Science

For the first time, scientists have used ultrafast X-ray flashes to take a direct image of a single electron as it moved during a chemical reaction. In the new study, published Aug. 20 in the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers accomplished this incredible feat by imaging how a valence electron — an electron in the outer shell of an …

Sign up for the Starts With a Bang newsletter Travel the universe with Dr. Ethan Siegel as he answers the biggest questions of all. The story of the expanding Universe has been a back-and-forth one over the past 110 years: ever since general relativity was first introduced. Initially, Einstein introduced the notion of a cosmological constant — a form of …

New research suggests we may live in a vast cosmic void, a region with far fewer galaxies and matter than expected. This finding could explain why the universe around us seems to be expanding faster than models predict, a puzzle known as the Hubble tension. Credit: SciTechDaily.com New data on baryon acoustic oscillations strengthen the case for a local cosmic …

White dwarfs — the superdense, slowly cooling embers left behind when stars like our sun die — are usually quiet cosmic relics. A rare few, however, are anything but. In recent years, astronomers analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft identified a handful of white dwarfs hurtling through the Milky Way at breakneck speeds of up to 1,240 …

Our corner of the universe looks tidy at first glance. But pull back, and patterns begin to surface that stretch across billions of light-years. New mapping work hints that our own galaxy belongs to a much larger basin shaped by gravity, while a separate find reveals a vast, ring-like arrangement of distant galaxies. The work was led by …

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Seen from space, Antarctica looks so much simpler than the other continents—a great sheet of ice set in contrast to the dark waters of the encircling Southern Ocean. Get closer, though, and you’ll find not a simple cap of frozen water, but an extraordinarily complex interplay between the ocean, sea ice, and ice sheets and shelves. That relationship is in …

The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope observed interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on 6 August 2025 using its Near-Infrared Spectrograph. The research team is analysing Webb’s data, with a preprint now available online. Webb is one of several space telescopes studying this comet, helping to reveal its size, physical properties, and chemical composition. For example, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and NASA’s …

Voyager 2, launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, was designed to explore the outer planets and ultimately venture into interstellar space. Its journey, spanning nearly five decades, has delivered invaluable data from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and beyond. Yet the mission has not been without peril. At multiple points, the spacecraft came dangerously close to failure, where a single …

Nobel physicist key to world’s 1st gravitational wave discovery in Eastern WA dies  Tri-City Herald Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss, influential physicist who forged new paths to understanding the universe, dies at 92  MIT News Nobel prize winner and gravitational wave pioneer Rainer Weiss dies at 92  Space Rainer Weiss, Who Gave a Nod to Einstein and the Big Bang, Dies at 92  The New …