Bizarre Things: Space & Time

August 11, 2025

Top Headlines

Martian Dust to Dream Homes: How Microbes Can Build on the Red Planet

June 25, 2025 — Imagine printing your Martian home from dust, sunlight, and a bit of biology. A new synthetic lichen system uses fungi and bacteria to grow building materials directly from Martian soil, completely autonomously and without human ...

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 ...

Millions of New Solar System Objects to Be Found and 'Filmed in Technicolor' -- Studies Predict

June 3, 2025 — Astronomers have revealed new research showing that millions of new solar system objects are likely to be detected by a brand-new facility, which is expected to come online later this ...

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 ...

New Laser Smaller Than a Penny Can Measure Objects at Ultrafast Rates

June 2, 2025 — Researchers have engineered a laser device smaller than a penny that they say could power everything from the LiDAR systems used in self-driving vehicles to gravitational wave detection, one of the most delicate experiments in existence to observe ...

Could 'Pausing' Cell Death Be the Final Frontier in Medicine on Earth and Beyond?

May 30, 2025 — The process of necrosis, a form of cell death, may represent one of the most promising ways to change the course of human aging, disease and even space travel, according to a new ...

Understanding Why Galaxy Clusters Are Warm May Explain the Origin of Giant Interstellar Structures

May 29, 2025 — Astronomers have explained how a galaxy cluster maintains its heat, despite emitting X-rays that cool the hot gas at its center. The group discovered the existence of a fast-moving, high-temperature ...

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 ...

Observing One-dimensional Anyons: Exotic Quasiparticles in the Coldest Corners of the Universe

May 28, 2025 — Scientists have observed anyons -- quasiparticles that differ from the familiar fermions and bosons -- in a one-dimensional quantum system for the first time. The results may contribute to a better ...

'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 ...

ALMA Measures Evolution of Monster Barred Spiral Galaxy

May 22, 2025 — Astronomers have observed a massive and extremely active barred spiral galaxy in the early Universe and found that it has important similarities and differences with modern galaxies. This improves our understanding of how barred spiral galaxies, ...

Latest Headlines

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This Tiny Spacecraft Could Race to a Black Hole and Rewrite Physics

Aug. 10, 2025 — A visionary plan proposes sending a paperclip-sized spacecraft, powered by Earth-based lasers, to a nearby black hole within a century. Led by astrophysicist Cosimo Bambi, the mission would test the ...

The Nuclear Clock That Could Finally Unmask Dark Matter

Aug. 9, 2025 — Physicists are exploring thorium-229’s unique properties to create a nuclear clock so precise it could detect the faintest hints of dark matter. Recent measurement advances may allow scientists to ...

Life Without Sunlight? Earthquake Fractures Fuel Deep Underground Microbes

Aug. 7, 2025 — Chinese scientists uncovered a powerful energy source for deep Earth microbes: hydrogen and oxidants generated by rock fracturing during earthquakes. The process may also suggest how life could exist ...

Scientists Create Mysterious Molecule That Could Spark Life in Space

Aug. 7, 2025 — Scientists have successfully synthesized methanetetrol, an incredibly unstable and previously elusive compound thought to be a key ingredient in the chemical evolution of life. Described as a ...

AI Cracks a Meteorite’s Secret: A Material That Defies Heat

Aug. 5, 2025 — A rare mineral from a 1724 meteorite defies the rules of heat flow, acting like both a crystal and a glass. Thanks to AI and quantum physics, researchers uncovered its bizarre ability to maintain ...

Scientists Just Recreated the Universe’s First Molecule and Solved a 13-Billion-Year-Old Puzzle

Aug. 3, 2025 — Long before stars lit up the sky, the universe was a hot, dense place where simple chemistry quietly set the stage for everything to come. Scientists ...

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 ...

Ghost Star’s Planet Orbits Backward in a Bizarre Stellar System

Aug. 2, 2025 — A bizarre planet defies cosmic norms: scientists have confirmed a giant planet orbiting in reverse around one star in a close binary system—an arrangement previously thought impossible. Using ...

Clockwork from Scratch: How Scientists Made Timekeeping Cells

July 29, 2025 — Scientists at UC Merced have engineered artificial cells that can keep perfect time—mimicking the 24-hour biological clocks found in living organisms. By reconstructing circadian machinery inside ...

This Interstellar Comet May Be a Frozen Relic from Before the Sun

July 11, 2025 — A newly discovered comet, 3I/ATLAS, may be the most ancient visitor ever detected, potentially older than our solar system itself. Unlike previous interstellar objects, this ice-rich comet seems to ...

These Mysterious Stars Could Glow Forever Using Dark Matter

July 13, 2025 — Imagine a star powered not by nuclear fusion, but by one of the universe’s greatest mysteries—dark matter. Scientists have proposed the existence of “dark dwarfs,” strange glowing objects ...

This Tiny Rice Plant Could Feed the First Lunar Colony

July 11, 2025 — In a bold step toward sustainable space travel, scientists are engineering a radically small, protein-rich rice that can grow in space. The Moon-Rice project, led by the Italian Space Agency in ...

Big-Bang Echoes Unmask a Billion-Light-Year Hole Around Earth—and It’s Stretching Space Faster

July 15, 2025 — Our galaxy may reside in a billion-light-year-wide cosmic bubble that accelerates local expansion, potentially settling the long-running Hubble tension. Galaxy counts reveal a sparsely populated ...

Hidden DNA-Sized Crystals in Cosmic Ice Could Rewrite Water—and Life Itself

July 9, 2025 — Scientists from UCL and the University of Cambridge have revealed that "space ice"—long thought to be completely disordered—is actually sprinkled with tiny crystals, changing our ...

Earth’s Weather Satellites Just Spent 10 Years Watching Venus — Here’s What They Found

July 2, 2025 — Japan’s Himawari weather satellites, designed to watch Earth, have quietly delivered a decade of infrared snapshots of Venus. By stitching 437 images together, scientists tracked daily thermal ...

JWST Unlocks 10-Billion-Year Mystery of How Galaxies Shape Themselves

June 30, 2025 — Using the James Webb Space Telescope, scientists spotted thin and thick disks in galaxies as far back as 10 billion years ago—something never seen before. These observations reveal that galaxies ...

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 ...

A Mysterious Mineral in Asteroid Ryugu May Rewrite Planetary History

June 28, 2025 — A surprising discovery from a tiny grain of asteroid Ryugu has rocked scientists' understanding of how our Solar System evolved. Researchers found djerfisherite—a mineral typically born in ...

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 ...

Tiny Orange Beads Found by Apollo Astronauts Reveal Moon’s Explosive Past

June 16, 2025 — When Apollo astronauts stumbled across shimmering orange beads on the moon, they had no idea they were gazing at ancient relics of violent volcanic activity. These glass spheres, tiny yet ...

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 ...

Largest-Ever Map of the Universe Reveals 10x More Early Galaxies Than Expected

June 7, 2025 — An international team of scientists has unveiled the largest and most detailed map of the universe ever created using the James Webb Space Telescope, revealing nearly 800,000 galaxies stretching back ...

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 ...

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 ...

Unveiling the Secrets of Planet Formation in Environments of High UV Radiation

May 21, 2025 — The fundamental building blocks for planet formation can exist even in environments with extreme ultraviolet radiation, according to a new ...

'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 ...

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 ...

Streaked Slopes on Mars Probably Not Signs of Water Flow, Study Finds

May 19, 2025 — Researchers analyzed a global database of 500,000 strange streaks that occur on steep Martian slopes, concluding that they're most likely caused by dry processes rather than liquid ...

Not One, but Two Massive Black Holes Are Eating Away at This Galaxy

May 19, 2025 — Astronomers searching for massive black holes shredding stars found one in an unusual place -- 2,600 light years from the core of a galaxy. The roque black hole may be from an earlier merger with ...