Physics News
September 2026
Every article published in September 2026. 24 articles · Back to full archive
Space Travel
While hunting for the disputed planet Fomalhaut b, astronomers on Hubble noticed a second point of light appear out of nowhere near the same star, and Berkeley's Paul Kalas says it looks like the debris of a violent collision unlike anything in our solar system today
Earth Observation
Why does a Central African rainforest nation get paid tens of millions of dollars to keep its trees standing while its own timber industry argues those same trees are worth more felled?
Flora And Fauna
The immortal jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can respond to injury or starvation by reabsorbing its tentacles, sinking to the seafloor, and reverting its adult cells back into a juvenile polyp, essentially rewinding its own development instead of dying
Deep Impact
In September 2026, Catalina Sky Survey spotted 2026 RW1 about seven hours before it burned up over the Indian Ocean; the 0.6–1.3-metre rock’s entry point was fixed to under 100 metres
Flora And Fauna
How does an East African pastoralist community keep grazing its cattle across the same rangelands where lion, elephant and giraffe populations have recovered over roughly two decades, even as fences and farms fragment the corridors around them?
Earth Observation
Between 2020 and 2024, a Chinese-led team used the submersible Fendouzhe to survey seven hadal regions in the Indo-Pacific and found rich protist-dominated communities living on rocks more than nine kilometres down, where hard-substrate life had been largely unknown
Space Travel
Saturn's famous northern hexagon has stood in place for more than 40 years of observations, and now Hubble has caught a matching 10-sided wave beginning to form around the planet's south pole as its seasons swing that hemisphere back into view
Deep Impact
A 710-metre asteroid in the main belt was found completing one rotation every 1.88 minutes—about 70 times faster than the limit beyond which a loosely bound rubble pile should begin breaking apart. Modelling suggests 2025 MN45 requires cohesion comparable to solid rock, perhaps because it is a compact fragment left by the destruction of a larger parent body.
Space Travel
Venus’s 467°C surface can melt lead and has destroyed landers within minutes or hours, yet at roughly 50 kilometres altitude its thick atmosphere provides radiation shielding comparable to Earth’s. Curiosity measured about 0.67 millisieverts per day on the Martian surface, making a floating Venus habitat substantially safer from radiation—though certainly not from sulphuric acid, carbon dioxide or the challenges of remaining airborne.
Moon Daily
The flag Apollo 11 planted on the Moon cost just $5.50, and when the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter examined the six landing sites in 2012, shadows indicated that five flag assemblies were still standing. Apollo 11’s had apparently been flattened by the lunar module’s ascent exhaust, while decades of unfiltered ultraviolet radiation may have bleached the surviving nylon flags white.
Space Travel
The Voyager probes were built to last five years. Forty-nine years later, NASA engineers performed an all-at-once power-saving swap on Voyager 2—despite commands taking about 20 hours to reach it—to keep its final three science instruments operating for at least another year, a challenge far beyond anything envisioned in its original design.
Moon Daily
When Luna 9 made the first successful soft landing on the Moon on 3 February 1966, astronomers at Jodrell Bank recognised that its unencrypted picture signal resembled the Radiofax format used by newspapers. The Daily Express supplied a facsimile receiver, allowing the first photographs from the lunar surface to appear in Britain before Moscow officially released them.
Chip Tech
In spring 2018 Microsoft's Project Natick sank 864 servers 117 feet off Orkney; after two years underwater the sealed racks failed at one-eighth the rate of a land twin
Flora And Fauna
In 1864 brown trout ova from England hatched in Tasmania's Plenty River; about 6,000 swan galaxias remain, and in 2023 conservationists moved 180 into three trout-free havens
Flora And Fauna