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Testing $Lambda$CDM with ANN-Reconstructed Expansion History from Cosmic Chronometers Yuki Hashimoto, Kazuharu Bamba, Sanjay Mandal arXiv:2604.22372v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In modern cosmology, the rapid growth of high-precision observational data, along with significant theoretical advances, has intensified the challenge of identifying a robust, model-independent framework to probe the expansion history of the Universe. In this work, we propose a novel artificial neural network (ANN)-based framework for the non-parametric reconstruction of the late-time cosmic expansion. The framework is trained and validated through a three-stage screening pipeline prior to its application to real observational data. As a demonstration of its effectiveness, we reconstruct the Hubble parameter $H(z)$Read More →

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Flexible 3D-Printable Shielding for Extreme Environments You’re based at Artemis Station on the lunar south pole, and you’re monitoring your 12 autonomous rovers that are exploring the surrounding terrain for signs of water ice or other essentials minerals. They’re about 3 kilometers out when you suddenly get a NASA Alert for an incoming solar storm. You know the rovers won’t return to base before the storm hits, but you’re calm knowing the rovers all recently got retrofitted with the latest hair-thin nanotube shielding to protect them from the harsh electromagnetic waves and radiation. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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How a Meteorite Helps Explain Mercury’s Chemical Makeup Mercury is one of the four rocky worlds of the Solar System, yet its chemistry is very different from Earth, Venus, and Mars. Missions to the planet show that it has an iron-poor, but sulfur- and magnesium-rich crust. Furthermore, it’s known to planetary scientists as the most reduced planet in the Solar system. It means that the chemical makeup is dominated by sulfides, carbides, and silicides — as opposed to oxides like we see here on Earth. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Binary Stars Form Lots Of Exoplanets, But Many Of Them Are Ejected As Rogue Planets Binary stars are common, but for a long time astronomers have thought that exoplanets would have trouble forming around them. In recent years, powerful telescopes have detected about 50 of these planets. Now, new simulations show that their formation isn’t actually rare, it’s just that they tend to be on wide orbits, with few opportunities to observe transits. Also, many of them are ejected and become rogue planets. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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ESA’s Proba 3 is Unlocking Secrets of the Solar Wind It has been a dream of astronomers and solar scientists for ages. A new mission gives solar researchers a powerful new tool in their arsenal: on-demand, total solar eclipses. Launched in 2024, The European Space Agency’s Proba-3 mission has proven the feasibility of a free-flying, space-based coronagraph. Now, first science results from the mission are giving us a view of the origin of space weather. The results were recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Is the Earliest Supermassive Black Hole Mystery Solved? One of the most intriguing puzzles in cosmology is the existence of supermassive black holes that seem to appear very early in the history of the Universe. Astronomers keep finding them at times when, by all that they understand about the infant Universe, they shouldn’t be there. The standard theory of black hole formation suggests that they shouldn’t have had enough time to grow as massive as they appear to be. Yet, there they are, monster black holes with the mass of at least a billion suns. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found a largeRead More →

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NASA connects little red dots with Chandra and Webb A newly discovered object may be a key to unlocking the true nature of a mysterious class of sources that astronomers have found in the early universe in recent years. A “X-ray dot” found by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory could explain what these objects are. A paper describing the results is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Laser-Swarm Science at the Proxima Centauri System The idea of sending a swarm of tiny laser-sail powered spacecraft to our nearest exoplanet won’t go away. While complex and punctuated with tough problems, the idea is the only realistic way of reaching another solar system this century, according to researchers. But the scientific benefits would be huge. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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The Last Dance of a Dying Star Every star that has ever lived has been slowly spinning down, losing rotational energy across billions of years until, at the end, it collapses. But new research from Kyoto University has revealed that the story is far stranger than that. Some stars, in their final moments, don’t slow down at all, they spin up and nobody predicted it. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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The Universe Builds Stars by the Book Stars are not born by chance. New research shows that the mass of a star cluster dictates exactly what kinds of stars it will produce from cool, dim dwarfs to blazing stellar giants ten times the mass of our Sun. It is a discovery that rewrites our understanding of how galaxies grow and evolve, and raises questions that astronomers will be grappling with for years to come. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Your Brain Thinks It Knows Where It Is…. Even When It Doesn’t Astronauts take time to adjust how firmly they grip and handle objects when moving between Earth and space, because the brain continues making predictions based on whichever gravitational environment it has most recently adapted to. Research from the Université catholique de Louvain reveals that this adjustment process works in both directions and sheds new light on how the brain anticipates and manages the risk of making mistakes. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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The most common planets in the galaxy don’t appear around the most common stars, TESS observations suggest Astronomers now estimate there is at least one planet for every star in our galaxy. These worlds, called exoplanets, are planets that orbit stars outside our solar system. But new research from McMaster University reveals a surprising twist: the most common planets in our galaxy don’t exist around the most common stars. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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DESI Completes Its Epic 3D Map, Hinting that Dark Energy Might Be Changing On top of Kitt Peak in the Arizona Desert, a robotic surveyor just completed a five year mission to catalogue the positions of tens of millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has now created the largest, most detailed 3D map of our universe ever constructed. And it’s not done yet, its main mission has been extended through 2028. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Newly confirmed supernova remnant is one of the faintest ever detected An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a new supernova remnant (SNR) using radio observations. The newfound supernova remnant, dubbed Abeona, is one of the faintest radio SNRs so far detected. The discovery is detailed in a research paper published April 21 on the arXiv preprint server. phys.org Go to SourceRead More →

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Canada Proposes POET Mission to Hunt Earth-Sized Planets Exoplanet science and the search for life beyond Earth continue to advance at break-neck speeds, with the number of confirmed exoplanets by NASA rapidly approaching 6,300, with 223 of those exoplanets being designated as terrestrial (rocky) exoplanets. With the promise of discovering an increasing number of Earth-sized exoplanets increasing every day, new telescopes from across the world have the opportunity to contribute to this incredible field. Universe Today Go to SourceRead More →

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Nonperturbative stochastic inflation in perturbative dynamical background Xiao-Quan Ye, Shao-Jiang Wang arXiv:2604.15219v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inflationary models that contain a transient ultra-slow-roll phase can exhibit strong non-perturbative dynamics, making the usual perturbative treatment of cosmological fluctuations incomplete. In such regimes, quantum diffusion and the nonlinear gravitational response of the background can both play important roles, motivating a framework that treats them systematically within quantum field theory in curved spacetime. In this work, we derive the first-order stochastic equations in quasi-de Sitter spacetime from the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism and develop a practical procedure to obtain compact stochastic equations that consistently incorporate metric perturbations via the classicalRead More →

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Identification of Candidate Halos Hosting Massive Black Hole Seeds in the $textit{Renaissance}$ Simulations with Support Vector Machines Brandon Pries, John H. Wise arXiv:2511.08706v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The nature of the origins of supermassive black holes remains uncertain. Multiple possible seeding pathways have been proposed across a variety of mass scales, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. One such channel is a direct collapse black hole (DCBH), thought to form from the deaths of supermassive stars in pristine atomic cooling halos in the early universe. In this work, we investigate the ability to identify halos likely to form a DCBH based on their propertiesRead More →

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An updated model for the Perseus Spiral Arm from Trigonometric Parallax and 3-dimensional kinematic distances of distant massive stars Lucas J. Hyland, Mark J. Reid, Simon P. Ellingsen, Andreas Brunthaler, Xing-Wu Zheng, Karl M. Menten arXiv:2603.05896v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We report trigonometric parallaxes and proper motions for three water masers and one methanol maser obtained with the VLBA as part of the BeSSeL Survey. Incorporating these parallaxes with 3-dimensional kinematic distances, we refine the position and pitch angle of the Perseus spiral arm in the 1$^mathrm{st}$ Galactic quadrant. Extrapolating the Perseus and Sagittarius arm locations to beyond the Galactic Center, we find that theyRead More →

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Dimensional reduction for sampled priors and application to photometric redshift distributions Gary Bernstein, William Assignies Doumerg, Michael A. Troxel, Alex Alarcon, Alexandra Amon, Giulia Giannini, Boyan Yin, Sahar Allam, Felipe Andrade-Oliveira, David Brooks, Aurelio Carnero Rosell, Jorge Carretero, Luiz da Costa, Maria Elidaiana da Silva Pereira, Juan De Vicente, Spencer Everett, Josh Frieman, Juan Garcia-Bellido, Daniel Gruen, Samuel Hinton, Devon L. Hollowood, Klaus Honscheid, David James, Sujeong Lee, Jennifer Marshall, Juan Mena-Fern’andez, Ramon Miquel, Andr’es Plazas Malag’on, Eusebio Sanchez, David Sanchez Cid, Ignacio Sevilla, Tae-hyeon Shin, Mathew Smith, Eric Suchyta, Molly Swanson, Noah Weaverdyck, Jochen Weller, Philip Wiseman arXiv:2506.00758v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A typicalRead More →

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Association of the IceCube neutrinos with CAZ blazar light curves Pouya M. Kouch, Talvikki Hovatta, Elina Lindfors, Ioannis Liodakis, Karri I. I. Koljonen, Alessandro Paggi arXiv:2510.16585v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has detected several hundred high-energy neutrinos from cosmic sources. Despite numerous studies searching for their origin, it is still not known which sources emit them. A few likely individual associations exist with active galactic nuclei (AGNs), mostly comprising blazars (AGNs with jets pointed toward Earth). Nonetheless, on a population level, blazar-neutrino correlation strengths are rather weak. This could mean that blazars as a population do not emit high-energy neutrinos or thatRead More →