By creating a 'little bit of the Universe in a bottle' in her lab, a PhD student in physics has reverse-engineered the chemical cocktails produced by stars to better understand how cosmic dust might have provided the building blocks of life.

Harvard researchers have experimentally shown that a beam of light can repeatedly focus and defocus itself in free space without a lens, confirming a 1960s theoretical prediction called the Montgomery effect.

Researchers show how bacteria that can mould Martian soil into brick-like structures fare in the presence of a toxic chemical found in the soil. The insights could inform the design of future extraterrestrial habitats. 

A University of Arizona-led research team has measured the dynamics and ever-changing "shell" of hot gas from where the solar wind originates. The findings could help scientists better understand how heated plasma interacts with magnetic fields general, including other astrophysical contexts such as interstellar gas, accretion disks around black holes and neutron stars.

Why are planets rarely found orbiting a pair of stars? UC Berkeley and American University of Beirut physicists find that general relativity makes the orbit of a tight binary pair precess. As the orbit shrinks because of tidal effects, the precesion increases. Eventually the precession matches the orbital precession of any circumbinary planet, creating a resonance that makes the planet’s orbit wildly eccentric. The planet either gets expelled from the system or is engulfed by one of the stars.

A UBC Okanagan-led research project has given a group of international scientists their clearest view yet of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, revealing that it is far more complex than previously believed.

Dr. Alex Hill, Assistant Professor in the Irving K. Barber Faculty of Science at UBCO, specializes in radio astronomy. Working at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory (DRAO), near Penticton, his team used data from the DRAO 15-metre telescope to complete the first broadband map of Faraday rotation, a phenomenon that scientists use to track magnetic fields across the northern sky.

The research team led by Professor Huiyun Liu at University College London demonstrated the first mid-infrared InAs/InP quantum-dot lasers, operating at 2.018 μm with a record-low threshold. By suppressing indium adatom anisotropic diffusion, they achieved high-density, uniform QDs suitable for multi-stack gain structures. This advance establishes the viability of InAs quantum dots in mid-infrared regime, marking a major step toward high-performance, cost-effective mid-infrared light sources for gas sensing, spectroscopy, free-space communication, and integrated photonic applications.

Researchers from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), in collaboration with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), have led the most extensive observational study to date of runaway massive stars, which includes an analysis of the rotation and binarity of these stars in our galaxy. This study, published today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, sheds new light on how these stellar “runaways” are ejected into space and what their properties reveal about their fascinating origins.