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The Oldest Stars in the Galaxy Just Weighed In on One of Cosmology's Biggest Arguments

Astronomers have measured the ages of over a hundred and fifty thousand ancient stars scattered across our Galaxy, and found the oldest of them is just the age it should be if the standard picture of the universe is correct. That simple agreement quietly undermines one of the leading attempts to explain a stubborn mystery, and hints that the real answer to the Hubble tension may lie somewhere else entirely. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/kJgMzdA via IFTTT
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Artificial Intelligence is Easily Fooled in the Search for Life

AI is a powerful tool in scientific research. It can be used to find patterns in vast quantities of data. But it also generates false positives, as most of us know. This is an "Achilles Heel" according to researchers who tested a neural network's ability to detect life. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/KHA1PWB via IFTTT
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Rebooting a Spacecraft, 140 Million Kilometres From Home.

Engineers have just upgraded the software running a spacecraft 140 million kilometres away, then held their breath through two full reboots with an eight minute delay on every command. The prize for getting it right is a close up look at an asteroid humanity has already changed forever, and the answer to a question nobody has been able to answer since 2022, what did we actually do to it? from Universe Today https://ift.tt/wjtpZzG via IFTTT
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Chemistry Reveals the Origins of an Interstellar Comet

Somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy is an old star that has lost one of its comets. By some quirk of orbital mechanics, that frozen nucleus of ice and dust got kicked out of its home system and into a long and winding trajectory across space. It entered our Solar System sometime in the distant past and traveled somewhat near to Earth on October 30, 2025, on its way through the system. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/gH95oms via IFTTT
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How the SKA Will Use Fast Radio Bursts to Decode the Universe

There are parts of the universe that are extremely hard to see, even for our most advanced telescopes. Gas and dust don’t emit any light, and are only visible by the light that they happen to block from stars and galaxies. Magnetic fields are even harder since regular light typically passes right through them. However, according to a new paper available in pre-print on arXiv, by Manisha Caleb of the University of Sydney and their co-authors, we’re currently commissioning a potentially game-changing new tool that could use a particularly violent astronomical phenomenon to provide new insight into these hard to see places. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/rjQ3Ox6 via IFTTT
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Are We Missing the Universe's "Noosignatures"?

Astrobiology has long been split into two camps: a search for "biosignatures" and a search for "intelligence." These look for very different things, but they also leave a huge gap in between. It took 3.5 billion years for us to go from the first microbe to a civilization that sent radio waves out into the cosmos. Detecting life in between those stages is a relatively untouched aspect of astrobiology—which is also the focal point of a new paper, "Signs and Signatures of Intelligence", available in pre-print on arXiv, by astrobiologist Julia DeMarines. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/pFP0X6R via IFTTT
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Listening for the Universe's Faintest Whispers, a Billion Supernovae at Once

Buried a kilometre underground in Japan, one of the world's most sensitive detectors may have caught its first faint trace of a sound scientists have been straining to hear for decades, the combined whisper of every supernova that has ever exploded across the universe. It is not yet a confirmed discovery, but if it holds up, it could rewrite how we trace the life and death of stars. from Universe Today https://ift.tt/Msb7A1I via IFTTT
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