your science briefing for 03.14.2025

A tiny solar system almost next door, making supercooled soup out of light, how two supernovae changed life on Earth, and more...

Barnard’s Star is our next closest stellar neighbor past Proxima and Alpha Centauri, a small red dwarf which we knew had a planetary system of its own. Now, scientists are finally able to confirm a clutch of four tiny planets orbiting around it in a matter of just a few days. They’re probably uninhabitable given how close they are, and there’s a bit of a question as to whether they’re small rocky planets or just burnt our cores of Hot Jupiters that wandered too close, but either way, this confirmation will help scientists further refine their tools and models to find more alien worlds… (UChicago)

It’s already a well-established fact that boredom and loss of control tends to promote conspiracy ideation. But another thing that tends to make people think there’s sinister machinations afoot? Having their basic needs constantly neglected. If you happen to live in a country where your well-being is considered a you problem, and providing the population with basic services is seen as “commie talk” by the powers that be, it’s not surprising that the citizens will start embracing conspiracy theories… (PsyPost)

In a head-scratching and eyebrow-raising first, scientists make what could only really be called light soup. No, not as in diet friend and low calorie but filling, as in slowed a beam of light in a supercooled plate of an aluminum gallium arsenide alloy so much, it started behaving like a liquid. It still had no density or viscosity, but it stayed together as if it had. This is a behavior we’ve actually seen when quarks and gluons are either heated past a trillion degrees or cooled within a billionth of a degree of absolute zero, which does make sense given that photons are also particles… (Newsweek)

Earth lives in an area of space known as the Local Bubble, a fairly sparsely populated region of space about a thousand light years across with star-forming regions around its outer edges. It was carved out by multiple supernovae, and two of them may have been responsible for mass extinctions on our world as their highly destructive waves of high energy particles slammed into our atmosphere. As Linda from Bob’s Burgers would put it, double interstellar xenocide, twice as nice… (EurekaAlert)

“It’s not a phase mom! It’s what all the early mammals are wearing!” must have said a flying squirrel during the age of the dinosaurs. While we mammals may rule the world today, 120 million years ago, it was a very different story. Our ancestors had to be very small, quiet, mostly nocturnal or crepuscular, and experimenting with a goth look with very plain, dark brown coat to avoid catching the eyes of small raptors. We know that thanks to comparing pigment producing cells of modern mammals until one common, ancestral pattern to all mammals emerged in the lab… (PopSci)