A digest of popular science news for the week that we haven't written about

The death of a massive star from a black hole was the largest and most spectacular event of its kind

Astronomers have discovered a black hole engaged in an epic stellar feast about 9 billion light-years away. The supermassive black hole, about 10 million times the mass of the Sun, has shredded a star about nine times more massive than our own and feasted on its stellar remains. It is the largest star ever observed to be destroyed in one of these terrifying “tidal disruption events,” or TDEs.

By comparison, the star in this VPE (designated AT2023vto) is five times more massive than the closest stellar body astronomers have seen destroyed by a black hole. This makes AT2023vto the largest and brightest VPE astronomers have ever discovered.

“What really sets the AT2023vto VPE apart from other VPEs is that it's incredibly, incredibly bright,” told team member Yvette Cendes of the University of Oregon. “It's 9 billion light-years away — more. It's very far away, but it's so bright that you can see it even at that distance. We usually see EHEs much closer to home.”

This is not the most distant VPE ever seen.

The defining feature of such distant (and therefore earlier) VLEs is that they shoot out jets of material at speeds close to the speed of light. This makes them incredibly bright, and easier to spot at great distances. VLE AT2023vto is like the other 99% in that it does not have these so-called relativistic jets — at least not yet.

NASA Demonstrates 'Ultra-Cold' Quantum Sensor in Space for the First Time

Future space missions could use quantum technologies to track water on Earth, study the composition of moons and other planets, or investigate mysterious cosmic phenomena.

NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory, the first facility of its kind aboard the International Space Station, has taken another step toward revolutionizing the use of quantum science in space. Science team members measured subtle vibrations of the space station using one of the lab's onboard instruments – the first time ultracold atoms have been used to detect changes in the environment in space.

The study, published August 13 in the journal Nature Communications, also reports the longest demonstration of the wave-like nature of atoms in free fall in space.

The Cold Atom Lab team made their measurements using a quantum instrument called an atom interferometer, which can precisely measure gravity, magnetic fields, and other forces. Scientists and engineers on Earth use the instrument to study the fundamental nature of gravity and to develop technologies that help navigate planes and ships. (Cell phones, transistors, and GPS are just a few of the significant technologies that rely on quantum physics but are not related to atom interferometry.)

Physicists have long wanted to apply atomic interferometry to space, where microgravity allows for longer measurement times and greater sensitivity, but the delicate, sensitive equipment was considered too fragile to operate for long periods without assistance. Now the Cold Atom Laboratory, operated remotely from Earth, has shown that it can be done.

Scientists have created a material capable of measuring the temperature of nanoscale objects

Scientists at the University of California, Irvine discovered a one-dimensional nanoscale material whose color changes with temperature. The team's results are published in the journal Advanced Materials.

“We found that we could make very small, sensitive thermometers,” says Max Arguilla, a chemistry professor at the University of California, Irvine, whose research group led the study. “This is some of the most practical, translatable work to come out of our lab.”

Arguilla likened the thermometers to “nano mood rings,” referring to jewelry that changes color based on the wearer’s body temperature. But rather than simply measuring temperature qualitatively, the color changes in these materials “can be calibrated and used to optically measure temperature at the nanoscale,” Arguilla said.

“The need to measure temperature is very important because many biological and industrial processes depend on monitoring minute changes in temperature,” he added. “We may now have thermometers that we can try to insert into cells.”

Optical thermometers could also potentially measure temperature and evaluate the performance of micro- and nanoelectronics, including chips and data storage devices, says Dmitry Cordova, a postdoctoral fellow in Arguilla’s group. The industry already has optical thermometers that are used to make computer components, but the team’s new material is “at least an order of magnitude more sensitive,” Cordova says.

The breakthrough came when Cordova and his colleagues grew crystals in their lab that resemble Slinky toys on a nanometer scale. They first grew the crystals to subject them to heat stress and see at what temperatures the crystals broke down.

Cordova and research student Leo Cheng noticed that the color of the crystals changed systematically from yellow to orange depending on the temperature.

The team then took precise measurements of the temperature range that the colours corresponded to, and found that the light yellow colours corresponded to temperatures of around -190 degrees Celsius, while the red-orange colours corresponded to temperatures of around 200 degrees Celsius.

Zebrafish Use Surprising Strategy to Regenerate Spinal Cords

Zebrafish are among a rare group of vertebrates that can completely regenerate their spinal cords after they are damaged. Understanding exactly how this regeneration occurs could provide clues to developing treatment strategies for spinal cord injuries in humans. Such injuries can be devastating, causing permanent loss of sensation and movement.

New studyconducted at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has compiled a detailed atlas of all the cells involved in zebrafish spinal cord regeneration and how they work together. The surprising discovery was that complete spinal cord regeneration requires the survival and adaptation of the severed neurons themselves. Surprisingly, the study found that stem cells, which are capable of forming new neurons and are usually considered central to the regeneration process, play a supporting role rather than leading the process.

Unlike spinal cord injuries in humans and other mammals, in which damaged neurons always die, damaged zebrafish neurons dramatically change their cellular functions in response to injury, first surviving and then taking on a new and central role in orchestrating the precise events that govern the healing process, researchers have found. Scientists knew that zebrafish neurons survive spinal cord injury, and the new study shows how they do it.

“We found that most, if not all, of the aspects of neuronal repair that we're trying to achieve in humans occur naturally in zebrafish,” speaks senior study author Meissa Mokalled, PhD, associate professor of developmental biology. “The surprising observation we made is that immediately after injury, there is robust neuronal protection and repair. We think these protective mechanisms allow neurons to survive the injury and then adopt a kind of spontaneous plasticity — or flexibility in their function — that gives the fish time to regenerate new neurons to achieve full recovery. Our study has identified genetic targets that will help us stimulate this type of plasticity in cells in humans and other mammals.”

Amateur scientists spot object moving at 1.5 million km/h

To detect a dim, fast-moving object emerging from the Milky Way, they used data from NASA's WISE telescope, which later became the NEOWISE mission.

Most familiar stars orbit peacefully around the center of the Milky Way. But citizen scientists working on NASA's Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project have helped discover an object moving so fast that it will escape the Milky Way's gravity and hurtle into intergalactic space. This hypervelocity object is the first object found with the mass of a small star.

The Backyard Worlds project uses images from NASA's Wide Field Infrared Explorer (WISE), which surveyed the sky in infrared light from 2009 to 2011. It was renamed NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) in 2013 and decommissioned on August 8, 2024.

Several years ago, longtime Backyard Worlds citizen scientists Martin Kabatnik, Thomas P. Bickle, and Dan Caselden spotted a faint, fast-moving object called CWISE J124909.08+362116.0 streaking across their screens in WISE images. Follow-up observations with several ground-based telescopes helped the scientists confirm the discovery and characterize the object. The citizen scientists co-authored the team’s study on the discovery, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint available here).

“I can’t describe how excited I was,” said Kabatnik, a citizen scientist in Nuremberg, Germany. “When I first saw how fast it was moving, I was sure it had been reported before.”

CWISE J1249 is flying out of the Milky Way at about 1.5 million km/h. But it also stands out for its low mass, making it difficult to classify as a celestial object. It could be a low-mass star, or, if it does not have sustained hydrogen fusion in its core, it would be considered a brown dwarf, something between a gas giant planet and a star.