Out in the cosmos, beyond the comfort of our tiny blue planet, exist forces so extreme they defy comprehensi…

Using the dynamics of the three-body problem, a planet orbiting at an angle close to 90° from a binary orbit is inferred.

When a planet’s orbit brings it between Earth and a distant star, it’s more than just a cosmic game of hide and seek. It’s an opportunity for NASA to improve its understanding of that planet’s atmosphere and rings. Planetary scientists call it a stellar occultation and that’s exactly what happened with Uranus on April 7.

Observing the alignment allows NASA scientists to measure the temperatures and composition of Uranus’s stratosphere—the middle layer of a planet’s atmosphere—and determine how it has changed over the last 30 years since Uranus’s last significant occultation.

“Uranus passed in front of a star that is about 400 light years from Earth,” said William Saunders, planetary scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, and science principal investigator and analysis lead, for what NASA’s team calls the Uranus Stellar Occultation Campaign 2025.

In the context of minimal phenomenal experience (MPE), the prevailing assumption is that subjectivity is entirely absent in pure awareness. This conclusion is based on the dissolution of specific properties of subjectivity, such as the first-person perspective and self-localization in space. However, while these properties are integral to subjectivity, their absence does not negate the existence of subjectivity itself. Some individuals report experiencing a bare witness or a sense of presence that might be a default property of consciousness, with other properties(FPP) being content-induced.

Similarly, MPE is often considered timeless due to the lack of change(zero content). We propose that the very persistence of awareness—being aware of itself as the only content—could serve as a rudimentary marker for the passage of time. Imagine an opera singer holding a note: while there’s no pitch change, the experience of the sustained note creates persistence of same experience and duration. Likewise, the persistence of awareness in MPE might provide a minimal sense of time.

Follow-up research on a 2023 image of the Sagittarius C stellar nursery in the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has revealed ejections from still-forming protostars and insights into the impact of strong magnetic fields on interstellar gas and the life cycle of stars.

“A big question in the Central Molecular Zone of our galaxy has been, if there is so much dense gas and cosmic dust here, and we know that stars form in such clouds, why are so few stars born here?” said astrophysicist John Bally of the University of Colorado Boulder, one of the principal investigators. “Now, for the first time, we are seeing directly that strong magnetic fields may play an important role in suppressing star formation, even at small scales.”

Detailed study of stars in this crowded, dusty region has been limited, but Webb’s advanced near-infrared instruments have allowed astronomers to see through the clouds to study young stars like never before.

Everyone knows about ice, liquid and vapor—but, depending on the conditions, water can actually form more than a dozen different structures. Scientists have now added a new phase to the list: superionic ice.

This type of ice forms at extremely high temperatures and pressures, such as those deep inside planets like Neptune and Uranus. Previously, superionic ice had only been glimpsed in a brief instant as scientists sent a shockwave through a droplet of water, but in a new study published in Nature Physics, scientists found a way to reliably create, sustain, and examine the ice.

“It was a surprise—everyone thought this phase wouldn’t appear until you are at much higher pressures than where we first find it,” said study co-author Vitali Prakapenka, a University of Chicago research professor and beamline scientist at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory. “But we were able to very accurately map the properties of this new ice, which constitutes a new phase of matter, thanks to several powerful tools.”

A stunning discovery on Mars has revealed the longest organic molecules ever found on the planet—carbon chains that could resemble building blocks of life as we know it. Preserved for billions of years in ancient Martian clay, these molecules were uncovered by NASA’s Curiosity rover and could poi