China is hatching a plan to find Earth 2.0

A satellite will scour the Milky Way for exoplanets orbiting stars just like the Sun.

China is planning its first space mission to survey the skies for exoplanets similar to Kepler-186f, an Earth-size planet orbiting a distant star (artist’s impression). Credit: NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle

Are These The Most Distant Galaxies Yet Seen?

Two fuzzy red objects in the early universe may be galaxies shining at us from only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Researchers Identify ‘Master Problem’ Underlying All Cryptography

The existence of secure cryptography depends on one of the oldest questions in computational complexity.

Samantha Mash for Quanta Magazine

A hole in a Triceratops named Big John probably came from combat

The puncture adds to evidence that the three-horned dinosaurs battled each other.

The largest known Triceratops features a hole in its bony frill that suggests the dinosaur, called Big John, fought with its peers. F. BACCHIA/ZOIC LLC

The Origins Of The 30,000-Year-Old ‘Venus Of Willendorf’ Statue Have Been Traced To Italy

Scientists used scans to determine that the Venus of Willendorf's limestone is "virtually indistinguishable" from limestone found in Italy.

In 1908, an archaeologist digging along the banks of the Danube River near Willendorf, Austria made a striking find: a 30,000-year-old limestone statue of a voluptuous woman, since dubbed the “Venus of Willendorf.” Now, scans of the statue have revealed that it likely originated in northern Italy, nearly 600 miles away.

Propagarsi con lentezza: analisi del suono su Marte

Lento e smorzato, al punto che un’ipotetica conversazione fra due persone a cinque metri di distanza l’una dall’altra risulterebbe molto difficoltosa. Sono le caratteristiche della propagazione del suono nell’atmosfera del Pianeta rosso, ottenute dall’analisi delle registrazioni compiute con il microfono a bordo della SuperCam di Perseverance.

La freccia rossa indica il microfono presente sulla SuperCam del rover Perseverance. È lungo 3,4 cm e pesa 13 grammi. Crediti: Nasa, Jpl-Caltech

Webb Completes First Multi-Instrument Alignment

The sixth stage of aligning NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s mirrors to its scientific instruments so they will create the most accurate and focused images possible has concluded. While the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) continues its cooldown, optics teams have successfully aligned the rest of the observatory’s onboard instruments to Webb’s mirrors. Previous alignment efforts were so accurate that the team concluded no additional adjustments to the secondary mirror are necessary until the seventh and final stage, which will involve MIRI when it has fully cooled.

A Record Broken: Hubble Finds the Most Distant Star Ever Seen

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has established an extraordinary new benchmark: detecting the light of a star that existed within the first billion years after the Universe’s birth in the Big Bang (at a redshift of 6.2) — the most distant individual star ever seen. This sets up a major target for the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope in its first year.

The star nicknamed Earendel (indicated here with an arrow) is positioned along a ripple in spacetime that gives it extreme magnification, allowing it to emerge into view from its host galaxy, which appears as a red smear across the sky. The whole scene is viewed through the distorted lens created by a massive galaxy cluster in the intervening space, which allows the galaxy's features to be seen, but also warps their appearance—an effect astronomers call gravitational lensing. The red dots on either side of Earendel are one star cluster that is mirrored on either side of the ripple, a result of the gravitational lensing distortion. The entire galaxy, called the Sunrise Arc, appears three times, and knots along its length are more mirrored star clusters. Earendel's unique position right along the line of most extreme magnification allows it to be detected, even though it is not a cluster. Credit: NASA, ESA, B. Welch (JHU), D. Coe (STScI), A. Pagan (STScI)

The Planet Inside

Scientists are probing the secrets of the inner core—and learning how it might have saved life on Earth.

Hey DUDE: Mysterious Death of Carbon Star Plays Out Like Six-Ring Circus

Scientists studying V Hydrae (V Hya) have witnessed the star’s mysterious death throes in unprecedented detail. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), the team discovered six slowly-expanding rings and two hourglass-shaped structures caused by the high-speed ejection of matter out into space. The results of the study are published in The Astrophysical Journal.