Space and time from Science Daily Feed

Astronomers have spotted what may be one of the universe’s earliest barred spiral galaxies — a striking cosmic structure forming just 2 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxy, COSMOS-74706, dates back about 11.5 billion years and contains a stellar bar, a bright, linear band of stars and gas stretching across its center, similar to the one in our own Milky Way.

Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, may have been born in a colossal cosmic crash. New research suggests Titan formed when two older moons slammed together hundreds of millions of years ago—an event so violent it reshaped Saturn’s entire moon system and may have indirectly sparked the formation of its iconic rings. Clues come from Titan’s unusual orbit, its surprisingly smooth surface, and the strange behavior of the tumbling moon Hyperion.

Scientists at the University of Oxford have finally settled a decades-long mystery about the Moon’s magnetic field — and it turns out both sides were right. By reanalyzing Apollo mission rocks, they discovered that the Moon did occasionally generate an incredibly powerful magnetic field, even stronger than Earth’s — but only for fleeting bursts lasting thousands of years or less. Most of the time, the Moon’s magnetic field was weak.

Mars’ frozen ice caps may be time capsules for ancient life. Lab experiments show that key building blocks of proteins can survive tens of millions of years in pure ice, even under relentless cosmic radiation. Ice mixed with Martian-like soil, however, destroys organic material far more quickly. The findings point future missions toward drilling into clean, buried ice rather than studying rocks or dirt.

Deep inside the Milky Way, an invisible force is quietly holding everything together — its magnetic field. Now, researchers have created one of the most detailed maps ever of this hidden structure, revealing surprising twists in how it flows through our galaxy.

Scientists have proposed a surprising connection between solar flares and earthquakes. When solar activity disturbs the ionosphere, it may generate electric fields that penetrate fragile fracture zones in Earth’s crust. If a fault is already critically stressed, this extra electrostatic pressure could help trigger a quake. The idea doesn’t claim direct causation, but it offers a fresh way to think about how space weather and seismic events might interact.

Far beyond Neptune, in the frozen depths of the Kuiper Belt, many ancient objects oddly resemble giant snowmen made of ice and rock. For years, scientists wondered how these delicate two-lobed shapes could form without violent collisions tearing them apart. Now researchers at Michigan State University have recreated the process in a powerful new simulation, showing that simple gravitational collapse can naturally produce these cosmic “snowmen.”

A Martian volcano once thought to be the result of a single eruption turns out to have a much more complex past. Orbital imaging and mineral data show it developed through multiple eruptive phases, all powered by the same evolving magma system underground. Shifts in mineral composition reveal the magma changed over time, hinting at different depths and storage histories. Mars’ interior was far more active than previously believed.

For the first time, scientists have mapped Uranus’s upper atmosphere in three dimensions, tracking temperatures and charged particles up to 5,000 kilometers above the clouds. Webb’s sharp vision revealed glowing auroral bands and unexpected dark regions shaped by the planet’s wildly tilted magnetic field.

Astronomers have uncovered one of the most mysterious galaxies ever found — a dim, ghostly object called CDG-2 that is almost entirely made of dark matter. Located 300 million light-years away in the Perseus galaxy cluster, it was discovered in an unusual way: not by its stars, but by four tightly packed globular clusters acting like cosmic breadcrumbs.

Researchers have uncovered more than a thousand previously unknown tectonic ridges across the Moon’s dark plains, showing the Moon is still contracting and reshaping itself. These features are among the youngest geological structures on the lunar surface. Because they form through the same forces linked to past moonquakes, they could signal new seismic hotspots.

Scientists scanning the heart of the Milky Way have spotted a tantalizing signal: a possible ultra-fast pulsar spinning every 8.19 milliseconds near Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s core. Pulsars act like incredibly precise cosmic clocks, and finding one in this extreme environment could open a rare window into how space-time behaves under intense gravity.

New data from major dark-energy observatories suggest the universe may not expand forever after all. A Cornell physicist calculates that the cosmos is heading toward a dramatic reversal: after reaching its maximum size in about 11 billion years, it could begin collapsing, ultimately ending in a “big crunch” roughly 20 billion years from now.