your science briefing for 02.21.2025

Another step in solving the mystery of intermediate black holes, imaging the edges of alien solar systems, America's purge of its scientific powerhouses, and more..

For decades, astronomers have been scratching their heads over a perplexing cosmic mystery. We see supermassive black holes with masses that tip the scales at millions and billions of solar masses. We see stellar black holes with masses of a few to maybe dozens of solar masses. With black holes between 100 and 100,000 solar masses, we very seldom find anything, however. But a brand new survey of dwarf galaxies, might be changing all that, having found hundreds of intermediate mass black holes as well as showing us new ways to hunt for them… (Space.com)

Glacier retreat, especially of small glaciers, is a terrific indicator of the rate of global warming and predictor of climate change intensity. The faster they melt, the worse it’s going to get. And unfortunately, over the last decade, smaller glaciers have retreated a lot faster than we’d want to see… (ScienceDaily)

Our solar system’s outer reaches have the Kuiper Belt. It’s a roughly doughnut shaped repository of icy worlds like Pluto, Sedna, and Quaoar, as well as comets and random rocky debris from the chaos of planetary formation. But is this structure unique to us? After all, we don’t have Hot Jupiters or planets with highly eccentric orbits either. Is an icy belt of planetary leftovers something solar system have as well? ESO researchers now have a possible answer with 74 images that say yes… (ESO)

While we’re used to the idea of Earth having icy polar caps and rightfully worry about the impact of them rapidly melting, in the grand scheme of things, polar ice is actually relatively new, pretty rare, and will eventually disappear. Both the Arctic and Antarctic formed over the last 33 million years, after over 600 million years of ice-free poles. In other words, polar ice may be a rare even in our geologic history and will be in the far future. But given that we live in the here and now, and rely on it to help regulate global climates, we should make sure we don’t melt it… (EarthSky)

Emulating the worst ideas in recent history, DOGE and the Trump administration seem dead set to do as much damage to American science and research as possible, firing thousands of experts in biology, chemistry, clinical medicine, epidemiology, materials sciences, and complex engineering, and slashing funding to their agencies. But this is par for the course for a government where hiring is based on partisan loyalty, disdain for science and facts, and pathological Dunning-Kruger fueled by a burning inferiority complex… (Science)