Cosmic Rays News

January 23, 2025

Top Headlines

Fresh, Direct Evidence for Tiny Drops of Quark-Gluon Plasma

Jan. 15, 2025 — A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny specks of a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Scientists ...

This Quasar May Have Helped Turn the Lights on for the Universe

Jan. 15, 2025 — Astronomers have detected an intensely brightening and dimming quasar that may help explain how some objects in the early universe grew at a highly accelerated rate. The discovery is the most distant object detected by the NuSTAR X-ray space ...

New Study Unveils Breakthrough in Understanding Cosmic Particle Accelerators

Jan. 13, 2025 — Scientists have come a step closer to understanding how collisionless shock waves -- found throughout the universe -- are able to accelerate particles to extreme ...

X-Ray Flashes from a Nearby Supermassive Black Hole Accelerate Mysteriously

Jan. 13, 2025 — Astronomers observed flashes of X-rays coming from a supermassive black hole at a steadily increasing clip. The source could be the core of a dead star that's teetering at the black hole's ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:03pm EST

Light, Flexible and Radiation-Resistant: Organic Solar Cells for Space

Jan. 10, 2025 — Radiation testing suggests that solar cells made from carbon-based, or organic, materials could outperform conventional silicon and gallium arsenide for generating electricity in the final frontier, ...

Astrophysicists Capture Astonishing Images of Gamma-Ray Flare from Supermassive Black Hole M87

Dec. 13, 2024 — The galaxy M87, located in the Virgo constellation, provided the first-ever photo of a black hole in 2019, when the Event Horizon Telescope captured ...

Superflares Once Per Century

Dec. 12, 2024 — Stars similar to the Sun produce a gigantic outburst of radiation on average about once every hundred years per star. Such superflares release more energy than a trillion hydrogen bombs and make all ...

A New Discovery About the Source of the Vast Energy in Cosmic Rays

Dec. 10, 2024 — New research suggests that these ultra-high energy rays derive their energy from magnetic ...

Particle Research Gets Closer to Answering Why We're Here

Dec. 5, 2024 — Physicists have outlined the next 10 years of global research into the behavior of neutrinos, particles so tiny that they pass through virtually everything by the trillions every second at nearly the ...

Possible Origins of Dark Matter in 'Dark Big Bang' Scenario

Nov. 18, 2024 — Recent research unlocks new clues that could radically change the world's understanding of the origin of dark ...

Most Energetic Cosmic-Ray Electrons and Positrons Ever Observed

Nov. 25, 2024 — Scientists have recently identified electrons and positrons with the highest energies ever recorded on Earth. They provide evidence of cosmic processes emitting colossal amounts of energy, the ...

A Nearby Supernova Could End the Search for Dark Matter

Nov. 21, 2024 — Axions are the most likely candidate for enigmatic dark matter that dominates the universe. Astrophysicists are searching for evidence of high-mass axions produced during supernovae. Scientists ...

Interstellar Methane as Progenitor of Amino Acids?

Nov. 6, 2024 — Gamma radiation can convert methane into a wide variety of products at room temperature, including hydrocarbons, oxygen-containing molecules, and amino acids, reports a research team. This type of ...

Dance of Electrons Measured in the Glow from Exploding Neutron-Stars

Nov. 4, 2024 — The temperature of elementary particles has been observed in the radioactive glow following the collision of two neutron stars and the birth of a black hole. This has, for the first time, made it ...

New ESO Image Captures a Dark Wolf in the Sky

Oct. 31, 2024 — For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals a spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly ...

One of the Fastest-Spinning Stars in the Universe

Oct. 30, 2024 — New research in our Milky Way has revealed a neutron star that rotates around its axis at an extremely high speed. It spins 716 times per second, making it one of the fastest-spinning objects ever ...

Seeing a Black Hole's Jet in a New Light

Oct. 28, 2024 — Researchers have pored over more than two decades' worth of data from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory to show there's new knotty science to discover around black ...

Lightning Strikes Kick Off a Game of Electron Pinball in Space

Oct. 10, 2024 — When lightning cracks on Earth, especially high-energy electrons may fall out of Earth's inner radiation belt, according to a new study -- an electron 'rain' that could threaten ...

Influence of a Black Hole's Spin: First Evidence of Precession in Ultraluminous Accretion Disks

Oct. 7, 2024 — Researchers conducted innovative simulations of spinning black holes grounded in general relativity, which clarified that the ultraluminous accretion disk (i.e., gaseous spiral surrounding a black ...

First Data from XRISM Space Mission Provides New Perspective on Supermassive Black Holes

Sep. 30, 2024 — Data from an international space mission is confirming decades worth of speculation about the galactic neighborhoods of supermassive black ...

Our Cosmic Neighborhood May Be 10x Larger

Sep. 27, 2024 — The Cosmicflows team has been studying the movements of 56,000 galaxies, revealing a potential shift in the scale of our galactic basin of ...

Huge Gamma-Ray Burst Collection 'Rivals 250-Year-Old Messier Catalog'

Sep. 13, 2024 — Hundreds of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) have been recorded as part of an enormous global effort so extensive it 'rivals the catalog of deep-sky objects created by Messier 250 years ago', ...

Hair-Thin Wire to Help Simulate Cosmic Conditions

Sep. 12, 2024 — Extreme conditions prevail inside stars and planets. The pressure reaches millions of bars, and it can be several million degrees hot. Sophisticated methods make it possible to create such states of ...

AI Helps Distinguish Dark Matter from Cosmic Noise

Sep. 6, 2024 — An AI-powered tool can distinguish dark matter's elusive effects from other cosmic phenomena, which could bring us closer to unlocking the secrets of dark ...

How Bright Is the Universe's Glow? Study Offers Best Measurement Yet

Sep. 3, 2024 — Over billions of years, the universe's stars and galaxies shined their light into space, leaving behind an imperceptibly faint night light known as the cosmic optical background. NASA's New ...

Dark Matter Could Have Helped Make Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe

Aug. 28, 2024 — Supermassive black holes typically take billions of years to form. But the James Webb Space Telescope is finding them not that long after the Big Bang -- before they should have had time to form. ...

New Record in Search for Dark Matter

Aug. 26, 2024 — New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector put the best-ever limits on particles called WIMPs, a leading candidate for what makes up our universe's invisible ...

New Heaviest Exotic Antimatter Nucleus

Aug. 21, 2024 — Scientists studying the tracks of particles streaming from six billion collisions of atomic nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- an 'atom smasher' that recreates the ...

Extraterrestrial Chemistry With Earthbound Possibilities

Aug. 21, 2024 — Who are we? Why are we here? We are stardust, the result of chemistry occurring throughout vast clouds of interstellar gas and dust. To better understand how that chemistry could create prebiotic ...

Explanation Found for X-Ray Radiation from Black Holes

Aug. 20, 2024 — Researchers have succeeded in something that has been pursued since the 1970s: explaining the X-ray radiation from the black hole surroundings. The radiation originates from the combined effect of ...

Cold Antimatter for Quantum State-Resolved Precision Measurements

Aug. 2, 2024 — Why does the universe contain matter and (virtually) no antimatter? Scientists have achieved an experimental breakthrough in this context. It can contribute to measuring the mass and magnetic moment ...

NASA's Fermi Finds New Feature in Brightest Gamma-Ray Burst Yet Seen

July 25, 2024 — In October 2022, astronomers were stunned by what was quickly dubbed the BOAT -- the brightest-of-all-time gamma-ray burst (GRB). Now an international science team reports that data from NASA's ...

Dark Matter Flies Ahead of Normal Matter in Mega Galaxy Cluster Collision

July 24, 2024 — Astronomers have untangled a messy collision between two massive clusters of galaxies in which the clusters' vast clouds of dark matter have decoupled from the so-called normal ...

Life Signs Could Survive Near Surfaces of Enceladus and Europa

July 21, 2024 — Europa and Enceladus, icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn respectively, have evidence of oceans beneath their crusts. A NASA experiment suggests -- if these oceans support life -- signatures of that life ...