Cosmic Rays News

November 23, 2024

Top Headlines

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 propose that a quick way to find these axions is to ...

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 reaction probably plays an important role in the ...

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 possible to measure the microscopic, physical ...

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 ...

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updated 11:04pm EST

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 ...

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 satellites, and even ...

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 ...

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', astronomers say. ...

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 Horizons ...

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 ...

Bizarre 'Garden Sprinkler-Like' Jet Is Spotted Shooting out of Neutron Star

July 16, 2024 — A strange 'garden sprinkler-like' jet coming from a neutron star has been pictured for the first time. The S-shaped structure is created as the jet changes direction due to the wobbling of ...

Mars Likely Had Cold and Icy Past, New Study Finds

July 10, 2024 — The question of whether Mars ever supported life has captivated the imagination of scientists and the public for decades. Central to the discovery is gaining insight into the past climate of ...

Shocked Quartz Reveals Evidence of Historical Cosmic Airburst

June 26, 2024 — Researchers continue to expand the case for the Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis. The idea proposes that a fragmented comet smashed into the Earth's atmosphere 12,800 years ago, causing a ...

A Hidden Treasure in the Milky Way -- Astronomers Uncover Ultrabright X-Ray Source

June 24, 2024 — Astronomers uncovered that a well-known X-ray binary, whose exact nature has been a mystery to scientists until now, is actually a hidden ultraluminous X-ray ...

Star Clusters Observed Within a Galaxy in the Early Universe

June 24, 2024 — The history of how stars and galaxies came to be and evolved into the present day remains among the most challenging astrophysical questions to solve yet, but new research brings us closer to ...

Pair of Merging Quasars at Cosmic Dawn

June 17, 2024 — Astronomers have discovered a double-record-breaking pair of quasars. Not only are they the most distant pair of merging quasars ever found, but also the only pair confirmed in the bygone era of the ...

Pair Plasmas Found in Deep Space Can Now Be Generated in the Lab

June 13, 2024 — Researchers have experimentally generated high-density relativistic electron-positron pair-plasma beams by producing two to three orders of magnitude more pairs than previously ...

How Do Supermassive Black Holes Get Super Massive?

June 11, 2024 — By combining forefront X-ray observations with state-of-the-art supercomputer simulations of the buildup of galaxies over cosmic history, researchers have provided the best modeling to date of the ...

The Solar System May Have Passed Through Dense Interstellar Clouds 2 Million Years Ago, Altering Earth's Climate

June 10, 2024 — Astrophysicists calculate the likelihood that Earth was exposed to cold, harsh interstellar clouds, a phenomenon not previously considered in geologic climate ...

Exotic Black Holes Could Be a Byproduct of Dark Matter

June 6, 2024 — In the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear charge, MIT physicists propose. The gravitational pull from these tiny, ...

Birth of Universe's Earliest Galaxies Observed for First Time

May 23, 2024 — Researchers have now seen the formation of three of the earliest galaxies in the universe, more than 13 billion years ago. The sensational discovery contributes important knowledge about the ...