In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with such a high amount of energy that it should have been impossible. In fact, there are no known sources anywhere in the universe capable of producing such energy—100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a “quasi-extremal primordial black hole,” explodes.

Governments, industry representatives and international organizations representing over 70 countries at the International Submarine Cable Resilience Summit 2026 reaffirmed today the need to strengthen support for the subsea cables at the heart of global digital communications.

The Heineman Foundation, AIP, and AAS are pleased to announce Alice Shapley as the winner of the 2026 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. Shapley was selected for her “landmark observational campaigns and creative techniques that redefined the forefront of the field of galaxy formation and evolution.” The award will be presented at the 249th AAS Meeting, Jan. 10-14, 2027, and Shapley will receive a certificate and a $10,000 award.

For astronauts, coming back to Earth is one of the most dangerous parts of any mission. A new research facility addresses that challenge by creating streams of gas that flow at thousands of miles per hour and burn at temperatures of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit.

Earth observation data underpin climate science, disaster response, and environmental policy, yet inconsistent grid definitions often limit their accuracy and reuse. Researchers now present a unified, axis-based grid model that resolves long-standing ambiguities in how spatial and temporal data are represented. The new framework modernizes international standards, enabling precise, interoperable data cubes across disciplines. This advance could significantly improve how Earth data are shared, analyzed, and trusted worldwide.

Using observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the researchers identified an ongoing merger event of at least five galaxies about 800 million years after the Big Bang, along with evidence that the collision was redistributing heavy elements beyond the galaxies themselves. Before JWST, astronomers expected complex galaxy mergers and widespread enrichment by oxygen and other products of stellar fusion to become common well over a billion years after the Big Bang. This discovery shows those processes were already underway far earlier than models predicted.