Gayoung Lee

After stretching a bit last year, this year the Nobel committee was determined to give the prize to the physicsiest physics that ever physicsed.

Photo plate of Hubble's famous "VAR!" discovery. This is a photonegative plate of an image of the Andromeda Galaxy, with several small annotations made in grease pencil. One of them was previously marked "N" for "nova," but the N has been crossed out and replaced with an excited "VAR!" to indicate a Cepheid Variable.

VAR!

In the early morning hours #OTD in 1923, Edwin Hubble took a photo plate of M31 that showed a Cepheid variable star.

Using Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s distance-luminosity relationship, Hubble concluded that M31 is another galaxy outside the Milky Way. 🧪 🔭 ⚛️

Image: Carnegie Observatories

These alien planets are astronomers’ favourites: here’s why Space scientists look back on 30 years of exoplanet discoveries — from rows of massive ‘super-Earths‘ to worlds with perfectly synchronized orbits.

This week (!) is the 30th anniversary of the announcement of 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet found orbiting a star like our Sun - since then, we've found over 6,000!

To celebrate, @alexwitze.bsky.social and @nature.com collected some astronomers' favourite planets:

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

NASA’s First-Ever Alien-Hunting Space Telescope Could Enlighten Our New Dark Age The Habitable Worlds Observatory is poised to tell us whether Earthlike planets are common—if it can get off the ground

Now on @sciam.bsky.social: NASA’s next-gen Habitable Worlds Observatory may be our best chance to find alien life. But can a nation busy ripping itself apart unite to launch a mission to solve life’s cosmic mysteries? By @nadiadrake.bsky.social (and me).

www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-...

Gizmondo headline "LIGO’s Sharpest Detection Yet Confirms Famous Stephen Hawking Theory" above an artistic image of a binary black hole merger in a soothing blue by Maggie Chiang for Simons Foundation

"Ten years after LIGO’s historical detection of gravitational waves, the project is cracking black hole mysteries at an astounding pace"

@gayoung.bsky.social writes in @gizmodo.com about #GW250114

gizmodo.com/ligos-sharpe...

#O4IsHere #EinsteinWasRight #HawkingWasRight #KerrWasRight 🔭🧪⚛️

Gizmodo just had a Glow Up!✨
The new site is bold, modern, faster, cleaner, and built for connection with sleeker layouts, quicker load times, and a smoother mobile experience. Every detail was designed to make it easier than ever to read, engage, discover, and share.
Explore the new www.gizmodo.com

The Winners of the 2025 Gizmodo Science Fair An experiment that transformed lead into gold, a satellite designed to manufacture drugs in space, and many other fascinating projects all took home trophies at this year’s Science Fair.

It's that most wonderful time of the year for us at Gizmodo's science desk: The Gizmodo Science Fair!

Every year, we get the chance to highlight research projects and achievements on the cusp of changing lives or shaking up their scientific fields—or that already have! gizmodo.com/the-winners-...

Oh this is very cool

#MathNerds

LIGO's Sharpest Detection Yet Confirms Famous Stephen Hawking Theory Ten years after LIGO’s historical detection of gravitational waves, the project is cracking black hole mysteries at an astounding pace.

LIGO's Sharpest Detection Yet Confirms Famous Stephen Hawking Theory https://gizmodo.com/ligos-sharpest-detection-yet-confirms-famous-stephen-hawking-theory-2000656839

YouTube video by Gizmodo Switch 2 Two-Month Review: What We Love, What We Hate

My 2-month Nintendo Switch 2 review video with @kylebarr.bsky.social is now live on @gizmodo.com's YouTube channel. We're getting back into "regular" tech review videos so go easy on us. Each video will get better. I promise!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdpc...

Today, Scientific American turns 180—the oldest continuously published magazine in the U.S. 🎉

Since 1845, we’ve shared the wonders of science with the world.

💫 Dive into 180 years of discovery: sciam.com/180
🧬 Explore pivotal moments in science: bit.ly/4mNTpGY
🎁 Win prizes: sciam.com/180contest

CHALLENGER!!!!

Why ‘Silksong’ Took Seven Years to Make The highly anticipated indie game has been in production for so long that it’s become an internet meme

BREAKING: Silksong will be out on September 4. Two weeks from today. Really.

Often, games that take 7+ years to make are plagued by mismanagement and painful burnout. But for Silksong? Team Cherry was having a blast. They still are.

This is their story: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

A striking image of the plasma jet in the blazar PKS 1424+240, seen head-on. The jet is threaded by a nearly perfect toroidal magnetic field (visualized in orange). Due to special relativity, high-energy gamma rays and neutrinos are strongly beamed toward Earth, even though the jet appears slow-moving from our perspective.

15 years of radio observations yielded this amazing view down the throat of a black hole.

We're looking into a jet of plasma shooting out from a supermassive black hole, called PKS 1424+240. The lines depict intense magnetic fields threaded through the jet. 🧪🔭

www.mpg.de/25171297/eye...

Meet Meschers, MIT's Tool for Building Paradoxical Digital Objects A new tool developed by MIT researchers enables users to create detailed computer representations of mathematically impossible objects.

Meschers got picked up by Gizmodo!

gizmodo.com/meet-mescher...

Thanks to @gayoung.bsky.social for the story!

Requirements for Joint Orbital Characterization of Cold Giants and Habitable Worlds with Habitable Worlds Observatory We determine optimal requirements for the joint detection of habitable-zone planets and cold giant planets with the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). Analysis of 164 nearby stars shows that a corona...

A timely paper for #HWO25: is it enough to find Earth-like planets around other nearby stars? No! We need their planetary system contexts. Does life on Earth depend on Jupiter?

@sabinastro.bsky.social led this nice analysis of HWO requirements to detect Earths + Jupiters.

arxiv.org/abs/2507.21443

If you want know all things #HabitableWorldsObservatory then follow @drjovian.bsky.social for the next two days as she posts from the #HWO25 meeting in Washington DC.
Thanks Jo for keeping us posted ☺️

A four panel comic titled Bird Sounds. In panel 1, labeled thrush, a wood thrush sings its beautiful eeohlay song against a forest background. In panel 2, labeled wren, a winter wren delicately sings tweedly tweedly tweedly. In panel 3, labeled warbler, a yellow warbler delicately sings sweet sweet. In panel 4, labeled heron in a death metal font, a heron screams KRAAGH against a background of fire.

Bird sounds.

this is very cool but also contains the truest thing anyone has ever said

"I’m very thankful that I get to blow stuff up with giant lasers for discoveries. And that’s my job, you know."

Thank you so much for the kind words! I’m very happy to hear that you enjoyed the story 😊

YouTube video by WIRED Astrobiologist Answers Astrobiology Questions | Tech Support | WIRED

While we're posting fresh space vids, I've gotta give a shout to this excellent @wired.com Q&A with NASA astrobiologist @drfunkyspoon.bsky.social fielding all the internet's burning queries about alien life. Watch it!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r_p...

You're Famous?!

In case you needed some good news this week:

We now have OVER A THOUSAND spectra of PLANETS AROUND OTHER STARS.

This is our training ground for modeling extreme weather. For understanding the diversity of planets across our Galaxy. For searching for biosignatures.

This is very, very cool.

All of these are supposed to be present in the standard models of particle physics & cosmology - but the actual numbers are far too small. So people invent physics beyond that to make baryons - "baryogenesis."

(We haven't ever observed baryon number violation, but theory predicts it should happen.)

Decades back Andrei Sakharov formulated the recipe to generate an asymmetry:
1) violation of baryon number itself
2) departure from thermal equilibrium
3) violation of C and CP almost-symmetries (C=particle/antiparticle exchange; P=parity=reflection in a mirror).

To be slightly more explicit: "matter" comes in the form of baryons (protons, neutrons, etc) and leptons (electrons, neutrinos, etc) and their antiparticles. Observation indicates that there are many more baryons than anti-baryons in the universe - the "baryon asymmetry." We're not sure why.

CERN Physicists Find Key Piece of the Matter-Antimatter Puzzle In a first, CERN physicists succeeded in observing matter-antimatter imbalance in baryons, fundamental particles that make up most of the observable universe.

New result from CERN (@lhcb.bsky.social) finds CP violation in the decay of baryons for the first time. Not unexpected - and not violation of baryon number itself! - but hopefully one more step in understanding why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.
gizmodo.com/cern-physici...

Astronomers Detect a Black Hole Merger That's So Massive It Shouldn’t Exist The powerful merger, designated GW231123, produced an extremely large black hole about 225 times the mass of our Sun.

Astronomers Detect a Black Hole Merger That's So Massive It Shouldn’t Exist https://gizmodo.com/astronomers-detect-a-black-hole-merger-thats-so-massive-it-shouldnt-exist-2000628197

Standard Mode of partycle physics

How to Keep Your Home Cool in Extreme Heat When extreme heat arrives, here are scientifically-based tips to keep your home cool, from the most efficient way to use air conditioning to strategic uses of fans

It's forking outside. Here's how to keep your house as cool as possible (and not paying a crazy high electricity bill): 🧪

Are all the blackout shades down in my house? Yup. Ceiling fan is going to circulate cooled air from the portable AC. We don't run the dishwasher during the day or use the oven.