A fireball meteor and loud explosion were seen in the skies over several provinces in Thailand, causing concern among local residents. (Photo: Facebook สมาคมดาราศาสตร์ไทย)
A fireball streaked across the night sky, accompanied by a loud explosion, over several provinces of Thailand early Monday morning, causing confusion and concern among residents.
The Thai Astronomical Society reported that the fireball was observed just after midnight, with sightings reported in many parts of the Northeast and in some central provinces.
The fireball was described as exceptionally bright and accompanied by a loud “boom”.
Recordings of the event, both still photos and video, spread quickly on social media. The sudden flash and the noise led to speculation whether it was related to the border clashes with Cambodia, maybe a drone incursion.
According to astronomers, the fireball was caused by a meteorite entering the Earth’s atmosphere at a height of 80 to 120 kilometres.
The astronomical society said such events are natural and happen often.
The universe’s first molecule just surprised us again.
In a discovery that could rewrite our understanding of how the first stars formed, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Heidelberg have revealed unexpected behavior in helium hydride (HeH⁺), the earliest known molecule in the cosmos.
Contrary to long-standing predictions, HeH⁺ remained chemically reactive even at extremely low temperatures: conditions that mimic the early universe.
To test how this ancient molecule behaved just after the Big Bang, researchers recreated early-universe conditions at the Cryogenic Storage Ring (CSR) in Heidelberg.
The world’s only facility of its kind, CSR simulates space-like environments just a few degrees above absolute zero.
By colliding stored HeH⁺ ions with a beam of neutral deuterium atoms, the team was able to observe the molecule’s reaction rates at ultra-cold temperatures for the first time.
Formed shortly after the Big Bang, HeH⁺ is a simple molecule made from a helium atom and a proton. It marked the beginning of chemical bonding in the universe and laid the foundation for molecular hydrogen (H₂), the fuel that powers stars.
For decades, HeH⁺ has been assumed to play a passive role in the cooling processes that allowed protostars to condense and ignite. But new experimental results challenge that narrative.
Molecule that changed everything
The researchers found that instead of slowing down as the temperature dropped, the reaction between HeH⁺ and deuterium remained surprisingly constant. This contradicts earlier models, which predicted a steep decline in reactivity at low temperatures.
“Previous theories predicted a significant decrease in the reaction probability at low temperatures, but we were unable to verify this in either the experiment or new theoretical calculations by our colleagues,” said Dr. Holger Kreckel of MPIK.
This matters because in the young universe, during the so-called “cosmic dark ages” before stars began to shine, molecules like HeH⁺ played a key role in cooling the primordial gas.
Effective cooling is necessary for gas clouds to collapse under gravity and form stars.
Since hydrogen atoms alone can’t release heat efficiently below 10,000°C, molecules with dipole moments like HeH⁺ were critical for shedding energy via radiation.
HeH⁺ also degrades through collisions with hydrogen atoms, producing ions that eventually lead to molecular hydrogen formation.
This chain of reactions was vital to star formation, and the new findings suggest HeH⁺ was far more active in that chemistry than previously thought.
Rethinking star formation chemistry
The MPIK team’s results also exposed flaws in older theoretical models. Collaborating with theoretical physicist Yohann Scribano, researchers found a long-standing error in the potential energy surface used to predict HeH⁺ behavior.
Correcting this surface brought simulations in line with experimental data, sharpening our understanding of early-universe chemistry.
These findings, published alongside complementary theoretical work, reframe HeH⁺ as a central player in star formation rather than a passive bystander. “
The reactions of HeH⁺ with neutral hydrogen and deuterium, therefore, appear to have been far more important… than previously assumed,” Kreckel added.
As the oldest molecule in the universe, HeH⁺ just reminded us that the earliest chemistry still holds secrets with implications that stretch across time and space.
The study has been published in the journal Astronomy Astrophysics.
Other efforts missed the real killer because researchers studied tissue samples of dead sea stars that no longer contained the bodily fluid that surrounds the organs.
But the latest study includes detailed analysis of this fluid, called coelomic fluid, where the bacteria Vibrio pectenicida were found.
“It’s incredibly difficult to trace the source of so many environmental diseases, especially underwater,” said microbiologist Blake Ushijima of the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who was not involved in the research. He said the detective work by this team was “really smart and significant.”
Now that scientists know the cause, they have a better shot at intervening to help sea stars.
Prentice said that scientists could potentially now test which of the remaining sea stars are still healthy — and consider whether to relocate them, or breed them in captivity to later transplant them to areas that have lost almost all their sunflower sea stars.
Scientists may also test if some populations have natural immunity, and if treatments like probiotics may help boost immunity to the disease.
Such recovery work is not only important for sea stars, but for entire Pacific ecosystems because healthy starfish gobble up excess sea urchins, researchers say.
Sunflower sea stars “look sort of innocent when you see them, but they eat almost everything that lives on the bottom of the ocean,” said Gehman. “They’re voracious eaters.”
With many fewer sea stars, the sea urchins that they usually munch on exploded in population – and in turn gobbled up around 95% of the kelp forest s in Northern California within a decade. These kelp forests provide food and habitat for a wide variety of animals including fish, sea otters and seals.
Researchers hope the new findings will allow them to restore sea star populations — and regrow the kelp forests that Thurber compares to “the rainforests of the ocean.”
Academics have warned that the scientific community needs to take “urgent action” to maintain the academic integrity of research papers, after finding that “sophisticated global networks” are working to undermine the system.
The publication of fraudulent papers is “far outpacing” that of legitimate research, warned the researchers, who have published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They found that although the total number of papers produced is doubling every 15 years, submissions suspected to have been written by “paper mills” are doubling every 18 months.
The paper analysed data sets of retracted publications, editorial records and instances of image duplication to build a comprehensive picture of trends in scientific fraud.
It says that although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on “lone” cases, “sophisticated global networks” of individual entities and paper mills are “systematically working together to undermine the integrity of academic publishing”.
Lead author, Luís A. N. Amaral, professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics at Northwestern University, said these networks were “essentially criminal organisations, acting together to fake the process of science”.
In particular, the study found that some journal editors were accepting disproportionately high numbers of submissions, and that authors were repeatedly submitting to these editors, suggesting that these networks “cooperated to facilitate publishing fraud”. It also finds that when journals were de-indexed, paper mills would target new ones, in a move known as “journal hopping”.
The paper further warns that “the literature in some fields may have already been irreparably damaged by fraud”, and that “current implemented punitive measures are not addressing the tide of fraudulent science”.
Reese Richardson, postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and co-author of the report said that the findings should serve as a wake-up call to the scientific community.
“If we’re not prepared to deal with the fraud that’s already occurring, then we’re certainly not prepared to deal with what generative AI can do to scientific literature. We have no clue what’s going to end up in the literature, what’s going to be regarded as scientific fact and what’s going to be used to train future AI models, which then will be used to write more papers,” Richardson said.
Amaral added that the scientific community needs to “police itself better in order to preserve its integrity”.
“If we do not create awareness around this problem, worse and worse behaviour will become normalised. At some point, it will be too late, and scientific literature will become completely poisoned,” Amaral said.
The paper says the findings show that the “integrity of the extant scientific record and of future science is being undermined through the shortcomings in the very systems through which scientists infer the trustworthiness of each other’s work”.
The authors said that there needs to be “enhanced scrutiny” of journals’ editorial processes, improved methods for detecting fabricated research, and a greater spotlight on the networks facilitating any misconduct.
Wudingloong wui lived in what is now Yunnan, China, around 200 million years ago (Early Jurassic epoch).
Reconstructed skeleton and representative bones of Wudingloong wui. Individual scale bars – 5 cm. Scale bar of the reconstructed skeleton – 50 cm. Image credit: Wang et al., doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-12185-2.
Wudingloong wui was a small- to medium-sized non-sauropodan member of Sauropodomorpha, one of the most successful dinosaurian groups with an almost global distribution, spanning from Antarctica to Greenland.
“Chinese non-sauropodan sauropodomorphs are mainly known in the Lower Jurassic Lufeng Formation in Lufeng and its neighboring areas, Yunnan province, and they are represented by Lufengosaurus, Yunnanosaurus, Jingshanosaurus, Xingxiulong, Yizhousaurus, and some other species,” said Geological Museum of China paleontologist Ya-Ming Wang and colleagues.
“Qianlong, which was reported from the Lower Jurassic Ziliujing Formation of neighboring Guizhou province, represents a recent discovery expanding our understanding on the distribution of the non-sauropodan sauropodomorphs in China.”
“The discovery of Wudingloong wui provides further evidence that the southwestern China sauropodomorph assemblage is one of the most taxonomically diverse and morphologically disparate in the pre-Toarcian Early Jurassic worldwide, represented by various species from near the base of the Massopoda to non-sauropodan sauropodiforms.”
The fossilized bones of Wudingloong wui were collected from the Yubacun Formation at Wande town in China’s Yunnan province.
“The specimen is a partial skeleton including skull and mandible, atlas-axis, third to the tenth cervical vertebrae, first to the seventh dorsal vertebrae, dorsal ribs, right scapula and coracoid, right forelimb including humerus, ulna, radius, and manus,” the paleontologists said.
“The fully co-ossified cranial elements and completely closed neurocentral sutures of the vertebrae demonstrates that the specimen was probably a mature individual.”
Wudingloong wui represents the earliest-diverging and stratigraphically oldest sauropodomorph dinosaur discovered in East Asia so far.
“The new species is placed as an earlier-diverging sauropodomorph than Massospondylidae and Sauropodiformes, which adds new information to the sauropodomorph assemblage of southwestern China,” the researchers said.
“Therefore, the Early Jurassic southwestern China sauropodomorph assemblage is now probably represented by four unique associations of species, including the relatively small and gracile Wudingloong, the medium-sized massospondylid Lufengosaurus (and possibly Xixiposaurus), the medium-large-bodied and possibly quadrupedal massopodans, and the early-diverging sauropodiforms, which is similar to the Late Triassic-Early Jurassic early sauropodomorph assemblages that have a wider time range, including the Elliot Formation of South Africa, the South America, and the Zimbabwean sauropodomorph assemblages.”
“The close phylogenetic relationship between Wudingloong and Plateosauravus from the Late Triassic Lower Elliot Formation of South Africa and Ruehleia from the Late Triassic of Germany indicates that the dispersal of early sauropodomorphs in East Asia either occurred at least in Rhaetian (206 to 201.4 million years ago) of the Late Triassic or just happened around the Triassic-Jurassic boundary (201.4 million years ago).”
“Further discoveries of more specimens and other analyses are necessary to test this hypothesis.”
“Nonetheless, the discovery of Wudingloong raises the question about the association between the distribution of the East Asian non-sauropodan sauropodomorphs and the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event.”
The team’s paper was published in the journal Scientific Reports.
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YM. Wang et al. 2025. A new Early Jurassic dinosaur represents the earliest-diverging and oldest sauropodomorph of East Asia. Sci Rep 15, 26749; doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-12185-2
This series of 41 radar images obtained by the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone Solar System Radar on July 28, 2025, shows the near-Earth asteroid 2025 OW as it made its close approach with our planet. The asteroid safely passed at about 400,000 miles (640,000 kilometers), or 1.6 times the distance from Earth to the Moon.
The asteroid was discovered on July 4, 2025, by the NASA-funded Pan-STARRS2 survey telescope on Haleakala in Maui, Hawaii. These Goldstone observations suggest that 2025 OW is about 200 feet (60 meters) wide and has an irregular shape. The observations also indicate that it is rapidly spinning, completing one rotation every 1½ to 3 minutes, making it one of the fastest-spinning near-Earth asteroids that the powerful radar system has observed. The observations resolve surface features down to 12 feet (3.75 meters) wide.
Asteroids can be “spun up” by sunlight being unevenly absorbed and re-emitted across their irregular surfaces. As photons (quantum particles of light) carry a tiny amount of momentum away from the asteroid, a tiny amount of torque is applied and, over time, the asteroid’s spin can increase – a phenomenon known as the YORP effect. For 2025 OW to maintain such a fast rotation without breaking apart, it may be a solid object rather than a loosely bound rubble pile like many asteroids.
The Goldstone measurements have allowed scientists to greatly reduce uncertainties in the asteroid’s distance from Earth and in its future motion for many decades. This July 28 close approach is the closest asteroid 2025 OW will come to Earth for the foreseeable future.
NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar is located near Barstow, California, and is supported by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program within the Planetary Defense Coordination Office at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. The radar system is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN), which is managed by the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. The DSN receives programmatic oversight from Space Communications and Navigation program office within the Space Operations Mission Directorate, also at NASA Headquarters.
More information about planetary radar and near-Earth objects can be found at:
NASA astronaut Don Pettit has spent 590 days living in space, and even back on Earth, he continues to share breathtaking images from his time off the planet.
Over the weekend, Pettit shared a long-exposure photograph that captured the soft curve of Earth below, the glow of the planet’s atmosphere, streaks of city lights and flashes of lightning from a thunderstorm. Hovering above it all: three galaxies.
Front and center is the Milky Way, the galaxy we call home. Two fainter companions appeared near the top of the image: the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.
These two galaxies orbit the Milky Way like distant cousins. Although they’re visible from the Southern Hemisphere, they’re far too faint to spot with the naked eye from most locations on Earth. From Pettit’s vantage point more than 250 miles above the surface, they shined a bit more clearly.
In the foreground of the photo sits a SpaceX Dragon capsule, one of the vehicles that ferries astronauts to and from the space station.
This is just the latest in a series of extraordinary images Pettit has captured during his time in orbit. Over the course of his missions, he’s documented satellites shining above the horizon, auroras dancing below his feet and the everyday routines of life in space.
Companies that broker and facilitate scientific fraud are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, according to a new study.
The analysis, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America on Aug. 4, examined the inner workings of the ARDA Conference, also known as the Academic Research and Development Association. ARDA is a paper mill—a site that lets academics add their names to already-written scientific papers that are accepted to be published in peer-reviewed journals.
Paper mills don’t usually state the names of journals that papers will be published in, but ARDA does so, making it easier to study, says Reese Richardson, a biologist and research integrity expert at Northwestern University who coauthored the new analysis.
In January 2018, ARDA listed 14 journals on its site; by March 2024, that figure had shot up to 86 publications. That’s despite efforts by databases like Web of Science and Scopus to deindex titles found to be cooperating with paper mills. Paper mills sometimes bribe journal editors to get them to publish poor-quality papers on which researchers have purchased authorships.
Deindexing is often seen as an effective tool to counteract paper mills since academics are keen to publish in journals indexed in databases like Web of Science and Scopus. But Richardson says the strategy isn’t working as well as it should because paper mills seem to be growing in size and number.
Nandita Quaderi, editor in chief for Web of Science and senior vice president of the analytics firm that operates it, Clarivate, says the study uses outdated data for Web of Science. “Since December 2021, we have de-listed a further 187 journals for failing our editorial requirements, including many journals flagged in the study,” she says in a statement emailed to C&EN. “Our ability to identify untrustworthy journals has greatly improved since 2023, which is when we introduced proprietary AI tools that look for signs of anomalous behaviour, questionable content (including papermill content), and irrelevant citations.”
Another indicator of the scaling up of organized scientific fraud, Richardson says, is that in recent years, academic publishers have started issuing more retractions in batches. “Publishers seem to recognize that the problem is systematic production of fraudulent science,” he notes.
Just last week, for instance, Retraction Watch reported that the academic publisher Frontiers Media retracted 122 studies published by five of its journals after finding that networks of authors and editors manipulated citations and conducted peer review without disclosing conflicts of interest. Frontiers notes in a statement that it is not the only publisher struggling with faulty papers. The company says its research-integrity team has identified more than 4,000 papers posted on other publishers’ journal sites that are linked to an “unethical” network.
Mark Robinson, corporate media relations manager at the scholarly publisher Taylor & Francis, tells C&EN that the firm is also dedicating “significant resources” to screening papers before peer review. “However, tackling the root causes that encourage and enable misconduct must be a priority for the whole academic community: institutions, funders, and publishers. This includes addressing the pressures on researchers around career advancement, rewards, and incentives,” Robinson adds.
Richardson and his colleagues estimate that the number of papers being pumped out by paper mills is doubling every 1.5 years, whereas the number of retractions is doubling only every 3.5 years. He and his team predict that only 15–25% of paper-mill products will ever be retracted.
“Our main takeaway is we have no clue how large the problem is and how quickly this may overtake legitimate literature,” Richardson says. “But it’s clear that it’s already surpassed in scale the intervention measures that are designed to contain it.”
The James Webb Space Telescope has returned to the scene of one of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most iconic images, the Ultra Deep Field, to capture galaxies throughout cosmic history.
This new image was taken as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), which is intent on further probing in infrared light two patches of sky that were originally imaged by Hubble: the Hubble Deep Field (1995) and the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (2004).
The deep fields were Hubble’s most intense stares into the universe, revealing the faintest galaxies at the highest redshifts that Hubble could see, galaxies that existed over 13 billion years ago and whose light has been traveling for all that time. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, in particular, was revisited several times by Hubble, in 2009, 2012 and 2014, using the near-infrared channels on the space telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3. It shows some 10,000 galaxies detectable in an area of sky just 2.4 arcminutes square, which is less than a tenth of the diameter of the Full Moon in the night sky.
However, Hubble can only see so far. At the greatest redshifts, corresponding to galaxies that we see as they existed within a few hundred million years of the Big Bang, visible light is stretched into infrared wavelengths beyond Hubble’s capacity to see. So, to beat this limitation, the JWST has stepped up.
The giant 6.5-meter space telescope got its first good look at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in October 2022 with its Near-Infrared Camera. It has revisited the Ultra Deep Field several times, as part of the JADES project, and this latest image was captured by the JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Deep Imaging Survey (MIDIS for short).
Indeed, the instrument’s shortest-wavelength filter (F560W, which detects infrared light from 4.9 to 6.4 microns, centered on 5.6 microns) took the longest exposure of any single filter as part of this image, totaling 41 hours.
The image doesn’t show the entirety of the Ultra Deep Field, only a section of it containing about 2,500 visible galaxies, four-fifths of them being truly distant, high redshift galaxies. None are record-breakers — the maximum redshifts visible are about 12, equating to 380 million years after the Big Bang, or 13.4 billion years ago. Just to compare, the current highest redshift galaxy, MoM-z14 (which is not part of the Ultra Deep Field), has a redshift of 14.4 and we see it as it existed about 280 million years after the Big Bang.
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When coupled with data from JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) that operates at shorter wavelengths (1.9 to 4.8 microns), the observations reveal a great deal about the many galaxies in the image, most of which are visible as small dots of light. The image is presented in false color, since infrared light has no visible colors since it is beyond what the human eye can see.
The famous deep-field image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image credit: ESA/Webb/NASA/CSA/G. Östlin, P. G. Perez-Gonzalez, J. Melinder, the JADES Collaboration, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb).)
Hundreds of red galaxies in the image are either star-forming galaxies that are shrouded by interstellar dust that absorbs the starlight and re-radiates it in infrared, or are highly evolved galaxies with lots of older, redder stars that formed near the beginning of the universe. Meanwhile, the small greenish-white galaxies are those that are at very high redshift, meaning we see them as they exist mostly during the first billion years of cosmic history. On the other hand, the larger blue and cyan galaxies are closer with low-redshifts and so appear brighter to NIRCam than to MIRI.
Astronomers work to push ever deeper with the JWST, adding observation on top of observations to chart the development of galaxies from close to the dawn of the universe to the present day. Among the data could be answers to many of cosmology’s greatest secrets, such as how supermassive black holes formed, how galaxies formed, and when the majority of stars in the universe came into being. This is all still a work in progress, so stay tuned!
A study of the JWST Ultra Deep Field observations as published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
