Category Astronomy/Space

For the first time, international researchers have pinpointed the moment when planets began to form around a star beyond the sun. Using the ALMA telescope, in which the European Southern Observatory (ESO) is a partner, and the James Webb Space Telescope, they have observed the creation of the first specks of planet-forming material—hot minerals just beginning to solidify. This finding marks the first time a planetary system has been identified at such an early stage in its formation and opens a window to the past of our own solar system.

“For the first time, we have identified the earliest moment when planet formation is initiated around a star other than our sun,” says Melissa McClure, a professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands and lead author of the new study, publishe...

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighbouring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Their theory is a potential solution to the ‘Hubble tension’ and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old.

The latest research – shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) in Durham – shows that sound waves from the early universe, &...

For decades, scientists have looked to light as a way to speed up computing. Photonic neural networks—systems that use light instead of electricity to process information—promise faster speeds and lower energy use than traditional electronics.

But despite their potential, these systems have struggled to match the accuracy of digital neural networks. A key reason: most photonic systems still mimic the structure and training methods of digital models, introducing errors when translating from software to hardware.

Now, a research team from Northwestern Polytechnical University and Southeast University in China has developed a new kind of photonic neural network tha...

A mystery interstellar object discovered last week is likely to be the oldest comet ever seen—possibly predating our solar system by more than 3 billion years, researchers say.

The “water ice-rich” visitor, named 3I/ATLAS, is only the third known object from beyond our solar system ever spotted in our cosmic neighborhood and the first to reach us from a completely different regi...