Pterosaurs May Have Had Brightly Colored Feathers, Exquisite Fossil Reveals

An amazingly well-preserved fossil suggests the common ancestor of dinosaurs and pterosaurs also had some type of feather or feather precursor.

Artist reconstruction of Tupandactylus imperator. Credit: Bob Nicholls (CC BY)

SpaceX’s Starship and NASA’s SLS Could Supercharge Space Science

Scientists are beginning to dream of how a new generation of super-heavy-lift rockets might enable revolutionary space telescopes and bigger, bolder interplanetary missions.

NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) moon megarocket topped by the Orion spacecraft (left); SpaceX’s Starship with Super Heavy booster (right). Credit: Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images (left); SpaceX/Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0) (right)

Bumpy Black Hole X-Rays May Push the Limits of Einstein’s Relativity

In the century since Albert Einstein proposed his theory of general relativity physicists have put it through the wringer with extensive experimental tests—and it has withstood them all. But these experiments were conducted in environments of relatively weak gravity. Scientists have thus been left to wonder how well the theory describes the universe under more extreme conditions, like those found in the regions around black holes. To that end a new study suggests a means of testing the limits of the theory: Researchers have determined that if general relativity does break down near black holes, the effects may be detectable in x-rays blazing off the infalling matter. The study was published in Physical Review D on July 22.