Category Astronomy/Space

The imaging team of NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has taken advantage of clear skies on the red planet to capture one of the sharpest panoramas of its mission so far. Visible in the mosaic, which was stitched together from 96 images taken at a location the science team calls “Falbreen,” are a rock that appears to lie on top of a sand ripple, a boundary line between two geologic units, and hills as distant as 40 miles (65 kilometers) away...

A recent study led by Dilda Berdikhan, a Ph.D. student from the Xinjiang Astronomical Observatory (XAO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has uncovered compelling evidence that a cloud–cloud collision has triggered active star formation in the molecular cloud G013.313+0.193 (hereafter G013.313) in the Milky Way. The findings are published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Using observational data from the NanShan 26-m Radio Telescope and the Delingha 13...

Researchers have discovered new insights into the reaction pathways of the first molecule in space. Long before stars lit up the sky, the universe was a hot, dense place where simple chemistry quietly set the stage for everything to come. Scientists have now recreated the first molecule ever to form, helium hydride, and discovered it played a much bigger role in the birth of stars than we thought. Using a special ultra-cold lab setup, they mimicked conditions from over 13 billion years ago and found that this ancient molecule helped cool the universe just enough for stars to ignite. Their findings could rewrite part of the story about how the cosmos evolved from darkness to light.

Immediately after the Big Bang, which occurred around 13...

A new study published in July 2025 tackles one of science’s most profound mysteries—how did life first emerge from nonliving matter on early Earth? Using cutting edge mathematical approaches, researcher Robert G. Endres from Imperial College London has developed a framework that suggests the spontaneous origin of life faces far greater challenges than previously understood.

The study, published on the arXiv preprint server, focuses on the difficulty of assembling structured biological information under what could be reas...