His work paved the way for the discovery of the Higgs boson, which explained how particles acquire mass, solving one of the deepest mysteries in physics.
Scientists have developed a new particle detector that can measure incredibly short bursts of electrons lasting just one trillionth of a second, or one picosecond. The breakthrough could help next-generation particle accelerators reveal how materials, chemicals and biological systems behave at the atomic level. The new detector was created by the Advanced Accelerator Diagnostics Collaboration, […]
Millions of years ago, a massive star exploded somewhere far away in our galaxy. During this violent event, called a supernova, the dying star blasted huge amounts of matter into space. These materials included carbon, nitrogen and oxygen—the essential ingredients for life—as well as many other elements, some as heavy as iron. The explosion itself […]
Northrop Grumman’s Stargazer took off Thursday, June 18, 2026, from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The modified L-1011 aircraft carried the company’s Pegasus XL rocket hosting LINK, a robotic servicing spacecraft from Katalyst Space. LINK will launch from the air-deployed Pegasus XL later this month on a mission to boost the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.
NASA/Jeanette Kazmierczak
An airplane carrying a rocket loaded with a robotic spacecraft designed to raise NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory departed the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on Thursday, June 18.
Stargazer, a modified L-1011 operated by Northrop Grumman, took off for Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. Attached to the belly of the aircraft was one of the company’s Pegasus XL rockets with LINK inside.
NASA contracted Katalyst Space to design and build LINK to rendezvous and dock with Swift and lift it back to a higher altitude.
Spacecraft in low Earth orbit experience drag caused by our planet’s atmosphere, which gradually reduces their altitude if they do not have propulsion systems to counteract the effect.
Recent solar activity magnified this effect on Swift, which began to sink faster than anticipated.
Katalyst selected Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL launch vehicle as the best means of reaching Swift on a short timeline based on orbital and programmatic needs.
Stargazer will carry Pegasus and LINK to Kwajalein Atoll, part of the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific Ocean with stopovers in California and Hawai’i.
NASA/Jamie Adkins
Later this month, Stargazer will carry the rocket to an altitude of around 40,000 feet before releasing it.
After several seconds in free-fall, Pegasus XL will fire the first of its three-stage rocket motors, delivering LINK into orbit in about 10 minutes.
Astronomers have discovered an unexpected surprise on the famous “Pink Planet,” a strange world known as GJ504b. Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists found that the object is surrounded by salty clouds and has an atmosphere filled with unusual chemicals. GJ504b was first discovered in 2013. It orbits a sun-like star about […]
New research reveals how an unusual celestial object resembling a cosmic “bullseye” could offer clues to one of the most perplexing phenomena in our universe.
The research, undertaken by physicists Pierre Sikivie and Yuxin Zhao at the University of Florida, focuses on an astronomical feature quite unlike any other—the galaxy LEDA 1313424, whose concentric rings have garnered it the apt nickname of the “Bullseye galaxy.”
Based on Sikivie and Zhao’s recent research, detailed in a new paper that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal, quantum behavior related to long-mysterious dark matter may hold the key to the galaxy’s unusual appearance.
Unraveling a Bullseye Galaxy’s Circular Secrets
In the past, astronomers have attempted to explain LEDA 1313424’s unusual concentric appearance as the likely result of an ancient collision between two galaxies.
Not so, according to Sikivie and Zhao, who now take a vastly different approach by arguing that a better explanation may involve a Bose-Einstein condensate of axions, a variety of extremely light hypothetical particles.
A stunning Hubble Telescope view of the Bullseye galaxy (Image Credit: NASA, ESA, I. Pasha (Yale), P. van Dokkum (Yale)).
This concept has much deeper roots that go back close to a century ago, when the first galaxy featuring an unusual concentric ring was discovered. This example, dubbed the Cartwheel galaxy, was only the first in a succession of similar astronomical discoveries involving galaxies with “ringed” appearances that incorporate as many as three annular features.
Unraveling an Annular Enigma
Explaining why these galaxies look this way has remained elusive. One theory proposed by astronomers, as noted earlier, involves impacts between two galaxies, which could create waves of density whose ripples become evident in ring-like structures surrounding the resulting galaxies.
However, a discovery in 2025 by Imad Pasha, a Yale University astronomer, and his colleagues presented an even stranger development in this ongoing concentric saga: the discovery of a galaxy that possesses not three rings, but nine of them. With its discovery, this remarkable celestial object’s unusual appearance garnered the nickname now familiar to us: “The Bullseye galaxy.”
Artist’s concept detailing the annular features encircling LEDA 1313424 (Image Credit: NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI))
One theory that astronomers believed may account for the galaxy’s nine concentric structures had been a hypothetical impact—and a very energetic one—that occurred about 56 million years ago. However, while investigating this possibility, Sikivie and Zhao say a problem emerged: this would mean that the outermost ring in the galaxy would have had to travel at a speed of 758 miles per second as it blasted outward from the galaxy’s center.
This speed, they say, is impossible to reconcile with what astronomers can already discern about the nature of the supposed collusion, as well as the well-characterized behavior of galactic material observed in other regions of the cosmos.
An Alternative Approach
In an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery behind this unique galaxy, Sikivie and Zhao have put forward an alternative idea: that the rings in the Bullseye galaxy might instead be a byproduct of dark matter’s mysterious properties.
According to astronomers, dark matter is believed to be a nonluminous material that populates our universe, contributing around 85% of its total mass. Despite its ubiquity, direct detections that could confirm its existence have remained elusive.
However, there are some intriguing cosmic phenomena that astronomers are aware of that are very good candidates for being indirect evidence of this mysterious material. These observations include gravitational motion that occurs in galaxies, whereby the accumulation of dark matter is believed to manifest in the appearance of spherical halos encircling them.
In the past, Sikivie has explored this possibility, and whether current prevailing theories about dark matter, such as the idea that hypothetical particles known as axions, may offer the best interpretation of the physical reality behind dark matter.
If dark matter is indeed related to axions, it would also be required to obey what astrophysicists call conservation of angular momentum. According to Sikivie, when axions and galaxies interact, a phenomenon should emerge where portions of dark matter halos closest to the center would become oriented in structural forms known as “caustic rings.”
“We had earlier proposed that disk galaxies have caustic rings of dark matter with a pattern of ring radii, very similar to the pattern of ring radii observed in LEDA 1313424,” Sikivie recently said.
With this idea in mind, Sikivie and Lhao then turned their attention to the mysterious bullseye of LEDA 1313424 and “fitted the observed ring radii to the pattern of ring radii in the caustic ring interpretation,” from which they discerned that “LEDA’s rings are the imprint of caustic rings of dark matter on the baryonic matter in LEDA’s disk.”
Strange Quantum Behaviors
A further aspect of the researchers’ theory involves the quantum behavior that axions are expected to engage in.
Under extremely cold conditions, these hypothetical dark matter particles could collectively occupy the same quantum state, forming what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate—a strange state of matter in which quantum effects become visible on macroscopic scales.
According to the team, such a condensate could interact with ordinary matter in ways that match astronomical observations. If the duo is correct, this could imply that ring-shaped galaxies such as LEDA may not result from galactic collisions at all—instead, these unique cosmic structures might be evidence of dark matter axions that have undergone Bose-Einstein condensation.
Presently, much like dark matter, axions have remained hypothetical and frustratingly difficult to detect. Of course, given their elusiveness, this also makes them a very good candidate in terms of helping scientists close in on the dark matter mystery, and new models are helping to provide potentially compelling new resolutions for such problems.
For now, mysterious ringed galaxies remain mysterious. However, as the work of researchers like Sikivie and Lhao progresses, one of astronomy’s more unusual recent discoveries is gradually coming into focus, while providing fresh insight into the intriguing quantum nature of dark matter.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
A new cosmic bounce model suggests that remnants from a pre-Big Bang Universe may still exist today. What if some of the Universe’s oldest objects are actually older than the Big Bang itself? A new study from the University of Portsmouth suggests that ancient black holes may have survived from a time before the Universe [...]
A quantum “mini universe” made from ultracold atoms revealed that time can emerge from entropy changes inside a system, offering experimental insight into one of physics’ deepest mysteries. A scientist at the University of Birmingham has created a “mini universe” that could help answer one of science’s most fundamental questions: What is time? In a [...]
WALLOPS ISLAND, Virginia—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
Almost everyone has experienced the frustration of trying to get ketchup out of a bottle. At first, nothing happens. The ketchup seems almost solid and refuses to move. Then, suddenly, it starts flowing, sometimes too quickly and all at once. Scientists call this surprising change in behavior “yielding.” Yielding happens when a material switches from […]
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?
Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.
That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.
Artist’s rendition of the DAPHNE (Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer) mission concept. The coloring represents auroras and atmospheric waves in Earth’s atmosphere.
Credit: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics/Mary Tostanoski
NASA selected a mission concept to research how space weather and dynamics within Earth’s atmosphere influence the space environment and help improve prediction capabilities for impacts on crucial technology, such as GPS and low Earth orbit satellites, as well as astronauts in space.
The DAPHNE (Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer) mission will enter Phase B of development, which includes planning and design for flight and mission operations. It will use identical twin satellites to study how changes in Earth’s lower atmosphere influence our planet’s upper atmosphere, where space weather is manifested.
“NASA is advancing the United States’ leadership as a space weather-ready nation, and by providing new insights into Earth’s atmosphere we can better predict and prepare for impacts in our daily lives on Earth and in space,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As NASA sends astronauts beyond Earth’s magnetic protection to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, DAPHNE will join the NASA science fleet strategically located across the solar system to provide data that will help mission planners predict and mitigate the effects of space weather for the benefit of all.”
The DAPHNE mission’s low-risk high-return concept will provide coordinated, multi-point measurements of neutral winds, temperature, and composition in the thermosphere. The ionosphere and thermosphere regions are where Earth’s neutral atmosphere transitions into the ionized plasma of space. In this thin shell that surrounds the planet, the atmosphere is in constant motion, shaped by the influence of solar activity and changes in the lower atmosphere and in near-Earth space.
Fundamental observations and physical insights from the DAPHNE mission will incorporate lower-atmospheric energy data to advance space weather predictive capabilities. The mission is led by Aimee Merkel from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The mission will be subject to a confirmation review in 2027, which will assess the progress of the mission and the availability of funds. If confirmed, the total estimated cost of the mission, excluding launch, will not exceed $250 million in fiscal year 2023 dollars, with a mission launch date of no earlier than 2029.
The DAPHNE mission was proposed as a concept study in response to the DYNAMIC (Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling) mission announcement of opportunity. Funding and management oversight for this mission is provided by the Solar Terrestrial Probes program at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
For more information on NASA’s heliophysics missions, visit:
Artist’s rendition of the DAPHNE (Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer) mission concept. The coloring represents auroras and atmospheric waves in Earth’s atmosphere.
Credit: Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics/Mary Tostanoski
NASA selected a mission concept to research how space weather and dynamics within Earth’s atmosphere influence the space environment and help improve prediction capabilities for impacts on crucial technology, such as GPS and low Earth orbit satellites, as well as astronauts in space.
The DAPHNE (Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer) mission will enter Phase B of development, which includes planning and design for flight and mission operations. It will use identical twin satellites to study how changes in Earth’s lower atmosphere influence our planet’s upper atmosphere, where space weather is manifested.
“NASA is advancing the United States’ leadership as a space weather-ready nation, and by providing new insights into Earth’s atmosphere we can better predict and prepare for impacts in our daily lives on Earth and in space,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “As NASA sends astronauts beyond Earth’s magnetic protection to the Moon, Mars, and beyond, DAPHNE will join the NASA science fleet strategically located across the solar system to provide data that will help mission planners predict and mitigate the effects of space weather for the benefit of all.”
The DAPHNE mission’s low-risk high-return concept will provide coordinated, multi-point measurements of neutral winds, temperature, and composition in the thermosphere. The ionosphere and thermosphere regions are where Earth’s neutral atmosphere transitions into the ionized plasma of space. In this thin shell that surrounds the planet, the atmosphere is in constant motion, shaped by the influence of solar activity and changes in the lower atmosphere and in near-Earth space.
Fundamental observations and physical insights from the DAPHNE mission will incorporate lower-atmospheric energy data to advance space weather predictive capabilities. The mission is led by Aimee Merkel from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
The mission will be subject to a confirmation review in 2027, which will assess the progress of the mission and the availability of funds. If confirmed, the total estimated cost of the mission, excluding launch, will not exceed $250 million in fiscal year 2023 dollars, with a mission launch date of no earlier than 2029.
The DAPHNE mission was proposed as a concept study in response to the DYNAMIC (Dynamical Neutral Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling) mission announcement of opportunity. Funding and management oversight for this mission is provided by the Solar Terrestrial Probes program at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
For more information on NASA’s heliophysics missions, visit:
Astronomers have traced a high-energy "ghost particle" back to Shadow Blaster, a star-forming galaxy located 11 billion light-years away. That means that this particle, a neutrino, had been travelling to us ever since the 13.8 billion year-old universe was just around 3 billion years old.
The discovery offers the first evidence that star-forming galaxies like Shadow Blaster play a significant role in populating the universe with mysterious high-energy cosmic ghost-neutrinos. These particles get their spooky nickname because, possessing virtually no mass and no electric charge, they pass through matter with little to no interaction while moving at nearly the speed of light. For context, as you read the preceding sentence, over 65 billion neutrinos streamed through every square inch of your body; that's about 100 billion per square centimeter.
Despite the difficulty associated with detecting such particles, humanity has been spotting neutrinos since the 1960s, but only a few sources of these particles have been identified. Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the cosmos after photons, particles of light, and the identified sources are nowhere near enough to account for this abundance. That has prompted the search for other, hidden neutrino sources, especially those which can accelerate neutrinos to high energies. Now that hunt has led to the identification of the incredibly bright Shadow Blaster galaxy, officially designated JCMT0402−0424, which shines in infrared, as a potential neutrino source.
The galaxy JCMT0402−0424, or "Shadow Blaster" identified as a source of a high-energy neutrino detected in 2021. (Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO))
"Shadow Blaster possesses the kind of dense, gas-rich environment that theoretical models have long suggested could efficiently produce high-energy neutrinos," Yuji Urata of MITOS Science Co., LTD. in Taiwan said in a statement. "If confirmed, Shadow Blaster would be the first-ever individual dusty star-forming galaxy directly linked to a high-energy neutrino event."
Thus far, no other credible candidates exist as potential sources for this high-energy neutrino, designated IC 210922A.
Chasing ghosts
Astronomers were alerted to the existence of IC 210922A half a decade ago when this high-energy neutrino event was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory located in Antarctica. This set the astronomical community scouring space in the direction of the constellation Eridanus for potential sources for an electromagnetic counterpart to this event with a range of telescopes. This turned up no convincing gamma-ray, X-ray or optical counterpart for the neutrino detection, nor could any gamma-ray burst, supernova, or tidal disruption event (in which a black hole violently shreds a star) be linked with IC 210922A.
Urata and colleagues began their personal search with the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), operated by the East Asian Observatory, and the Submillimeter Array (SMA), discovering Shadow Blaster, a galaxy in the right position and with the right level of brightness to be associated with IC 210922A. The team followed this up with an investigation using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a collection of 66 radio wave antennas in northern Chile.
The detection of this galaxy was possible because it is strongly gravitationally lensed. Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon that occurs when an object of great mass comes between Earth and a distant background source, curving the fabric of spacetime. As light from the background source navigates this curvature, its path is curved. This results in light from the lensed source arriving at different times to our telescopes, causing it to be amplified.
In the case of Shadow Blaster, before the team could learn anything about this distant galaxy, they had to discover more about the object serving as the intermediate gravitational lens, specifically what type of object it is, its mass, and its distance from us. To do this, they turned to the Gemini North telescope and its Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) and the Gemini Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (GNIRS) instruments.
With the model of a gravitational lens determined, the team discovered that Shadow Blaster is a galaxy with an extremely compact heart filled with dense clouds of gas and dust that is fueling an intense burst of star formation. A region such as this has long been theorized to serve as a powerful particle accelerator. Because Shadow Blaster lacks a feeding supermassive black hole, this research shows that these regions can still serve as cosmic particle accelerators when they harbor sleeping black holes and in the absence of the powerful jets that erupt from active galactic nuclei (AGNs).
As for the overall population of neutrinos, this research could help account for that too. Intensely star-forming galaxies, or starburst galaxies, are believed to have been prevalent around 10 billion years ago in the early universe. Thus, these galaxies could have been producing a multitude of high-energy neutrinos. Proving that may prove difficult, however, as astronomers don't have the good fortune to find all of these galaxies lurking behind a gravitational lens, meaning they may be too faint and distant to study.
"Our analysis suggests that this population could contribute up to roughly 20% of the observed diffuse neutrino background measured by IceCube," Urata concluded,
The team's research was published on Wednesday (June 17) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Physicists with LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have detected the elusive Ωcc⁺ baryon, a particle containing two charm quarks and one strange quark, completing a long-sought family of doubly charmed baryons first predicted over half a century ago.
Physicists have revealed that the unusual decay of an “exotic” subatomic particle could offer new clues to its mysterious structure.
The discovery, reported by a team of physicists in a study published in Physical Review Letters, argues that it provides the first “crucial discrimination” between current theoretical models of a variety of subatomic particles known as the Ds(2317) meson.
Exotic Subatomic Mysteries
The new research has its beginnings more than two decades ago, with the initial detection of an unusual particle known as the Ds(2317) meson. Part of what makes this particle unique is the fact that it possesses one charm quark (or “c quark,” a kind of elementary particle) and one strange antiquark—the third lightest of all the known quarks.
It was deemed a major discovery at the time, and for good reason: it seemed to point at a significant discrepancy between the particle’s measured mass of 2.317 GeV/c2, and predictions based on estimates that placed it significantly higher, at around 2.4 GeV/c2.
Now, in a new study by researchers with the Belle and Belle II Collaboration, observations of previously undetected behaviors that include never-before-seen light-emissions during the particle’s decay have been described for the first time.
Based on their analysis, the team believes their new findings mark not only a significant first in the study of these particles, but that they may also help researchers solve the longstanding mystery involving apparent discrepancies between the observed and expected mass values for the Ds(2317) meson.
The findings, the team says, could also provide physicists with deeper insights into the fundamental forces that currently bind matter.
Unraveling a Baffling Discrepancy
The team approached the problem by first proposing a range of different models that could potentially describe the internal structure of the Ds(2317) meson. Of key importance was the fact that each of the different models allows researchers to predict a specific range of potential values for the particle’s decay.
This was achieved based on the probability that the Ds(2317 meson will decay by emitting a gamma ray, which was then divided by an entirely separate probability: that the particle would emit a pion—a type of meson with a mass roughly 270 times that of an electron—rather than a gamma ray.
Based on these two possibilities, the team determined that measurements indicating a ratio of greater than 8.1% would point to the likelihood that the meson represents a compact state involving quark-antiquark models.
However, if the calculated value turned out to be lower—specifically in the range of between 0.5% and 4.25%—that would instead favor models that describe the particle as functioning closer to being a sort of molecule-like state of two separate mesons.
Well Above Standard Deviations
With such values in mind, the team then went to work to determine which was more likely with help from data collected by the Japanese KEKB and SuperKEKB electron–positron colliders.
Using this information, the particle’s gamma-emitting decay was successfully detected, revealing a statistical significance above ten standard deviations. Next, the Belle and Belle II Collaboration conducted measurements that showed the decay ratio between photons and pions was close to 7%, placing the determined value smaller than the majority of quark-antiquark models, and at a greater value than those in the molecular models.
“This result provides crucial discrimination between theoretical models of the Ds(2317) structure,” the team writes.
Going forward, the researchers believe additional insights that may help to conclusively reveal the mysterious Ds(2317) meson’s structure may be achievable through more complete measurements of the particle’s decay rate.
The recent paper, “Observation of the Radiative Decay 𝐷*𝑠0(2317)+→𝐷*𝑠+𝛾,” appeared in Physical Review Letters.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
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Could the Universe hold minds built from radically different stuff?
The first evidence of its kind.
