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Physicists Challenge Long-Held Assumptions about Nature of Dark Matter

Dark photons are hypothetical dark sector particles proposed as a force carrier similar to the photon of electromagnetism but potentially connected to dark matter. Image credit: University of Adelaide.
Jan 19, 2026 by News Staff

Dark matter may not have been ‘cold’ in the earliest moments after the Big Bang, as long believed; instead, new research from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and the Universit’e Paris-Saclay suggests dark matter particles could have been incredibly hot, traveling near the speed of light in the primordial cosmos, before cooling down in time to seed the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure. Hypothetical dark matter particles....

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Operating principle and implementation of MASI. Image credit: Wang et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-025-65661-8.

New Sensor Rewrites Rules of Optical Imaging

Jan 19, 2026 by News Staff

Inspired by a technique that allowed astronomers to image a black hole, scientists at the University of Connecticut developed a lens-free image sensor...

Signatures of single gravitons from gravitational waves can be detected in near-future experiments. Image credit: I. Pikovski.

Physicists Begin Building First-Ever Graviton Detector

Jan 19, 2026 by News Staff

Stevens Institute of Technology physicist Igor Pikovski and colleagues are developing the first experiment designed to capture individual gravitons —...

A composite image of the Ring Nebula constructed from four WEAVE/LIFU emission-line images. Image credit: Wesson et al., doi: 10.1093/mnras/staf2139.

Astronomers Spot Surprising Iron ‘Bar’ at Heart of Ring Nebula

Jan 16, 2026 by News Staff

Astronomers using the WHT Enhanced Area Velocity Explorer (WEAVE), a powerful new instrument mounted on the William Herschel Telescope on La Palma, have...

Tyrannosaurus rex holotype specimen at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, the United States. Image credit: Scott Robert Anselmo / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Tyrannosaurus rex Took Nearly Four Decades to Grow Up, New Research Shows

Jan 15, 2026 by News Staff

A comprehensive analysis of 17 fossil specimens reveals that Tyrannosaurus rex grew far more slowly than previously thought — reaching its full-grown...

Little red dots are young supermassive black holes in dense ionized cocoons. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Webb / Rusakov et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-025-09900-4.

Early Universe’s ‘Little Red Dots’ Are Young Supermassive Black Holes, Astrophysicists Say

Jan 15, 2026 by News Staff

Astrophysicists at the University of Copenhagen show that the enigmatic ‘little red dots’ — red sources scattered across images of the early...

Facial reconstruction of Homo habilis. Image credit: Cicero Moraes.

2-Million-Year-Old Skeleton Offers Clearest Look Yet at Homo habilis

Jan 15, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

A newly-described partial skeleton from the Koobi Fora Formation in northern Kenya is giving paleoanthropologists their most complete picture yet of Homo...

This image depicts a Pleistocene landscape in northern Spain with woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis), and European cave lions (Panthera leo spelaea) with a reindeer carcass. Image credit: Mauricio Antón.

14,400-Year-Old Woolly Rhinoceros Genome Shows No Evidence of Recent Inbreeding

Jan 14, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

The woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis) is a cold-adapted herbivore that went extinct around 14,000 years ago, but little is known about their...

A screenshot of the SETI@home user interface on a desktop computer in 2009. Image credit: Robert Sanders / UC Berkeley.

Millions Joined SETI@home Project, Now Astronomers Zero In on 100 Promising Signals

Jan 14, 2026 by News Staff

SETI@home, the pioneering distributed-computing project launched in 1999 that enlisted millions of volunteers to analyze radio signals from space, produced...

Leang Bulu Bettue in the Maros-Pangkep karst area of South Sulawesi. Image credit: Burhan et al., doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0337993.

Enigmatic Hominins May Have Overlapped with Homo sapiens on Sulawesi

Jan 13, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

At Leang Bulu Bettue, a rock-shelter in the Maros-Pangkep karst region on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, paleoanthropologists have uncovered one of...

The rockhead poacher (Bothragonus swanii) in Oregon Coast Aquarium. Image credit: Rhinopias / CC BY-SA 4.0.

Scientist Finds Built-In Drum in Head of Weird-Looking Fish

Jan 13, 2026 by Natali Anderson

A fish species called the armored rockhead poacher (Bothragonus swanii) carries a secret that has confounded marine biologists for decades: a deep, bowl-shaped...

The Hubble image shows the Circinus Galaxy, a spiral galaxy about 13 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Circinus; a close-up of its core from Webb shows the inner face of the hole of the donut-shaped disk of gas disk glowing in infrared light; the outer ring appears as dark spots. Image credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Webb / Hubble / Enrique Lopez-Rodriguez, University of South Carolina / Deepashri Thatte, STScI / Alyssa Pagan, STScI / NSF’s NOIRLab / CTIO.

Webb Peers into Heart of Circinus Galaxy

Jan 13, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

Astronomers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have captured the most detailed infrared view yet into the center of the Circinus Galaxy, one of...

The International Space Station is seen with Earth in the background. Image credit: NASA.

Microgravity on International Space Station Alters Coevolution of Bacteriophages and Their Hosts

Jan 13, 2026 by News Staff

In new experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS), microbiologists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Rhodium Scientific Inc. have...

COSMOS-74706: an unsharp mask overlaid onto the F200W, F277W, and F356W filter composition; the white lines are logarithmic spirals fitted to points along the arm structures and a line segment fitted to the approximately North to South aligned bar structure. Image credit: Daniel Ivanov.

Barred Spiral Galaxy Spotted Just Two Billion Years after Big Bang

Jan 13, 2026 by News Staff

Using the high resolution images from the NIRCam (Near-InfraRed Camera) instrument onboard the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have...

Life reconstruction of Xenovenator espinosai. Image credit: Connor Ashbridge / CC BY 4.0.

Thick-Skulled Troodontid Dinosaur Unearthed in Mexico

Jan 12, 2026 by Enrico de Lazaro

A team of paleontologists from Mexico and the United States has identified a new species of bird-like dinosaur with an unusually thick and domed skull,...

This artist’s impression shows the evolution of the Universe beginning with the Big Bang on the left followed by the appearance of the Cosmic Microwave Background. The formation of the first stars ends the cosmic dark ages, followed by the formation of galaxies. Image credit: M. Weiss / Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

New Solution to Cosmic Acceleration Challenges Dark Energy Paradigm

Jan 12, 2026 by News Staff

Physicists from the Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity at the University of Bremen and the Transylvanian University of Brașov have unveiled...

This image, taken with the MUSE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope, shows a shock wave around RXJ0528+2838. Image credit: ESO / Iłkiewicz et al.

Unexpected Shock Wave Detected around Nearby White Dwarf

Jan 12, 2026 by News Staff

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured a breathtaking shock wave around the white dwarf star 1RXS J052832.5+283824 (RXJ0528+2838...

Life reconstruction of Sacabambaspis janvieri, a species of armored jawless fish that lived during the Ordovician period. Image credit: Kaori Serakaki, OIST.

Study: Late Ordovician Mass Extinction Cleared Way for First Fishes

Jan 12, 2026 by News Staff

A long-standing mystery in vertebrate evolution — why most major fish lineages appear suddenly in the fossil record tens of millions of years after...

This artist’s concept shows the red supergiant star Betelgeuse and an orbiting companion star. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Elizabeth Wheatley, STScI / Andrea Dupree, CfA.

Astronomers Detect Celestial ‘Wake’ from Betelgeuse’s Companion Star

Jan 12, 2026 by News Staff

New multi-year observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory and Roque de...

An artist’s impression of the asteroid 2025 MN45. Image credit: NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC / AURA / P. Marenfeld.

Record-Setting Asteroid Found in Pre-Survey Data from Vera Rubin Observatory

Jan 9, 2026 by News Staff

Astronomers have detected an extraordinary asteroid, named 2025 MN45, in early data from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Camera — the...

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