planet orbiting a tiny red dwarf star, something they believed wasn t even possible. The planet, TOI-6894b, is about the size of Saturn but orbits a star just a ...

Sharpest-Ever Solar View Shows Tiny Stripes Driving Big Space Storms

June 21, 2025 — A stunning breakthrough in solar physics reveals ultra-fine magnetic structures on the Sun's surface, thanks to the NSF's Inouye Solar Telescope. Researchers captured never-before-seen ...

Scientist Discovers How Solar Events Affect the Velocity of Helium Pickup Ions

May 21, 2025 — Scientists have discovered how solar activity affects the velocity distribution and evolution of helium pickup ...

Astronomers Observe Largest Ever Sample of Galaxies Up to Over 12 Billion Light Years Away

May 19, 2025 — The largest sample of galaxy groups ever detected has been presented by a team of international astronomers using data from the James Webb Space telescope (JWST) in an area of the sky called COSMOS ...

Dark Matter Formed When Fast Particles Slowed Down and Got Heavy, New Theory Says

May 14, 2025 — Researchers propose a new theory for the origin of dark matter, the invisible substance thought to give the universe its shape and structure. Their mathematical models show that dark matter could ...

Astrophysicists Explore Our Galaxy's Magnetic Turbulence in Unprecedented Detail Using a New Computer Model

May 13, 2025 — Astronomers have developed a groundbreaking computer simulation to explore, in unprecedented detail, magnetism and turbulence in the interstellar medium (ISM) -- the vast ocean of gas and charged ...

Universe Decays Faster Than Thought, but Still Takes a Long Time

May 12, 2025 — The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of scientists on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 10^78 years ...

The Squid Galaxy's Neutrino Game Just Leveled Up

May 8, 2025 — In space, energetic neutrinos are usually paired with energetic gamma rays. Galaxy NGC 1068, however, emits strong neutrinos and weak gamma rays, which presents a puzzle for scientists to solve. A ...

Stellar Collapse and Explosions Distribute Gold Throughout the Universe

May 7, 2025 — Magnetar flares, colossal cosmic explosions, may be directly responsible for the creation and distribution of heavy elements across the universe, suggests a new ...

NASA's NICER Maps Debris from Recurring Cosmic Crashes

May 6, 2025 — Astronomers have probed the physical environment of repeating X-ray outbursts near monster black holes thanks to data from NASA's NICER (Neutron star Interior Composition Explorer) and other ...

New Theory of Gravity Brings Long-Sought Theory of Everything a Crucial Step Closer

May 5, 2025 — Researchers have developed a new quantum theory of gravity which describes gravity in a way that's compatible with the Standard Model of particle physics, opening the door to an improved ...

A Snapshot of Relativistic Motion: Special Relativity Made Visible

May 5, 2025 — In 1959, physicists James Terrell and Roger Penrose (Nobel laureate in 2020) independently concluded that fast-moving objects should appear rotated. However, this effect has never been demonstrated. ...