WASHINGTON, D.C. — Local weather alerts are familiar warnings for potentially dangerous conditions, but an alert that puts all of Earth on warning is rare.

Conventional string theory’s predictions are incompatible both with the observation of dark energy, which appears to be causing our universe’s expansion to speed up, and with viable theories of quantum gravity, instead predicting a vast ‘swampland’ of impossible universes. Now, a new analysis by FQxI physicist Eduardo Guendelman, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel, shows that an exotic subset of string models–in which the tension of strings is generated dynamically–could provide an escape route out of the string theory swampland. The analysis was reported in The European Physical Journal C, in March.

Scientists with the global Event Horizon Telescope project have learned new secrets about the black hole at the center of our Milky Way, with the help of high-throughput computing advances pioneered in Wisconsin.

For astrophysicists, neutron stars stand out as objects of irresistible fascination — perhaps, in part, because of how difficult they are to decipher. But calculations conducted on the Frontier supercomputer, located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have revealed new clues about the inner workings of neutron stars. 

Around midday, Earth’s ionosphere sometimes experiences sharp, short-lived dips in its electron density—an unusual phenomenon known as a noontime bite-out. A new study takes a global view of these midday disruptions, using finely detailed ionospheric maps to compare their behavior in years of high and low solar activity. 

In the name of open science, the multinational scientific collaboration COSMOS on Thursday released the data behind the largest map of the universe. Called the COSMOS-Web field, the project, built with data collected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), consists of all the imaging and a catalog of nearly 800,000 galaxies spanning nearly all of cosmic time. And it’s been challenging existing notions of the infant universe.