Featured
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News & Views |
Galaxy found napping in the primordial Universe
Observations have revealed a galaxy that stopped forming stars earlier than expected. This discovery offers clues about when the first galaxies emerged and sheds light on how stars formed when the Universe was in its infancy.
- Jacqueline Antwi-Danso
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Article |
Star Formation Shut Down by Multiphase Gas Outflow in a Galaxy at a Redshift of 2.45
- Sirio Belli
- , Minjung Park
- & Rainer Weinberger
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Nature Podcast |
Living on Mars would probably suck — here's why
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith join us to discuss their book A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
- Benjamin Thompson
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News |
Violent volcanoes have wracked Jupiter’s moon Io for billions of years
Understanding the volcanic moon’s history could offer fresh insights into conditions on early Earth.
- Sarah Wild
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Article |
Stripped-envelope supernova light curves argue for central engine activity
Analysis of the energy budget of a sample of 54 well-observed stripped-envelope supernovae of all sub-types shows statistically significant, largely model-independent, observational evidence for a non-radioactive power source in most of them.
- Ósmar Rodríguez
- , Ehud Nakar
- & Dan Maoz
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Article
| Open Access
Methane emission from a cool brown dwarf
Methane emission from a very cool brown dwarf, perhaps arising from an aurora, has been detected in James Webb Space Telescope observations.
- Jacqueline K. Faherty
- , Ben Burningham
- & Niall Whiteford
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Nature Podcast |
Keys, wallet, phone: the neuroscience behind working memory
Brain areas work in tandem to temporarily store important information, and an aurora on a cool brown dwarf.
- Benjamin Thompson
- & Noah Baker
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Career Column |
‘Shrugging off failure is hard’: the $400-million grant setback that shaped the Smithsonian lead scientist’s career
Planetary scientist Ellen Stofan thought about leaving research after a funding bid was rejected. But new opportunities emerged.
- Anne Gulland
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News |
Could JWST solve cosmology’s big mystery? Physicists debate Universe-expansion data
Results from the telescope could help to end a long-standing disagreement over the rate of cosmic expansion. But scientists say more measurements are needed.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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Research Highlight |
An exoplanet is wrapped in glory
Astronomers spot the first planet outside the Solar System to boast a phenomenon reminiscent of a rainbow.
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News |
Total solar eclipse 2024: what dazzled scientists
Amateur and professional astronomers share with Nature what they observed and what data they collected when the Moon blocked the Sun.
- Sumeet Kulkarni
- & Lauren Wolf
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Nature Podcast |
The ‘ghost roads’ driving tropical deforestation
Researchers find that a huge number of roads that don’t appear on official maps, and the protein that could determine whether someone is left-handed.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Benjamin Thompson
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Research Highlight |
Smallest known starquakes are detected with a subtle shift of colour
An unusual technique picks up the slow vibration of a faint star.
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News |
Total solar eclipse 2024: how it will help scientists to study the Sun
The Sun’s mysterious outer atmosphere, the corona, will become easier to view from Earth on 8 April.
- Sumeet Kulkarni
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Book Review |
Cosmologist Claudia de Rham on falling for gravity
The aspiring astronaut turned theoretical physicist talks travelling, the accelerating expansion of the Universe, thinking beyond three dimensions and detecting gravitational waves.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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News |
This super-Earth is the first planet confirmed to have a permanent dark side
Convincing evidence of 1:1 tidal locking had been absent until a new analysis of the exoplanet LHS 3844b.
- Joseph Howlett
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Article |
Thermonuclear explosions on neutron stars reveal the speed of their jets
Relativistic jets observed from transient neutron stars throughout the Universe produce bright flares for minutes after each X-ray burst, helping to determine the role individual system properties have on the speed and revealing the dominant launching mechanism.
- Thomas D. Russell
- , Nathalie Degenaar
- & Melania Del Santo
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Article |
The complex circumstellar environment of supernova 2023ixf
Using ultraviolet data as well as a comprehensive set of further multiwavelength observations of the supernova 2023ixf, a reliable bolometric light curve is derived that indicates the heating nature of the early emission.
- E. A. Zimmerman
- , I. Irani
- & K. Zhang
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Essay |
How did the Big Bang get its name? Here’s the real story
Astronomer Fred Hoyle supposedly coined the catchy term to ridicule the theory of the Universe’s origins — 75 years on, it’s time to set the record straight.
- Helge Kragh
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News |
‘Best view ever’: observatory will map Big Bang’s afterglow in new detail
The Simons Observatory will search for signs of gravitational waves that originated from the Big Bang.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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Article |
At least one in a dozen stars shows evidence of planetary ingestion
By analysing the chemical abundance differences of pairs of co-moving stars born together, it is found that about 8% show chemical signatures that indicate ingestion of planetary material.
- Fan Liu
- , Yuan-Sen Ting
- & Fei Dai
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News |
Planet-eating stars hint at hidden chaos in the Milky Way
A handful of middle-aged stars seem to have gobbled up a planet, challenging assumptions about the stability of such systems.
- Elizabeth Gibney
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Muse |
Do black holes explode? The 50-year-old puzzle that challenges quantum physics
Stephen Hawking’s paradoxical finding that black holes don’t live forever has profound, unresolved implications for the quest for unifying theories of reality.
- Davide Castelvecchi
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News |
Did ‘alien’ debris hit Earth? Startling claim sparks row at scientific meeting
Astrophysicist Avi Loeb says that an interstellar meteor showered Earth with particles. At a planetary-science conference this week, researchers begged to differ.
- Alexandra Witze
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Book Review |
Act now to prevent a ‘gold rush’ in outer space
As private firms aim for the Moon and beyond, a book calls for an urgent relook at the legal compact that governs space exploration.
- Timiebi Aganaba
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Arts Review |
159 days of solitude: how loneliness haunts astronauts
The psychological pressures of going into space might be as hard as the physical feat, a documentary reveals.
- Alexandra Witze
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Article
| Open Access
A rapidly time-varying equatorial jet in Jupiter’s deep interior
An axisymmetric, equatorial jet in Jupiter’s interior has a wavelike fluctuation with a 4-year period, revealing hidden aspects of the magnetic field within the metallic hydrogen region and constraining the dynamo that generates the magnetic field.
- Jeremy Bloxham
- , Hao Cao
- & Scott J. Bolton
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Article
| Open Access
A recently quenched galaxy 700 million years after the Big Bang
Analysis of the JWST/NIRSpec spectrum of the recently observed Lyman-break galaxy JADES-GS+53.15508-27.80178 revealed a redshift of z = 7.3, a Balmer break and a complete absence of nebular emission lines, indicating that quenching occurred only 700 million years after the Big Bang.
- Tobias J. Looser
- , Francesco D’Eugenio
- & Jan Scholtz
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Article |
Buoyant crystals halt the cooling of white dwarf stars
A population of freezing white dwarf stars maintaining a constant luminosity for a duration comparable with the age of the universe can be explained by a solid–liquid distillation mechanism interrupting cooling for billions of years.
- Antoine Bédard
- , Simon Blouin
- & Sihao Cheng
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Nature Podcast |
These tiny fish combine electric pulses to probe the environment
Elephantnose fish share electric pulses to extend their senses, and the bumblebees that show a uniquely human trait.
- Nick Petrić Howe
- & Benjamin Thompson
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Correspondence |
Space and nuclear pioneers show the value of empowering women in STEM
- Farhan M. Asrar
- , Safa Siddiqui
- & Soyeon Yi
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Research Highlight |
This dying star bears a jagged metal scar
The surface of a white dwarf is marked with metallic patches — souvenirs of its encounter with an asteroid or planet.
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News |
Two giant US telescopes threatened by funding cap
The Thirty Meter Telescope and Giant Magellan Telescope might need to compete for survival in the face of federal spending limits.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
How dwarf galaxies lit up the Universe after the Big Bang
Some of the faintest objects ever observed suggest that small galaxies get the credit for clearing the ‘fog’ pervading the early cosmos.
- Sumeet Kulkarni
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Article |
Most of the photons that reionized the Universe came from dwarf galaxies
An analysis of eight ultra-faint galaxies during the epoch of reionization with absolute magnitudes between −17 mag and −15 mag shows that most of the photons that reionized the Universe come from dwarf galaxies.
- Hakim Atek
- , Ivo Labbé
- & Katherine E. Whitaker
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Article
| Open Access
The Dimorphos ejecta plume properties revealed by LICIACube
Dimorphos ejecta plume properties were revealed by the observations from the LICIACube cube satellite, which was deployed 15 days in advance of the impact of DART.
- E. Dotto
- , J. D. P. Deshapriya
- & M. Zannoni
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Nature Podcast |
Could this one-time ‘epigenetic’ treatment control cholesterol?
Regulating gene expression lowers blood cholesterol in mice, and how the Universe’s cosmic fog was lifted.
- Nick Petrić Howe
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News |
Private Moon lander is dying — it scored some wins for science
The Odysseus spacecraft gathered data successfully from the lunar surface.
- Alexandra Witze
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News & Views |
From the archive: Stephen Hawking’s explosive idea, and scientific spirit
Snippets from Nature’s past.
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News |
Japanese Moon-lander unexpectedly survives the lunar night
Its engineers never gave up hope, but the Moon-lander continues to beat the odds.
- Ling Xin
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News |
Giant ‘bubble’ in space could be source of powerful cosmic rays
Scientists have identified a region in the Milky Way capable of accelerating particles to super-high energy levels.
- Gemma Conroy
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News |
First private Moon lander touches down on lunar surface to make history
After a nail-biting descent, the Odysseus spacecraft has landed near the lunar south pole and prepares to kick off a week of data gathering.
- Alexandra Witze
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News |
Supernova mystery solved: JWST reveals the fate of an iconic stellar explosion
Decades-long quest ends as the landmark observatory detects signs of the 1987 blast’s central neutron star.
- Alexandra Witze
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Obituary |
Arno A. Penzias (1933–2024), co-discoverer of the cosmic microwave background
Astrophysicist whose radio-wave observations confirmed the Big Bang origin of the Universe.
- John Bally
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Article |
A lanthanide-rich kilonova in the aftermath of a long gamma-ray burst
A modelling analysis shows that an unusually long gamma-ray burst gave rise to a lanthanide-rich kilonova following the merger of a neutron star–neutron star or of a neutron star–black hole.
- Yu-Han Yang
- , Eleonora Troja
- & Ignacio Pérez-García
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News & Views |
Rare isotopes formed in prelude to γ-ray burst
The afterglow of a long burst of γ-rays suggests that the events leading to these explosions can be sizeable sources of some of the Universe’s rare isotopes — and that classifications of γ-ray bursts are too simplistic.
- Daniel Kasen
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Article |
The Radcliffe Wave is oscillating
Spatial and kinematic analysis of the solar neighbourhood shows that the Radcliffe Wave, a wave-shaped chain of star-forming gas clouds, is oscillating through the Galactic plane while also drifting radially away from the Galactic Centre.
- Ralf Konietzka
- , Alyssa A. Goodman
- & Núria Miret-Roig
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Where I Work |
Building precision instruments to explore the cosmos
Phil Korngut tests NASA’s SPHEREx telescope under extreme conditions at his laboratory in California.
- Rachael Pells
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News |
The decimal point is 150 years older than historians thought
Origin of the powerful calculation tool traced back to a mathematician from the Italian Renaissance.
- Jo Marchant
A magnetar giant flare in the nearby starburst galaxy M82