Category: 7. Science

Video of Tens of Thousands of Migrating Rays Is Bringing Relaxation to Our Timelines originally appeared on PetHelpful.

If you need a moment of Zen in the middle of your day, this video shared by Virtuoso Travel on Instagram is just the thing. It captures a few peaceful moments of the great Mobula ray migration, and it’s absolutely stunning to watch.

The video shows tens of thousands of rays gliding through the water together in perfect harmony. It’s one of nature’s most peaceful and beautiful displays. The music accompanying the short clip adds to the relaxation. We could watch and listen to this on repeat all day!

Swoon! This was so relaxing and satisfying to watch! Virtuoso explains a bit more about it in the video’s caption, “Every year between April and July, tens of thousands of Mobula rays gather in the warm coastal waters of Baja California Sur, creating the largest ray migration on Earth. It’s a mesmerizing wildlife phenomenon, vast, graceful, and unforgettable”

We couldn’t agree more! Imagine being in the water as this beautiful group passed by. What an amazing experience!

Related: Kite Surfer in Australia Has Once-In-A-Lifetime Encounter With Stingray

More about Mobula Rays

If these Mobula rays look familiar, they might remind you of stingrays. They look like and have some of the same characteristics of stingrays, but no stinger. They also might remind you of manta rays; there are ten different species of Mobula rays worldwide, eight of which are referred to as devil rays, and two are manta rays.

And they are big! Their winglike fins can extend up to 17 feet! And while they may look a little intimidating, you don’t have to worry about becoming their next meal. Mobula rays are filter feeders and mostly eat plankton.

They’re also the acrobats of the ocean. Cabo Adventures shared, “While the fact that these flying rays can jump two meters (about 6-1/2 feet!) out of the surface of the water is likely their most remarkable feature.” Not only that, but they also enjoy doing twists, turns, flips, and flops!

They are as good at swimming as they are jumping. “Their extremely long wingspan allows these rays to propel themselves forward at high speeds, empowering them to travel great distances and depths. For example, they can dive down nearly two km (1-1/4 miles) and swim at the surface at a rate of 13 MPH.” Pretty cool!

Video of Tens of Thousands of Migrating Rays Is Bringing Relaxation to Our Timelines first appeared on PetHelpful on Jul 19, 2025

This story was originally reported by PetHelpful on Jul 19, 2025, where it first appeared.

A NASA Mars mission’s long and winding road to the launch pad is nearing its end.

The twin ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) Mars probes had been scheduled to launch last October, on the first-ever flight of Blue Origin’s huge, partially reusable New Glenn rocket.

Three different meteor showers are happening at the same time this month, giving skywatchers plenty of chances to spend their summer nights looking for shooting stars.

The annual alpha Capricornids, the Southern delta Aquariids and the Perseid meteor showers are all currently active, with each celestial show set to last through mid-August.

Here’s what to know about these meteor showers, and where and how you can spot shooting stars.

The alpha Capricornids

The alpha Capricornids and the Southern delta Aquariids will peak in activity at the end of this month, overnight from July 29 to 30, while the Perseids — often considered the best and most reliable shooting star display — will ramp up to its peak next month.

Skywatchers will likely encounter mostly favorable conditions for catching meteor showers this July, according to the American Meteor Society.

The alpha Capricornids meteor shower is not typically a strong display, but it can produce a number of bright fireballs while active. At its height, the meteor shower can produce around five shooting stars per hour under dark skies and clear conditions, according to the American Meteor Society.

The shower gets its name because the meteors appear to stream from the constellation of Capricorn. During this year’s peak, the moon will be only 27% full, offering people on either side of the equator a chance to catch the celestial show.

The alpha Capricornids meteor shower occurs when Earth passes through clouds of dust particles and debris from the comet 169P/NEAT, which completes one orbit around the sun every 4.2 years. As pieces of debris hit the planet’s atmosphere and vaporize, they create bright streaks of light that sometimes leave behind bright trails.

The Southern delta Aquariids

The Southern delta Aquariids, as their name suggests, are best viewed from the Southern Hemisphere. This meteor shower is capable of producing up to 25 meteors per hour under ideal conditions, but the shooting stars are typically fainter.

Southern delta Aquariids can be tricky to spot, according to NASA, but the best chances this year will likely be in the early morning hours.

The meteor shower is thought to be caused by pieces of the comet 96P/Machholz, which completes one orbit around the sun every 5.2 years.

The Perseids

Finally, the Perseids meteor shower is underway and is expected to peak overnight from Aug. 12 to 13. The Perseids are usually one of the most highly anticipated skywatching events of the year because the meteor shower occurs during warm summer months in the Northern Hemisphere and it typically delivers a high rate of shooting stars. Under ideal conditions, the Perseids can produce as many as 100 shooting stars per hour.

This year, however, the moon will be around 84% full, which will likely wash out meteors and “severely compromise this shower at the time of maximum activity,” according to the American Meteor Society.

“Such conditions will reduce activity by at least 75% as only the brighter meteors will be visible,” the society said in its forecast.

The Perseids shower occurs when Earth passes through a cloud of dust particles and debris left over from a comet known as 109P/Swift-Tuttle.

Why it’s awesome: Colugos are commonly called “flying lemurs,” but the name is misleading. These nocturnal mammals look somewhat like lemurs, with small, furry faces that are dominated by a pair of enormous forward-facing eyes. However, colugos aren’t lemurs, which are part of the Primates order. Rather, colugos are the sole members of the order Dermoptera, and are the closest living relatives of modern primates.

Colugos also don’t fly, exactly. Unlike bats — the only mammals capable of powered flight — colugos do not have wings. Instead, they have a furry membrane called a patagium that is only suitable for gliding.

Astronomers using data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a spectacular cosmic object they’re calling the “Infinity Galaxy.”

The site of an epic head-on collision between two galaxies, it could harbor the secrets to how the heaviest black holes in the universe, the supermassive black holes found at the hearts of galaxies, are born and reach their unbelievable masses — masses extreme enough to organize trillions of stars around them.

“Everything is unusual about this galaxy. Not only does it look very strange, but it also has this supermassive black hole that’s pulling a lot of material in,” Pieter van Dokkum, lead author of a new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, said in a statement about the work.

“As an unexpected bonus, it turns out that both galaxy nuclei also have an active supermassive black hole,” van Dokkum added. “So, this system has three confirmed active black holes: two very massive ones in both of the galaxy nuclei, and the one in between them that might have formed there.”

The singularity-studded object was found by searching through public data collected in the COSMOS-Web survey, which is designed to document the evolution of galaxies, with data gathered on 800,000 realms and counting.

In an image taken with the Webb, two bright spots represent the nuclei of each of the two colliding galaxies, both surrounded by their own ring of stars. This lends it the shape of an infinity symbol, hence its memorable name.

What’s most striking, though, is what appears between them, revealed in follow-up observations: an enormous supermassive black hole swimming in a sea of ionized gas. It’s estimated to contain a mass equivalent to a million times that of our own Sun — and it’s still actively growing. 

“It likely didn’t just arrive there, but instead it formed there. And pretty recently,” van Dokkum said. “We think we’re witnessing the birth of a supermassive black hole — something that has never been seen before.”

This could be some of the most compelling evidence yet of black holes forming by directly collapsing into a singularity from a huge, heavy cloud of gas.

The origins of supermassive black holes are one of the great mysteries of cosmology. They undeniably exist, forming the heart of the largest galaxies, including our own Milky Way — but how they form and gain such unbelievable heft is still hotly debated; the heaviest black holes may weigh hundreds of billions of solar masses.

The most well-known way that black holes are born is through the collapse of a very massive star that explodes in a supernova. This might spawn a black hole with several to a hundred times the mass of the Sun, maybe even a thousand. Then, give one of these stellar-mass black holes hundreds of millions to billions of years to devour matter that falls into it, or merge with other black holes, and it might reach a supermassive stature.

Astronomers, however, have observed black holes boasting millions of solar masses while existing just 400 million years after the Big Bang, which simply isn’t enough time for one to reach its size by gradually accreting matter.

That points to another possibility called the “heavy seed theory,” explains van Dokkum, “where a much larger black hole, maybe up to one million times the mass of our Sun, forms directly from the collapse of a large gas cloud.” This would’ve been facilitated by the hot conditions of the early universe, allowing a gas cloud to collapse into one large object instead of forming numerous smaller stars.

“It’s not clear that this direct-collapse process could work in practice,” van Dokkum said.

But there’s compelling reason to believe that the Infinity Galaxy is home to a black hole born through this exact process. The best clue is the central supermassive black hole’s velocity, which matches up with the surrounding gas, strongly suggesting it formed right where we’re seeing it. If it formed elsewhere in the cosmos and barged into the mix, the velocity would be significantly higher.

What astronomers think happened, then, is that when the constituent two galaxies collided, the gas contained in them compressed to form a “dense knot,” van Dokkum said, “which then collapsed into a black hole.”

“We can’t say definitively that we have found a direct collapse black hole,” van Dokkum concluded. “But we can say that these new data strengthen the case that we’re seeing a newborn black hole, while eliminating some of the competing explanations.”

More on black holes: Scientists Detect Sign of Something Impossible Out in Deep Space

Now, the headlines aren’t going to tell you this. The title of a popular science summary of the paper reads, “Dinosaur wrist bone discovery reshapes understanding of flight evolution.” Yes, to evolutionists this study was surprising . . . and (once again!) rewrites their (fairy) story. But in a biblical worldview, the headline is far less exciting—extinct birds had wrists like birds! But wrists were designed by God—they didn’t happen by chance.

According to the summary, the study focused on “two theropod dinosaur fossils.” Okay, we’re into the first sentence of the summary and already we need to correct them—these weren’t “theropod dinosaurs.” They were birds!

How do I know? Well, consider what follows: “[This analysis] has shown that they had a type of carpal bone (pisiform) in their wrists—a bone considered important to flight in birds.”

Yes, these two “dinosaurs” had a tiny bone in their wrists that’s found only in birds! This confirms the research we’ve been doing here at Answers in Genesis: The “troodontid, a birdlike raptor related to the Velociraptor; and an oviraptorid, an odd birdlike omnivore with a long neck and a toothless beak” weren’t just “birdlike”—they were birds.

Of course, to explain this unexpected finding, the evolutionary researchers turn to some storytelling:

This [wrist] bone was originally a sesamoid bone like a kneecap, and had moved from its original position in the wrist to replace the ulnare, another carpal bone. Its position in modern birds appears to establish linkages that allow birds to fold their wings automatically when the elbow flexes.

The bone’s shape—with a large V-shaped notch—also allows the pisiform of birds to clasp their hand bones to stop them from dislocating during flight. Therefore, this bone is an important part of a bird’s forelimb and critical to flight.

So a bone similar to a kneecap just happened to move over millions of years and become a sophisticated wristbone that, together with other bones (and don’t forget all the soft tissue—muscles, ligaments, tendons, nervous system, etc.—that also must work with the bones!), enables birds to do exactly what they need to do. This story strains the imagination!

Oh, and this summary article also repeats the claim that, according to evolutionary assumptions, “flight evolved at least twice, and possibly up to five times” just in this group of “dinosaurs” as they supposedly evolved into birds—not to mention bats, insects, pterosaurs, and other flyers!

No, this study isn’t a shocking rewrite of what we thought we knew. This study actually confirms a scientific prediction published by one of our researchers, paleoartist Joel Leineweber, in 2023: “Flightless maniraptors will be found with wings similar to flightless birds today.”

Yes, this new study is just another confirmation of the biblical creation model and the failure of the evolutionary model!

Yes, this new study is just another confirmation of the biblical creation model and the failure of the evolutionary model!

You can learn more about which “dinosaurs” were actually birds in the video “The Surprising Truth About Velociraptors,” featuring Joel Leineweber, on our YouTube channel (there’s so much great content on that channel—be sure to join our over 800,000 subscribers if you haven’t already!).

Thanks for stopping by and thanks for praying,

Ken

This item was written with the assistance of AiG’s research team.

A new mission set to blast off for low-Earth orbit will study magnetic storms around the Earth and learn more about how they affect our atmosphere and satellites.

NASA’s Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, or TRACERS for short, mission represents a pair of satellites that will fly in a sun-synchronous orbit — meaning they are always over the dayside of the Earth — and pass through the polar cusps. The cusps are, in essence, two holes in Earth’s magnetosphere, where the field lines dip down onto the magnetic poles.

In the center of our galaxy, gigantic, balloon-like structures of high-energy radiation extend thousands of light-years above and below the Milky Way’s plane. Known as the Fermi bubbles, the massive lobes may have been the result of a violent outburst in our galaxy’s recent past. A new discovery of cold hydrogen clouds embedded inside the bubbles adds another level of mystery to the objects, suggesting they’re only a few million years old—practically brand-new, by cosmic standards.

Using the National Science Foundation’s Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, a team of scientists discovered something extremely odd. Lurking inside the hot Fermi bubbles are clouds of cold gas that shouldn’t be there, forcing scientists to wonder how the cooler gas manages to survive in the superheated, extreme environment. The new findings, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, shed light on how galaxies evolve over time.

The Fermi bubbles were discovered in 2010 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The two orbs form an hourglass structure, one stretching above and another below the center of the Milky Way. Each lobe is around 25,000 light-years tall, made up of gamma rays and high-energy cosmic rays.

“Fermi bubbles are a relatively recent discovery – they were first identified by telescopes that ‘see’ gamma rays in 2010 – there are different theories about how it happened, but we do know that it was an extremely sudden and violent event, like a volcanic eruption but on a massive scale,” Rongmon Bordoloi, associate professor of physics at North Carolina State University and co-author of the research, said in a statement.

The team behind the study was observing the Fermi bubbles to gather high-resolution data about the composition of the hot gas within the structure. The majority of gas inside the Fermi bubbles is super-hot, measuring at around 1 million degrees Kelvin. Surprisingly, the team also found clouds of neutral hydrogen gas dotted within the bubbles around 12,000 light-years above the center of the galaxy and as massive as several thousand Suns.

The gas in the clouds, however, is relatively cold compared to the rest of the gas in the bubbles. “They’re around 10,000 degrees Kelvin, so cooler than their surroundings by at least a factor of 100,” Andrew Fox, astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute and coauthor of the paper, said in a statement. “Finding those clouds within the Fermi bubble is like finding ice cubes in a volcano.”

Considering their extreme environment, the clouds of hydrogen should have been destroyed, a process that would take over a few million years. This means that the Fermi bubbles are much younger than expected. “It wouldn’t be possible for the clouds to be present at all if the Fermi bubbles were 10 million years old or older,” Bordoloi said.

The scientists behind the study believe that the clouds were swept up from the center of the Milky Way and carried by the hot wind that formed the Fermi bubbles. Jay Lockman, an astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory and coauthor of the paper, compared the system to a more familiar phenomenon: “Just as you can’t see the motion of the wind on Earth unless there are clouds to track it, we can’t see the hot wind from the Milky Way but can detect radio emission from the cold clouds it carries along.”