Researchers exploit quantum entanglement to measure the interference of light signals from two distant detectors, opening a path toward quantum-enhanced astronomy.
Category: space
Methane emerges from interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it exits the solar system
Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is now on its way out of our solar system, never to return. The comet was only the third-ever detected object to originate from outside our solar system. Traveling at high speeds, it looped around the sun within 1.5 AU (one AU, or astronomical unit, is the distance between Earth and the sun) in October 2025; as of April, it is now past the orbit of Jupiter on its way out of the solar system.
3I/ATLAS is over a kilometer wide and is made up of dust and ices from the far-off planetary system where it originated. Using the advanced instrumentation of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Caltech researchers examined the mid-infrared signatures (wavelengths of light 10 times longer than those humans see) that emitted from 3I/ATLAS as it approached the sun in an effort to understand the distant environment in which the comet formed. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“It’s a very interesting object,” says Caltech graduate student Matthew Belyakov, lead author on the new paper. “It has been traveling through the galaxy for at least a billion years. The high speed at which it flew past us gave just a narrow window to study it.”
Is AI Conscious?
Anil Seth is one of most important and influential neuroscientists of consciousness in the present moment. He’s also a great friend. We’ve learnt so much for our public and private interactions. I think this is our fourth public interaction, but it was also the first that was just the two of us. This conversation surprised me and stimulated my thinking for a long time afterwards. There is a small problem I mention in the intro, but I hope you can see past that. Enjoy, and please let me know your thoughts!
Come and see me in discussion with William Lane Craig, Jessica Frazier, and Joe Folley 1st May in the Royal Institution Theatre in London. https://www.thepanpsycast.com/reserve… book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose–… Please subscribe and support my public work financially if you’re able. / philipgoffphilosophy.
My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose–…
Please subscribe and support my public work financially if you’re able. / philipgoffphilosophy.
Physicists can’t find “now” anywhere in the universe | Jim Al-Khalili
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We would hope that the moment that we eternally live in, the “now,” would have a concrete scientific explanation. But the truth is far more complicated, says the relativity of simultaneity.
Jim Al-Khalili explains how the past and future are more fluid than we may think.
Preorder Jim Al-Khalili’s forthcoming book, On Time: The Physics That Makes the Universe, here: https://www.amazon.com/Time-Physics-T?tag=lifeboatfound-20…
About Jim Al-Khalili: Jim is a multiple award-winning science communicator renowned for his public engagement around the world through writing and broadcasting and a leading academic making fundamental contributions to theoretical physics, particularly in nuclear reaction theory, quantum effects in biology, open quantum systems and the foundations of quantum mechanics. Jim is a theoretical physicist at the University of Surrey where he holds a Distinguished Chair in physics as well as a university chair in the public engagement in science. He received his PhD in nuclear reaction theory in 1989 and has published widely in the field. His current interest is in open quantum systems and the application of quantum mechanics in biology.
About Jim Al-Khalili:
Gravity follows Newton and Einstein’s rules, even at cosmic scales
Gravity, as most people understand it, is the familiar force that pulls a falling apple toward Earth. But for astronomers and theoretical physicists, it is also a vexing invisible architect that guides the shape and evolution of the largest cosmic structures across the universe.
For decades, puzzling observations of unusually fast-moving galaxies have forced cosmologists like the University of Pennsylvania’s Patricio A. Gallardo to revisit the fundamentals of physics, exploring, for example, whether the laws of gravity as described by Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein truly apply everywhere.
“Astrophysics has been plagued by a massive discrepancy in the cosmic ledger,” says Gallardo. “When we look at how stars orbit within galaxies or how galaxies move within galaxy clusters, some appear to be traveling way too fast for the amount of visible matter they contain.”
Astronomers crack a decades-old mystery, catching gas morphing into planet-building disks around newborn stars
An international team led by Dr. Indrani Das of Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) has shown, for the first time, how infalling gas from star-forming cores gradually transitions into planet-forming disks. Their findings, combining numerical simulations with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations, are published today in The Astrophysical Journal.
Protoplanetary disks form around young stars when dense molecular cloud cores collapse under their own gravity. An outer shroud of gas and dust, known as the envelope, surrounds and feeds both the young star and the forming disk. While it is well understood that planets eventually form within these disks and follow Keplerian orbits, the mechanism that transforms rapid infalling gas motion from the envelope into ordered Keplerian motion within the disk has remained a mystery for decades.
Based on both theoretical and observational evidence, the recent study discovered that there exists a distinct transition zone at the envelope-disk interface of a young star-disk system, which Das named ENDTRANZ (Envelope Disk Transition Zone). The findings have established that infalling gas motions gradually transition into Keplerian motions across this transition zone. Crucially, this transition is far from abrupt and contradicts earlier infall models that are based on classical test-particle dynamics.
Actively Exploited nginx-ui Flaw (CVE-2026–33032) Enables Full Nginx Server Takeover
A recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting nginx-ui, an open-source, web-based Nginx management tool, has come under active exploitation in the wild.
The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026–33032 (CVSS score: 9.8), an authentication bypass vulnerability that enables threat actors to seize control of the Nginx service. It has been codenamed MCPwn by Pluto Security.
“The nginx-ui MCP (Model Context Protocol) integration exposes two HTTP endpoints: /mcp and /mcp_message,” according to an advisory released by nginx-ui maintainers last month. “While /mcp requires both IP whitelisting and authentication (AuthRequired middleware), the /mcp_message endpoint only applies IP whitelisting — and the default IP whitelist is empty, which the middleware treats as ‘allow all.’”
Inside a Neutron Star, Matter Starts Breaking Down
What happens to matter when gravity crushes it beyond the breaking point? Inside a neutron star, atoms are destroyed. Electrons are forced into protons. Nuclei dissolve into a sea of neutrons. And at the very center, even neutrons themselves may break apart into quarks — forming exotic states of matter that physicists still can’t fully explain.
In this video, we go inside a neutron star layer by layer. From the crystalline outer crust where neutron-rich nuclei sit in a lattice denser than anything on Earth, through the bizarre nuclear pasta phases where matter forms sheets, tubes, and bubbles of nuclear material, into the superfluid outer core where neutrons flow without friction and protons conduct without resistance, and finally into the mysterious inner core where densities reach five to ten times that of an atomic nucleus and the very concept of a \.
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