In an era of growing demand for real-time precision navigation, researchers have unveiled a powerful leap forward in satellite-based positioning. 

A fascinating glimpse into how a solar system like our own is born has been revealed with the detection of planet-forming ‘pebbles’ around two young stars. These seeds to make new worlds are thought to gradually clump together over time, in much the same way Jupiter was first created 4.5 billion years ago, followed by Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The planet-forming discs, known as protoplanetary discs, were spotted out to at least Neptune-like orbits around the young stars DG Tau and HL Tau, both around 450 light-years from Earth. The new observations, revealed at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting 2025 in Durham, are helping to fill in a missing piece of the planet formation puzzle.

Celestial objects known as dark dwarfs may be hiding at the centre of our galaxy and could offer key clues to uncover the nature of one of the most mysterious and fundamental phenomena in contemporary cosmology: dark matter. A new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP) by a team of researchers based in the UK and Hawaii describes these objects for the first time and proposes how to verify their existence using current observational tools such as the James Webb Space Telescope.

 

Theoretical physicist Jonathan Heckman and Ph.D. student Rebecca Hicks at University of Pennsylvania put a spin on ideas related to testing string theory: Rather than looking to verify it, the team and their collaborators sought a novel way to falsify it with data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. “We're not rooting for string theory to fail,” Hicks says. “We're stress-testing it, applying more pressure to see if it holds up." “If string theory survives, fantastic," Heckman says. "If it snaps, we'll learn something profound about nature.”

Forests are falling behind in the race against climate change, with new research revealing it takes centuries for tree populations to adapt—far too slow to keep pace with today’s rapidly warming world.