Category: 7. Science

They’re the boogeymen of science fiction, a paradox of science and quite possibly a key to understanding the universe.

Scientists have been scrambling to understand the mysterious forces of black holes for decades, but so far it seems they’ve found more existential questions than answers.

We know a black hole is so heavy that its gravity creates a kind of divot in the geometry of the universe, said Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University.

“A black hole is so concentrated that it causes a little deep puncture in space/time. At the end of the puncture you have a thing called a singularity where all known laws of nature break down. Nothing that we know of exists at that point.”

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Understanding what science knows about black holes involves mysterious little red dots, the formation of galaxies, and spaghettification (the unpleasant thought experiment about what would happen to a person unlucky enough to be sucked into a black hole).

First, the good news: Black holes aren’t out to get us. They aren’t whizzing around the universe looking for galaxies, suns and planets to devour.

“They don’t just sneak up to you in a dark alley,” said Lloyd Knox, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Davis.

But our understanding of the very fundamentals of the universe has been transformed over the past decade by new telescopes and sensors that are letting scientists see more black holes and at every stage of their lives.

What to know about observatory: James Webb Space Telescope marks 3rd anniversary

“Our understanding of the role black holes play, that they are an essential part of the formation of galaxies, is new,” said Natarajan.

Here what cosmic secrets are being revealed:

A new kind of black hole and a newly proven theory

The original understanding of how black holes formed was that when a sufficiently large sun (about 10 times or more massive than our Sun) reached the end of its life, it could explode into a supernova that then collapses back into a black hole. The matter can collapse down into something only a few miles across, becoming so dense that its gravity is strong enough that nothing, not even light, can escape. This is what is called a stellar mass black hole.

But in the past two decades, new types of black holes have been seen and astronomers are beginning to understand how they form. Called supermassive black holes, they have been found at the center of pretty much every galaxy and are a hundred thousand to billion times the mass of our Sun. 

But how did they form?

“The original idea was that small black holes formed and then they grew,” said Natarajan. “But then there’s a timing crunch to explain the monsters seen in the early universe. Even if they’re gobbling down stellar gas, did they have the time to get so big? That was an open question even 20 years ago.”

In 2017, she theorized that these supermassive black holes from the early beginnings of the universe happened when galactic gas clouds collapsed directly in on themselves, skipping the star stage entirely and going straight from gas to a massive black hole seed, with a head start, that could then grow.

“Then guess what? In 2023 the James Webb telescope found these objects,” she said. “This is what a scientist lives for, to make a prediction and see it proven.”

Black holes don’t suck everything into them

Because they have such massive gravity, black holes gobble up stellar gases and anything else that gets too close to them. But it’s not an endless process that ends up with the entire universe being sucked into them.

People sometimes worry that black holes are these huge vacuum cleaners that draw in everything in sight. “It’s not like a whirlpool dragging everything into it,” said Knox.

Black holes are really like any other concentration of mass, whether it’s a sun or a planet. They have their own gravitational pull but it isn’t infinite.

“If you’re far enough away, you’d just feel the gravitational force, just the way you’d feel it from a planet,” said Brenna Mockler, a post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Observatories at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Pasadena, California.

If you fell into a black hole, you’d be ‘spaghettified’

All matter causes a dip or pothole in space/time, said Natarajan. A black hole is so heavy that its gravity creates a kind of divot in the geometry of the universe.

“The bigger the mass, the bigger the pothole,” she said.

Where that puncture leads is unknown.

“It’s an open question,” said Natarajan. “We don’t think it could be another universe, because we don’t know where in our universe it could go. But we don’t know.”

So what if a human being fell into a black hole? Astrophysicists have a word for it – spaghettification.

“If you were to fall head first into a black hole, the difference in gravity between your head and your toes would be so intense that you’d be stretched out and spaghettified,” Natarajan said.

Our Sun will never become a black hole

There’s no fear that our own Sun will become a black hole, said Knox. It’s not big enough.

“Lower mass stars burn through their hydrogen to make helium and then they’ll start burning helium into carbon. And then at some point it ends up just pushing itself all apart,” he said.

“Our Sun will eventually expand and envelop the Earth and destroy it – but that’s in 5 billion years, so you have some time to get ready. But it won’t become a black hole.”

A still unanswered mystery – ‘little red dots’

NASA’s super powerful James Webb Space Telescope began its scientific mission in 2022 and almost immediately picked up something that so far no one can explain: small red objects that appear to be abundant in the cosmos.

Dubbed “little red dots,” these objects have perplexed astronomers. They could be very, very dense, highly star-forming galaxies.

“Or they could be highly accreting supermassive black holes from the very early universe,” said Mockler, who is an incoming professor at the University of California, Davis.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What is a black hole? Scientists scramble to untangle cosmic mystery

A starlight flicker recorded by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite in March 2025 hinted at something intriguing. Now the signal has been traced to TOI‑1846 b, a super‑Earth lying only 154 light-years away in the northern constellation Lyra.

The planet’s discovery comes from Abderahmane Soubkiou and colleagues at the Oukaimeden Observatory in Morocco, working with observers on four continents. 

NASA confirmed the discovery after the team combined TESS data with telescope images, light measurements from the ground, and older star photos. 

How TESS watches TOI‑1846 b

Launched on April 18, 2018, TESS scans one giant stripe of sky after another, measuring the minute dimming that marks a planet crossing its star’s face.

More than 7,600 such dips have been tagged as “TESS Objects of Interest,” and over 630 have been checked off as bona fide worlds so far.

TESS favors small cool suns, and TOI‑1846 (the sun near TOI‑1846 b) fits that bill. The Red Dwarf is about 40 percent the Sun’s size and mass and glows a warm 6,000 F, making its habitable zone far closer in.

Because the star is faint, each transit of TOI‑1846 b subtracts only a few hundredths of a percent of its light. Yet TESS’s four wide‑field cameras and 30‑minute cadence keep such shallow events from slipping past.

Sizing up a watery world

More detailed observations suggest the planet is almost twice as wide as Earth and about four times heavier. That size and weight combination gives it a density lighter than solid rock but heavier than planets with thick, gassy envelopes.

Based on this, scientists think the planet may have a layer of dense ice underneath, topped by a thin atmosphere or maybe even a shallow ocean.

If that’s true, water could exist in some form even with the estimated surface temperature around 600°F, thanks to the planet likely always showing one side to its star.

“We have validated TOI‑1846 b using TESS and multicolor ground‑based photometric data, high‑resolution imaging, and spectroscopic observations,” wrote Soubkiou at the end of the team’s announcement.

Their measurements also show the planet circles its star in just under four days, staying much closer to its sun than Mercury does to ours.

Why the radius gap matters

Exoplanet surveys reveal a puzzling lull at roughly 1.8 Earth radii, the so‑called radius valley, separating rocky super‑Earths from gassy sub‑Neptunes.

Planets sitting on the valley’s floor help astronomers decide whether photo‑evaporation, core‑powered mass loss, or formation history digs the gap.

Because TOI‑1846 is relatively bright in infrared, its planet offers a pristine test case. Any hydrogen envelope should be thin enough for infrared spectrographs to peek through and probe heavier molecules such as water vapor or carbon dioxide.

TESS statistics still leave the radius valley poorly sampled around M dwarf stars. Pinning down the exact cutoff in these cooler systems could explain why some worlds shed their primordial gas while others stay puffy.

Why red dwarfs are important

Red dwarfs make up about 75% of the stars in our galaxy, and many of them lie close to Earth.
Because they are smaller and cooler than the Sun, it is easier to detect small planets around them using the transit method.

Their low brightness also means that planets in the habitable zone orbit very close in, making transits more frequent and easier to spot.

This gives astronomers more chances to gather data and confirm whether these worlds could hold onto atmospheres or even surface water.

What comes next

“These findings make TOI‑1846 b well‑suited for mass determination via RV observations,” the team noted, pointing to the MAROON‑X instrument on Gemini North in Hawaiʻi. By clocking the star’s wobble at yard‑per‑second precision, MAROON‑X can verify the planet’s mass and sniff out hidden siblings.

Transit timing campaigns will keep watching for additional planets that tug on TOI‑1846b as it circles. A second world farther out could protect a gentler, milder zone where liquid water survives without pressure cookers.

Looking for life on TOI‑1846 b

Even sizzling planets can teach researchers how atmospheres evolve around small stars.
If the upcoming JWST Cycle 4 wins time for TOI‑1846 b, its mid‑infrared spectrometers could detect steam, methane, or sulfur dioxide in just a handful of eclipses.

Life is unlikely under those temperatures, yet understanding how oceans persist on the hot edge guides the broader search.

Every new planet confirmed using the transit method adds another valuable piece to the puzzle. Each of these targets helps improve our chances of finding milder, Earth-like worlds orbiting the thousands of red dwarfs scattered within 100 light-years of our solar system.

The study is published in arXiv.

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Imagine trying to describe a city using only drone photos, or judging a restaurant based on the menu font. That’s how scientists have long been forced to study cancer: peering through microscopes, crunching datasets, trying to understand cells by viewing one layer at a time.

Now, a new deep-learning tool called CellLENS is flipping that model inside out, and zooming into cancer cells with unprecedented clarity.

Developed by a powerhouse team from MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and University of Pennsylvania and led by Bokai Zhu of the Broad Institute and Ragon Institute, CellLENS (Cell Local Environment and Neighborhood Scan) merges three perspectives into one:

• What genes a cell expresses
• Where does it live in the tumor
• What it looks like under the microscope

The tool creates a 3D atlas of the tumor, grouping cells not by first impressions, but by behavior and biology. That means two identical-looking cells can be accurately separated if one’s quietly suppressing the immune system while the other’s mounting an attack.

This smart system blends two AI superpowers: convolutional neural networks and graph neural networks, to create a detailed digital snapshot of every single cell. Even if two cells look like identical twins under the microscope, the AI can spot if one is acting like a hero at the tumor’s edge while the other is just blending in quietly. It doesn’t just group cells by looks, it groups them by biology, behavior, and social scene.

“Before, we’d just say, ‘Here’s a T cell,’” Zhu explains. “Now we can say, ‘Here’s a T cell, and it’s engaged in battle at this specific tumor border.’”

It’s not just cell spotting, it’s cell storytelling.

Many cancer treatments stumble because they target cells without understanding their spatial strategy. For instance, immune therapies often miss their mark if the target cells only huddle at the tumor’s edge. CellLENS fills in those blanks, revealing who’s where, doing what, and why it matters.

Applied to healthy tissues and cancers like lymphoma and liver tumors, CellLENS uncovered rare immune cell types and decoded their silent choreography, showing how their positions in the tissue shaped their roles in either fighting disease or quietly fueling it.

“I’m extremely excited by the potential of new AI tools, like CellLENS, to help us more holistically understand aberrant cellular behaviors within tissues,” says co-author Alex K. Shalek, the director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and Chemistry, and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, as well as an Institute member of the Broad Institute and a member of the Ragon Institute.

“We can now measure a tremendous amount of information about individual cells and their tissue contexts with cutting-edge, multi-omic assays. Effectively leveraging that data to nominate new therapeutic leads is a critical step in developing improved interventions. When coupled with the right input data and careful downstream validations, such tools promise to accelerate our ability to positively impact human health and wellness.”

Journal Reference:

1. Bokai Zhu, Sheng Gao, Shuxiao Chen et al. CellLENS enables cross-domain information fusion for enhanced cell population delineation in single-cell spatial omics data. Nature Immunology. DOI: 10.1038/s41590-025-02163-1

Film Adaptation Titled “Take Warning” Explores a Darker Thread in Moe Taylor’s Cinematic Cosmos, In Stark Contrast to His 2021 Flagship Film, “As Organism”

CLEVELAND, OH, UNITED STATES, July 12, 2025 /EINPresswire.com/ — BrainDagger Films has officially announced the screenplay adaptation of Moe Taylor’s 2003 cult novel The Viral Limit. The feature film, retitled Take Warning, is now in active development with a screenplay underway — marking a stark thematic pivot from the filmmaker’s more recent work. Taylor has tasked long-time colleague, Mike Ede (JACK’D, Bah Humbug, Adam and Me) as screenwriter.

Written by Moe Taylor during a time of profound internal conflict while serving overseas in the military, The Viral Limit is a psychological survival narrative cloaked in apocalyptic dread. The upcoming adaptation will preserve the novel’s original intensity while offering a cinematic exploration of how perception can turn the universe into either a savior… or a storm.

“In 2003, I saw the universe as something that wanted to kill me,” says Taylor. “By 2021, I saw it as something I was part of. This film revisits the moment before I understood that.”

🔹 A Journey from Warning to Wonder

The development of Take Warning follows Taylor’s 2021 documentary As Organism, a critically praised meditation on cosmic harmony and interconnectedness. While As Organism offered audiences a path toward unity, Take Warning takes them down a darker road — one carved from paranoia, trauma, and the fear of collapse.

“It’s the inverse of As Organism,” Taylor explains. “This is the film I wrote before I healed. It’s about surviving a world that feels like it’s coming for you. And in that sense, it’s honest.”

Together, the two films form a metaphysical diptych — bookends to a 20-year transformation in the filmmaker’s worldview.

🔹 About the Story

In Take Warning, two mountain climbers are caught in a vicious storm that begins to take on a life of its own. As they fight to descend back to civilization, they discover that the clouds above are more than weather — they’re a force, a consciousness, maybe even a reckoning.

The film invites audiences to ask: What happens when the storm isn’t just outside you, but inside you too?

🔹 In Development Now

Title: Take Warning (adapted from the novel The Viral Limit)

Written by: Moe Taylor (novel), screenplay in development

Produced by: BrainDagger Films

Projected release: TBD

Stage: Book-to-screenplay adaptation underway

Official website: www.braindaggerfilms.com

🔹 Contact

For media inquiries, screen rights, or early access to materials:

Moe Taylor

Founder, BrainDagger Films

📧 info@braindaggerfilms.com

🌐 www.braindaggerfilms.com

BrainDagger Films

Where every warning hides a wonder.

Moe Taylor
BrainDagger Films
+1 970-773-4579
moe.taylor.director@braindaggerfilms.com
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As Organism

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Astronomers who examined the sound waves from the Big Bang say that the Earth — and the entire Milky Way galaxy we call home — could be trapped in a huge void billions of light years across.

Their study, which was just presented at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in the UK, could solve one of cosmology’s greatest mysteries: the Hubble tension, or why the older universe appears to be expanding more slowly than younger regions.

“The Hubble tension is largely a local phenomenon, with little evidence that the expansion rate disagrees with expectations in the standard cosmology further back in time,” Indranil Banik, a cosmologist from the University of Portsmouth who led the research, said in a statement about the work. “So a local solution like a local void is a promising way to go about solving the problem.”

Our universe is expanding at an accelerated rate, but precisely what rate is a matter of intense debate. When astronomers analyze the cosmic microwave background, the light leftover from the Big Bang and the oldest light in the universe, the rate is slower compared to that derived from observations in the nearby universe of Type Ia supernovas and luminous, pulsing stars known as Cepheids.

The discrepancy has become undeniable, and its implications are so profound that it’s been dubbed a “crisis in cosmology.” Is our understanding of the universe wrong? Is there some new physics we are yet unaware of?

But this latest research could pump the brakes a little. If the Earth happens to be near the center of a low density “void” in space, approximately a billion light years in radius and roughly 20 percent below the universe’s average density, that could neatly explain the discrepancy.

Banik explains that such a region “would cause matter to be pulled by gravity toward the higher-density exterior of the void, leading to the void becoming emptier with time.”

“As the void is emptying out,” he continues, “the velocity of objects away from us would be larger than if the void were not there. This therefore gives the appearance of a faster local expansion rate.”

The idea of a local void has been floated before. But this latest work adds credence to the theory by analyzing baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO), or as the researchers call it, the “sound of the Big Bang” — emanations produced as the uniform sea of hot matter that formed from the Big Bang repeatedly contracted and then expanded in a tug of war with gravity, before eventually cooling.

“These sound waves traveled for only a short while before becoming frozen in place once the universe cooled enough for neutral atoms to form,” Banik said, allowing astronomers to use them as a “standard ruler” to measure cosmos.

If this void exists, Banik argues, then it would distort the BAO in a way that we could measure. After analyzing all BAO measurements taken over the last 20 years, that’s exactly what Banik says he’s found.

The biggest problem that this theory runs into, however, is that it defies our understanding of the universe’s structure: at the largest scales, it should appear uniform and evenly distributed. A region billions of light years across that’s somehow less dense than everything around it is quite clearly in violation of that.

Nonetheless, Banik plans to test his local void model with other methods of estimating the universe’s expansion.

More on space: Mysterious Object Headed Into Our Solar System Is Coming From the Center of the Galaxy

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa) Parker Solar Probe has delivered breathtaking images of the sun, capturing stunning visuals from just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometres) away.

During a flyby on December 24, 2024, the probe captured the groundbreaking images, revealing crucial insights into the solar wind — a continuous flow of charged particles emerging from the sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona.

This flow contributes to various space weather phenomena, including auroras and disruptive electromagnetic events that can endanger power grids and satellites, according to Live Science.

The newly obtained data is particularly pivotal in unravelling the mystery of the slow solar wind, which exhibits a denser and more erratic behaviour compared to its faster counterpart.

Researchers have long struggled to understand how the solar wind is generated and how it escapes the sun’s immense gravity.

“The big unknown has been: how is the solar wind generated, and how does it manage to escape the Sun’s immense gravitational pull?” said Nour Rawafi, the project scientist for Parker Solar Probe at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

“Understanding this continuous flow of particles, particularly the slow solar wind, is a major challenge.”

The Parker Solar Probe’s latest pass was able to confirm a key hypothesis: the slow solar wind consists of two distinct types — Alfvénic and non-Alfvénic.

The images are helping scientists pinpoint the origins of these streams, suggesting Alfvénic winds may emerge from coronal holes in cooler regions, while non-Alfvénic winds could be released from hot magnetic loops called helmet streamers.

“We don’t have a final consensus yet, but we have a whole lot of new intriguing data,” said Adam Szabo, Parker Solar Probe mission scientist at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, in the statement.

The Parker Solar Probe, which was launched in 2018, is the first spacecraft to have entered the sun’s corona. It is equipped with advanced scientific instrumentation, including the Wide Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR), the unmanned probe endures extreme temperatures and radiation to collect data.

The probe will continue its mission and is expected to next pass its perihelion — the closest point to the sun’s surface — on September 15.

The ESA/NASA Rosalind Franklin rover, planned for launch in 2028, will carry the first laser desorption ionization mass spectrometer (LDI-MS) to Mars as part of the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA) instrument.

MOMA will contribute to the astrobiology goals of the mission through the analysis of potential organic biosignatures. Due to the minimal availability of comparable equipment, laboratory analyses using similar techniques and instrumentation have been limited.

In this study, we present a modified commercial benchtop LDI-MS designed to replicate MOMA functionality and to enable rapid testing of samples for MOMA validation experiments. We demonstrate that our instrument can detect organic standards in mineral matrices, with MS/MS enabling structural identification even in complex mixtures.

Schematic of (A) the original LTQ 337 nm laser optical path and (B) the modified 266 nm laser optical path. In the modified path, the initial laser beam is split by a beam sampler, dumping ~95% of the total energy. The 5% “sampled” beam passes through a plano-convex lens (f = 750 mm) and is reflected toward the instrument via a dichroic mirror. The beam then passes through the builtin focusing lens (f = 80 mm) of the LTQ to enter the source region where it contacts the sample plate. Ions are guided through a quadrupole and into the mass spectrometer. — astro-ph.EP

Performance was additionally validated against an existing LDI-MS prototype through the comparison of spectra derived from natural samples from a Mars analog site in the Atacama Desert. Lastly, analysis of Mars analog synthetic mineral mixes highlights the capacity of the instrument to characterize both the mineralogical and organic signals in mission-relevant samples.

This modified benchtop instrument will serve as a platform for collaborative research to prepare for MOMA operations, test LDI parameters, and generate pre-flight reference data in support of the mission science and astrobiology specific goals.

Thermo Scientific LTQ XL Linear lon Trap Mass Spectrometer

Zachary K. Garvin (1), Anaïs Roussel (1), Luoth Chou (2), Marco E. Castillo (2 and 3), Xiang Li (2), William B. Brinckerhoff (2), Sarah Stewart Johnson (1) ((1) Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., USA, (2) NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA, (3) Aerodyne Industries, Cape Canaveral, FL, USA)

Comments: Submitted to Astrobiology. ZKG and AR contributed equally to this work. 24 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables (including Supplemental)
Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)
Cite as: arXiv:2506.14691 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:2506.14691v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.14691
Focus to learn more
Submission history
From: Zachary Garvin
[v1] Tue, 17 Jun 2025 16:29:09 UTC (2,225 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14691

Astrobiology