While investigating a mysterious radiation signal unlike any seen before, astronomers may have uncovered a rare pair of binary supermassive black holes with a truly monstrous appetite.

Supermassive black holes — cosmic titans with masses of 100,000 to billions of times the mass of the sun — are among the universe's most fearsome phenomena. These celestial behemoths can consume entire stars and unleash torrents of powerful radiation visible across vast cosmic distances. However, in a recent study, researchers observed something entirely unprecedented: a pair of supermassive black holes devouring an enormous gas cloud that's unlike any celestial meal scientists have ever seen.

This discovery, made possible by a curious radiation signal, offers new insight into the behavior of these cosmic giants and their relationship with the galaxies they inhabit.

Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Valparaíso in Chile and lead author of a new study on the ravenous black holes, told Live Science via email:

"The light that is emitted from the system shows an oscillatory pattern that is repeated every 60 - 90 days, and this is the first time that this kind of variation is observed in an active galactic nucleus,""This pattern is observed in the X-rays, ultraviolet and optical frequencies, making this system unique."

Synthetic biologists make artificial cells, but one particular kind isn't worth the risk.

As synthetic biologists, we have spent the last few decades in awe of the breakthroughs in the field. In the last fifteen years, synthetic biologists have stored books, images, and even videos in DNA, developed the ability to modify and engineer genes with remarkable accuracy, and even created an organism with chromosome designed using a computer and synthesized in the lab.^1-5

These advances have allowed us to develop effective drugs against diseases like malaria, innovate lightweight, biodegradable, and high-strength materials such as artificial spider silk, and bolster our understanding of how life forms.^6-8 In many cases, these breakthroughs were unforeseen and would not have happened if scientists could not conduct their research freely.

We may - not too-long from today - look back fondly on the days when a headrest was just a headrest. Kind of like the way a steering wheel used to be just a steering wheel - before it became a "safety" device.

One that sometimes explodes shrapnel in your face.

But how about a headrest that gets into your head? One that houses a scanner that monitors your brainwaves - also for "safety" reasons? It is apparently in the works. A company by the name of Neumo has reportedly been "shopping" a "contactless, non-invasive way of collecting brainwave activity data and helping (car companies) interpret it in a way that can ensure drivers stay alert and are otherwise in tip-top driving form."

How, exactly, will this be done?

Neumo's headrest scanner is based on a "sensor that can be mounted discreetly in the vehicle's headrest to collect brainwaves passively from up to 12 ins. (30.5 cm) away" and a "printed-circuit-board antenna that detects the brain activity and a receiver to relay the information collected."

Relayed to whom? Well, the car's computer, of course.

"Data gathered is crunched by Neumo's proprietary software and scored on a 10-point scale, evaluating the driver's level of distraction and drowsiness, state of health and well-being and the amount of workload and stress they are under."

Italics added.

The entire surface of the inner core, or small patches of it, may be swelling and contracting.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Earth's inner core, a solid metal ball gyrating within the molten outer core, may be both slowing down and changing shape.

Recent analyses of earthquake waves have suggested that around 15 years ago, the inner core's rotation may have slowed so much that it appeared to pause or reverse direction relative to the surface. But a new analysis suggests something more must be changing at Earth's center.

The most probable explanation is that the inner core is not only rotating differently — its surface is probably also morphing, geophysicist John Vidale of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles reported December 9 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The finding could help resolve a long-standing debate over what is changing at the inner core.

No instrument can physically probe Earth's core. So, researchers study it using seismic waves from earthquakes. Scientists typically use quakes that occur in the South Sandwich Islands near Antarctica, which repose on the opposite side of the planet from instrument arrays in Alaska. The earthquake waves travel through the planet like sonar waves through water, with some passing through the inner core on their way to Alaska. Instruments there then record the waves as squiggly signatures called waveforms, which contain information about what the waves encountered on their journey through Earth.

Astronomers analyzing archival images from JWST have discovered an unexpectedly vast population of the smallest asteroids ever seen in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Astronomers analyzing archival images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have discovered an unexpectedly vast population of the smallest asteroids ever seen in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The finding could lead to better tracking of the tiny but powerful space rocks that are likely to approach Earth.

The newfound asteroids range in size from that of a bus to several stadiums — tiny compared to the massive space rock that wiped out most dinosaurs, but they nevertheless pack a significant punch. Only a decade ago an asteroid just tens of meters in size took everyone by surprise when it exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and released 30 times more energy than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima in WWII.

These so-called "decameter" asteroids collide with Earth 10,000 times more frequently than their larger counterparts, but their small size makes it challenging for surveys to detect them well in advance.

In recent years, a team of astronomers including Julien de Wit, an associate professor of planetary science at MIT, has been testing a computationally-intensive method to identify passing asteroids in telescope images of faraway stars.

By applying this method to thousands of JWST images of the host star in about 40 light-years distant TRAPPIST-1 system, which is the best-studied planetary system beyond our own, the researchers found eight previously known and 138 new decameter asteroids in the main asteroid belt. Among them, six appear to have been gravitationally nudged by nearby planets into trajectories that will bring them close to Earth. An early, unedited release of the findings was published Dec. 9 in the journal Nature.

"We thought we would just detect a few new objects, but we detected so many more than expected — especially small ones," de Wit said in a statement. "It is a sign that we are probing a new population regime."

For the first time, the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has detected and "weighed" a galaxy that not only existed about 600 million years after the Big Bang, but also has a mass that is similar to what our Milky Way galaxy's mass might have been at the same stage of development.

Other galaxies Webb has detected at this period in the history of the universe are significantly more massive. Nicknamed the Firefly Sparkle, this galaxy is gleaming with star clusters — 10 in all — each of which researchers examined in great detail. Their work is published in Nature.

"I didn't think it would be possible to resolve a galaxy that existed so early in the universe into so many distinct components, let alone find that its mass is similar to our own galaxy's when it was in the process of forming," said Lamiya Mowla, co-lead author of the paper and an assistant professor at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. "There is so much going on inside this tiny galaxy, including so many different phases of star formation."

There is no question that the sun is a temperamental star, as this year's unusually strong solar storms show. Some of them led to remarkable auroras even at low latitudes. But can our star become even more furious?

Evidence of the most violent solar "tantrums" can be found in prehistoric tree trunks and in samples of millennia-old glacial ice. However, from these indirect sources, the frequency of superflares cannot be determined. And direct measurements of the amount of radiation reaching the Earth from the sun have only been available since the beginning of the space age.

Another way to learn about our sun's long-term behavior is to turn to the stars, as is the approach of a new study. The work is published in the journal Science.

Several brief flashes on the lunar surface were captured from Earth.
As we approach the peak of the Geminid meteor shower overnight on Friday (Dec. 13), the skies are beginning to light up with impressive meteors striking Earth's atmosphere. But Earth isn't the only target; the moon is regularly bombarded with such meteors, and Daichi Fujii, the curator of the Hiratsuka City Museum in Japan, has captured some of the most recent collisions.

Fujii documented meteor impacts on the moon on Dec. 6, Dec. 7 and twice on Dec. 8, 2024, using cameras set to monitor Earth's nearest neighbor. You can view some of his lunar impact videos (as well as some impressive fireballs) on his X account.

"There was another lunar impact flash tonight. I filmed it at 360fps from my home at 22:34:35 on December 8, 2024 (slow playback) and was able to confirm it with multiple telescopes. Bright meteors and fireballs have been appearing every day, but lunar impact flashes have also been captured one after another," Fujii wrote in a post on X on Dec. 8.

Also known as Virgo A or NGC 4486, M87 is the brightest object in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, the largest gravitationally bound type of structure in the universe. It came to fame in April 2019 after scientists from EHT released the first image of a black hole in its center. Led by the EHT multi wavelength working group, a study published in Astronomy and Astrophysics Journal presents the data from the second EHT observational campaign conducted in April 2018, involving over 25 terrestrial and orbital telescopes. The authors report the first observation of a high-energy gamma-ray flare in over a decade from the supermassive black hole M87, based on nearly simultaneous spectra of the galaxy spanning the broadest wavelength range ever collected.

"We were lucky to detect a gamma-ray flare from M87 during this Event Horizon Telescope's multi-wavelength campaign. This marks the first gamma-ray flaring event observed in this source in over a decade, allowing us to precisely constrain the size of the region responsible for the observed gamma-ray emission. Observations — both recent ones with a more sensitive EHT array and those planned for the coming years — will provide invaluable insights and an extraordinary opportunity to study the physics surrounding M87's supermassive black hole. These efforts promise to shed light on the disk-jet connection and uncover the origins and mechanisms behind the gamma-ray photon emission." says Giacomo Principe, one of the paper coordinators, a researcher at the University of Trieste associated with INAF and INFN. The article has been accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The relativistic jet examined by the researchers is surprising in its extent, reaching sizes that exceed the black hole's event horizon by tens of millions of times (7 orders of magnitude) - akin to the difference between the size of a bacterium and the largest known blue whale.

The first pictures of the new-born baby that flashed up on our family chat showed a charming, surprised-looking face with wide, slate-grey eyes - similar in shape to his father's brown eyes, but closer in colour to his mother's green. By his second birthday, however, the pictures revealed he had become a happy toddler with eyes the same dark brown shade as his father's, with all trace of the dark grey of those early photographs gone.

We might think of our eye colour as one of our defining physical traits, as personal to us as the shape of our nose or how much our ears stick out. It is a trait that can often leave a lasting impression on us too - eye colour can even influence how trustworthy we find someone.

But, surprisingly, our eye colour doesn't always remain constant throughout our lives - in fact, a wide range of external influences can change it, from injury to infection and sun damage. And sometimes the change appears to happen spontaneously.