Category Astronomy/Space

Some of the strangest weather in the solar system doesn’t happen on Earth or even in Jupiter’s Great Red Spot—it happens in the interiors of ice giants like Neptune and Uranus. Specifically, scientists have long believed that, at certain pressures and temperatures, it literally rains diamonds inside these planets. For the first time, scientists have mimicked the process they believe creates this phenomenon.

A new paper by physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), published in Nature Physics, resolves the 20-year-old scientific mystery and shows how the same physics that makes it rain diamonds inside Neptune could also help us triple our fusion energy output.

Let’s talk about the actual experiment first...

A team of researchers led by the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa Department of Chemistry has uncovered a faster way large carbon-based molecules may form in space, helping solve a long-standing mystery about how some of the building blocks of the universe grow.

The study, published in Nature Communications in August 2026 and first-authored by chemistry graduate student Shane Goettl, identifies a new chemical process that could explain the rapid formation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs)—large molecules made of carbon and hydrogen that are found throughout the universe, from dying stars to clouds of gas between stars.

Scientists have known these molecules are abundant ...

In dark skies at night, distant starlight twinkles and speaks to vast cosmic histories almost as old as time itself. New data from instruments such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope are helping astrophysicists probe deep cosmic mysteries, including the evolution of black holes and galaxies.

Using supercomputers to help make sense of the data, researchers from multiple institutions worked together to complete the largest cosmological hydrodynamic simulation, called ASTRID—a mind-boggling computational run that traces the evolution of the universe from its earliest times to the present.

“The most important information about our recent study is that we’ve evolved the ASTRID simulation to z = 0, and that these data are available,” said Yihao Zhou, a Ph.D...

The Roman Space Telescope is designed to directly image exoplanets using complex optomechanical systems developed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

The Roman Space Telescope has been under development for about a decade under NASA’s leadership and is scheduled to launch on Aug. 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT. The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, who was considered the architect of NASA’s modern science program and, among other efforts, dedicated herself to the success of the Hubble Space Telescope project.

Roman’s destination is the L2 Lagrange point, a specific location 1...