Cosmic Rays News

October 29, 2026

Top Headlines

NASA’s Artemis I Mission Reveals Surprising Radiation Levels Near the Moon

Oct. 28, 2026 NASA’s Artemis I mission has revealed that cosmic radiation near the Moon is higher than in Earth orbit, but not by as much as scientists might expect. Tiny experimental detectors also uncovered ...

Scientists Build a Nuclear Clock That Could Make Atomic Clocks Obsolete

Oct. 10, 2026 Scientists in Vienna have achieved a major breakthrough in timekeeping by creating the world’s first self-stabilizing nuclear clock, a technology that could eventually surpass even the most precise atomic clocks. Instead of relying on electrons in ...

This Suitcase-sized Spacecraft Could Hear the Universe Before Stars Existed

Sep. 28, 2026 CosmoCube will use the far side of the Moon as a shield from Earth’s radio noise to search for a faint signal from the universe before the first stars existed. The suitcase-sized satellite could reveal how the cosmic dark ages ended and how dark ...

A $100 Detector Can See Invisible Particles Raining Down from Space

Sep. 17, 2026 A pocket-sized, roughly $100 detector can reveal the invisible stream of cosmic particles constantly passing through Earth and even through our bodies. What began as a student physics project is now being used in major experiments, balloon missions, ...

Interstellar Solar Sails Hit a Strange Problem at 75% of Light Speed

Sep. 2, 2026 Solar sails pushed by powerful lasers could reach incredible speeds, but relativity may eventually make the light itself work against them. At around 75% of the speed of light, scattered photons can begin creating drag, adding a surprising obstacle ...

NASA’s Psyche Spacecraft Aces Mars Flyby Capturing Stunning Timelapse Video

July 28, 2026 NASA’s Psyche spacecraft aced its Mars flyby, using the planet’s gravity to speed toward its 2029 encounter with a metal-rich asteroid. The spacecraft tested its cameras, magnetometer, and ...

China’s Chang’e-6 Reveals Why Solar Wind Hits the Moon’s Two Sides Differently

July 21, 2026 China’s Chang’e-6 samples have uncovered a surprising difference between the Moon’s two hemispheres. Solar wind particles penetrated deeper into the far-side soil because Earth’s ...

New AI Model Reveals How Neutron Star Mergers Forge Heavy Elements

July 8, 2026 Researchers have created an AI-based simulation that makes it much faster to model how neutron star mergers produce many of the universe's heaviest elements. The new tool could improve predictions of these powerful explosions while helping ...

The Milky Way’s Weird Gamma-ray Glow May Be Dark Matter After All

June 30, 2026 A strange gamma-ray glow at the center of the Milky Way has long sparked debate over whether it comes from hidden neutron stars or elusive dark matter. By applying machine learning to more than a million simulated observations, researchers included ...

Tiny X-ray Telescope Could Unlock the Moon's Hidden Chemistry

June 6, 2026 A lightweight new X-ray telescope could finally give scientists something they’ve never had before: a complete chemical map of the Moon. Researchers used detailed mission simulations to show that a compact telescope orbiting the Moon could ...

Scientists Discover Towering Red Auroras Reaching Deep Into Space Above Japan

May 21, 2026 Mysterious red auroras spotted over Japan were found reaching astonishingly high altitudes, even during space storms considered relatively mild. The discovery suggests hidden solar activity may be ...

James Webb Telescope Reveals the Clearest Map Ever of the Universe’s Cosmic Web

May 12, 2026 Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have created the clearest map yet of the universe’s “cosmic web” — the enormous hidden structure that connects galaxies across space. By ...

Latest Headlines

updated 10:18am EDT

NASA Discovers Jupiter’s Invisible Shield Is More Complex Than Earth’s

Oct. 29, 2026 NASA’s Juno spacecraft has discovered that Jupiter uses a surprisingly complex system of powerful plasma waves and multiple shock regions to defend against the solar wind. The findings reveal major ...

Einstein's Equations May Explain the Universe Without Dark Energy

Oct. 29, 2026 Mathematicians have uncovered what they argue is a fundamental flaw in the standard model of the universe, potentially challenging the need for dark energy. Their calculations suggest that the ...

Meteors Don't Just Burn Up. What Really Happens Is Far More Violent

Oct. 28, 2026 Scientists have uncovered seven surprising stages that space rocks go through as they hurtle toward Earth, revealing that melting and violent fragmentation, rather than simple evaporation, determine ...

James Webb Discovers a Scorching Lava Planet With a “giant Sunscreen”

Oct. 27, 2026 A scorching lava planet 280 light-years away has surprised astronomers by apparently maintaining a thick atmosphere despite conditions that should have stripped it away billions of years ago. James ...

Smithsonian Scientists Just Recreated the First 2 Billion Years of the Universe

Oct. 27, 2026 Scientists have created one of the largest and most detailed simulations of the early universe ever made, offering an extraordinary new glimpse into ...

A 2,700-Year-Old Solar Eclipse Just Revealed Something Surprising About Earth

Oct. 26, 2026 A solar eclipse recorded more than 2,700 years ago is revealing surprising secrets about Earth's rotation and the Sun's ancient behavior. By ...

Astronomers Uncover a Mysterious Magnetic Web Above the Sun

Oct. 24, 2026 The Sun’s seemingly peaceful regions are hiding a surprisingly complex magnetic world. Using a balloon-borne telescope high above Earth, scientists discovered delicate, thread-like magnetic ...

NASA Reveals 16 Stunning Galaxies Hiding Cosmic Chaos

Oct. 20, 2026 NASA's stunning new gallery of 16 galaxies reveals colossal black hole jets, explosive star formation, and spectacular cosmic collisions through the combined power of Chandra, James Webb, Hubble, and ...

Astronomers Discover a Ghostly Green Star Unlike Any Known Before

Oct. 19, 2026 Astronomers have uncovered a surprising rainbow of dead stars, including the first known star that would appear genuinely green to human eyes. Researchers found that white dwarfs can glow in ...

NASA’s Webb Reveals the Wild Weather of a Mysterious World 20 Light-Years Away

Oct. 17, 2026 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that a turbulent world 20 light-years away has a surprisingly orderly weather system, with three ...

James Webb Reveals a Strange Bulge in an Alien Planet's Atmosphere

Oct. 16, 2026 Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered that a distant alien planet's atmosphere is surprisingly lopsided. Located 1,300 light-years away, the scorching gas giant ...

MIT Astronomers Catch a Star in a Feast That Could Last Billions of Years

Oct. 10, 2026 Astronomers have discovered a bizarre star system about 300 light-years from Earth where a small star is slowly devouring a nearby brown dwarf, an object too massive to be a planet but too small to ...

A Record-Breaking X-Ray Flash May Reveal the Birth of a Magnetar

Sep. 30, 2026 Astronomers have found strong evidence that some mysterious, minutes-long X-ray flashes are produced when two neutron stars collide and create a magnetar. One record-setting event glowed in X-rays ...

Einstein Probe Reveals a Hidden Phase of Neutron Star Collisions

Oct. 8, 2026 Einstein Probe revealed nearly 10 minutes of soft X-ray activity following a short gamma-ray burst, exposing a phase of neutron star mergers that previous missions may have missed. The prolonged ...

Scientists Find a Surprising Clue to Why the Universe’s Expansion Doesn’t Add Up

Oct. 4, 2026 Tiny magnetic fields created shortly after the Big Bang may help explain the long-running disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding. Detailed simulations show that these primordial fields ...

The Ice Blasting from Saturn's Moon Enceladus Is Stranger Than Scientists Realized

Sep. 29, 2026 Enceladus may naturally separate and concentrate chemicals from its hidden ocean as droplets slowly freeze and shatter on their way into space. The process could explain Cassini’s puzzling ...

Chang’e-6 Lunar Soil Contains a Surprising Magnetic Time Capsule

Oct. 3, 2026 Scientists studying Chang’e-6 lunar soil have discovered a previously unknown magnetic mineral in natural Moon samples: a form of metallic iron called γ-Fe. Found inside tiny impact-glass ...

The Early Universe Wasn’t Nearly as Pristine as Scientists Thought

Oct. 2, 2026 JWST has revealed that galaxies were spreading carbon, oxygen, and other heavy elements through space just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The surprising discovery suggests the young universe ...

Black Hole Jets May Decide the Fate of Entire Galaxies

Sep. 30, 2026 Powerful jets from supermassive black holes can disturb star-forming gas far beyond a galaxy’s visible edge, leaving a glowing trail hundreds of thousands of light-years long. By keeping this gas ...

Webb Finds a Surprising Atmosphere on a Scorching Lava World

Oct. 7, 2026 The James Webb Space Telescope has found strong evidence that the rocky lava world HD 3167 b has an atmosphere, despite circling its star every 24 hours under extreme heat. The surprising discovery ...

The LHC Just Ruled out Another Hiding Place for Quantum Black Holes

Sep. 22, 2026 Physicists searching through Large Hadron Collider data found no evidence that the machine has been producing microscopic quantum black holes, but the result sharply narrows where such exotic physics ...

Scientists Are About to Test Einstein’s Gravity With Exotic Matter

Sep. 18, 2026 Scientists have found a new way to create a controlled beam of muonium, an exotic atom containing a heavier cousin of the electron. The advance could allow researchers to test for the first time ...

The Universe Has Plenty of Hydrogen. So Why Is Star Formation Collapsing?

Sep. 3, 2026 Star formation across the universe has fallen dramatically over the past 4.5 billion years, but astronomers have uncovered a surprising twist: the supply of neutral hydrogen, a key ingredient for ...

Venus’s Pale Yellow Clouds May Hide Something Surprisingly Dark

Sep. 12, 2026 A century-old mystery in Venus’s clouds just became more intriguing, as scientists calculated how strongly the unidentified material behind its dark ultraviolet patterns must absorb light. The ...

James Webb Reveals Why Planet Formation Is a Race Against Time

Sep. 28, 2026 JWST has revealed that young planetary systems lose their planet-building gas through a changing mix of powerful jets, molecular winds, and radiation-driven outflows. As the disks age and their gas ...

Earth May Have Lost the Sun’s Protective Shield Millions of Years Ago

Sep. 2, 2026 NASA-funded studies suggest Earth’s climate has been influenced by both the Sun’s travels through dense regions of the Milky Way and the violent superflares of its youth. Those events may help ...

Scientists May Have Finally Caught “empty” Space Changing Light

Aug. 26, 2026 A magnetar with an astonishingly powerful magnetic field may have revealed a quantum effect predicted by Werner Heisenberg nearly 90 years ago. Its light shows signs that supposedly empty space is ...

Physicists Create a Tiny “Big Bang” With Surprisingly Small Atomic Nuclei

Aug. 23, 2026 Researchers at CERN have created microscopic versions of the early Universe by colliding surprisingly small atomic nuclei at nearly the speed of light. The collisions produced quark-gluon plasma, the ...

A Mysterious Cosmic Hum May Come from 13-Billion-Year-Old Dark Stars

Aug. 27, 2026 Today’s mysterious gravitational-wave background may preserve clues about how the Universe’s first supermassive black holes formed. Descendants of hypothetical Dark Stars could be responsible for ...

Dying Radio Galaxies Fade Faster Than Scientists Expected

Sep. 4, 2026 Astronomers have identified a surprisingly young population of fading radio galaxies whose supermassive black holes have already switched off their powerful jets. The confirmed remnants range from ...