Researchers say they detected the first gravitational-wave "fingerprints" of a black hole's event horizon by analyzing the final moments of the powerful GW250114 merger. The findings support Einstein's general relativity and may eventually help probe frame dragging and quantum fluctuations near black holes. Phys.org reports: For the new research published in Nature, an international team of researchers analyzed data from the strongest gravitational wave ever recorded, known as GW250114, detected by the LIGO observatory in January 2025. By isolating the last burst of waves -- known as "direct waves" -- from this black hole merger, the scientists said they were able to extract information from closer to an event horizon than ever before. "This black hole horizon concept normally appears in science fiction," lead study author Sizheng Ma of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada told AFP. "But now we are really able to touch the region around the horizon with gravitational data," he added. "Sometimes I cannot believe this is really happening." The last stage of two black holes merging is like a spoon stirring a glass of water, Ma explained. The resulting swirl in space creates the ripple of gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light in all directions. If the metaphorical spoon is stirring close enough to the black hole's event horizon, "this offers us a chance to decode the physics around that region," Ma said. By supporting the theory of general relativity, the results "proved that Einstein was correct again," he added. The scientists emphasized that more research was needed to decipher what can be gleaned about event horizons using this method. But they did detect information about how black holes twist space around themselves as they rotate -- a phenomenon known as "frame dragging." "This is similar to pushing a glass into a table and twisting it, so that the tablecloth winds up around it," Maximiliano Isi, a gravitational wave astrophysicist at Columbia University, told AFP. In the future, the scientists hope to find signs of tiny changes known as quantum fluctuations. "In this way, we can really probe this near-horizon region to look for new physics," including searching for a deviation from general relativity, Ma said.

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New simulations suggest Venus' extremely slow backward rotation may have been triggered by a high-angle collision with a fast-moving object roughly one-tenth its mass. The impact could have dramatically altered Venus' spin and melted nearly its entire mantle. Universe Today reports: Venus' bizarre and extraordinarily slow retrograde rotation on its axis has long puzzled planetary scientists. But in a new paper presented at the recent European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna, the authors argue that their models indicate that a high angle moon-sized, high-velocity impactor likely triggered Venus's strange 248-day rotation. And it probably happened within the first 50 million years of Venus' formation. [...] The team found that an impactor that is about a tenth of Venus' mass hitting the planet at a high angle could drastically slow the early young planet's rotation. Depending on the actual impact parameters, we can slow down a rapidly rotating early Venus to rotation rates that are that are compatible with long-term evolution towards a slow rotating planet, says [Cedric Gillmann, the paper's lead author and a planetary scientist at ETH Zurich]. Or even in some cases with large energetic impact that happen with a tangential impact that would even put planets early on in already a retrograde but faster rotation, he says. In the simulations, giant impacts expectedly produce surface magma oceans, the paper's authors note. Their relative depths vary depending on impact properties: from a shallow melt layer in the order of 100km thick to a fully molten mantle, they note. If the surface can radiate heat to space efficiently, the magma ocean cools down quickly, they write. If Gillmann and colleagues are correct, Venus' likely impactor also melted some 99 percent of Venus' mantle. That is, the interior structure that extends between its core and crust. You will get rid of that impact heat pretty efficiently, and after a few hundred million years, you end up seeing an evolution that is very difficult to distinguish from a case where you don't have an impact, says Gillmann. What role the impact may have played in Venus' lack of plate tectonics, however, remains open for debate. But it's known that Venus' lack of a large-scale carbon recycling mechanism likely led to its current runaway greenhouse.

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A Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket's upper stage broke apart shortly after last week's June 9 launch, likely creating 100 to 150 pieces of debris in a busy region of low-Earth orbit crossed by the ISS and lower-altitude Starlink satellites. Most fragments should reenter within months because of atmospheric drag, but experts say the incident adds to a worsening trend as China leaves more large rocket bodies in orbit while expanding its launch rate. Ars Technica reports: The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public. "The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing." So far, the Space Force has not added any of the debris fragments to the official catalog of human-made space objects. [...] The bad news is that the Zhuque-2E's breakup is the latest chapter in China's growing contribution to the space junk problem. After decades of leaving spent rocket bodies in orbit, launch operators in most countries now reserve enough fuel to steer their upper stages back to Earth for controlled reentries. Rocket bodies attributed to Russia and the former Soviet Union account for the bulk of the launch-related debris in long-lived orbits, followed by China and the United States. But the Russian and American numbers are declining or holding steady, while the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in these long-lived orbits has grown by more than 150 percent in the past five years, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell. The increase comes as China ramps up launches of its own megaconstellations designed to compete with SpaceX's Starlink. Rocket bodies are the most concerning sources of space debris because they are typically fairly large in size and mass, often with residual propellant and high-pressure gases that can trigger an explosion. There is no way to maneuver or dispose of them if left abandoned in orbit after releasing their payloads. McKnight characterized the recent breakup of the Zhuque-2E rocket as a "slight space safety issue," but the trend is not good. China's Long March 6A rocket has an especially bad track record, including two explosions that littered a higher-altitude low-Earth orbit with more than 1,000 debris fragments, where they will remain for decades or centuries. "Three of the top four breakup events in LEO are of Chinese origin, with two of these events being from Chinese (rocket body) explosions in the last four years," McKnight said.

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Researchers say mysterious, seconds-long GPS interference bursts detected across Europe appear to come from Russian EKS early-warning satellites, making this "a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space," reports Ars Technica. The signals may be tests of space-based jamming capability, short satellite communications, or something else, but experts say they raise troubling questions about whether GPS disruption could eventually be weaponized on a continental scale. From the report: The discovery came from an investigation detailed in a June 2 preprint paper by Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements at The University of Texas at Austin, along with Argyris Krizise at Stanford University in California. By sifting through public data from ground-based stations with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, they identified a pattern of high-powered interference lasting less than 10 seconds each time but simultaneously detectable by ground stations across Europe from Norway to Spain to Poland, and even reaching as far west as Greenland and Canada. By analyzing the ground station data from January 2019 to April 2026, the researchers found 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event overlapping with the GPS L1 frequency band centered on 1575.42 megahertz. That represents the main band used for signal transmission by the US-made GPS satellite constellation and GNSS constellations from other countries. Such interference patterns happened mostly on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays during business hours in Europe, Humphreys told the YouTube channel Veritasium. Because such "continental-scale" interference was simultaneously affecting GPS receivers across Europe and beyond, Humphreys and his colleagues calculated that the source had to be at least 1,200 kilometers above the Earth. [...] In the Veritasium video, Humphreys speculated that the Russians may have been testing the satellites' GPS interference capabilities only briefly on a neighboring frequency adjacent to the typical GPS band. "And then in the eventual future when there is a hot conflict, they go ahead and tune their transmitter down to the GPS band, but it's much more damaging now that it lies right on that band," he said. Incidentally, the raw data also revealed a second interference burst from the Russian satellites in a lower-frequency band used by China's BeiDou navigation system. "I can no longer say this is accidental with confidence," Humphreys told Veritasium. He also described the Russian satellites' quiet demonstration as a "massive escalation in the electronic warfare background conflict that is going on right now." Richard Bowden, division head of assured and resilient PNT at the multinational technology company GMV in Spain, wrote in a LinkedIn comment: "These signals are, without a doubt, intentional and placed on or around GNSS signals, and have the potential to disrupt legitimate use of GNSS services. But from our side at least, we can't be sure they are intentionally malicious or intended as an EW [electronic warfare] weapon."

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Italian fashion house Prada "unveiled on Sunday the inner-layer garment set to be worn by NASA astronauts heading to the moon," reports Reuters. "The body-hugging suit, created in collaboration with Houston-based space infrastructure developer Axiom Space, features ventilation tubes knitted into the garment." Expertise for developing space exploration products "can come from lots of seemingly unrelated industries," said Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space... The new product follows Prada's splashy foray into space fashion in 2024 with the unveiling of a spacesuit that is expected to be used for NASA's anticipated Artemis 4 moon landing in 2028... Other fashion and apparel companies have jumped on the space bandwagon. Under Armour has partnered with spaceflight company Virgin Galactic to create space apparel, while Columbia Sportswear has worked with space exploration company Intuitive Machines on space fabric technology. The new "Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment" was displayed on a mannequin at an event at Prada's Manhattan store.

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After 50 years of searching, astronomers say they have finally found evidence of a long-sought "wind" blowing from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. "Unless a black hole exists in a perfect vacuum, it must blow a wind somehow. And there is no perfect vacuum in the universe," team co-leader and Northwestern University researcher Mark Gorski said in a statement. "With new observations, this is the first time we've had a clean enough view to see the wind's imprint. We looked at the data and said, 'There it is. There is the thing that everybody's been looking for for 50 years.'" Space.com reports: Scientists have been aware for some time that feeding black holes launch powerful outflows of material around them, including jets and winds. Winds are caused when matter falling to the black hole is accelerated to near light-speed, generating pressure that pushes infalling material away. That has been seen with ravenously feeding black holes before, but not the barely feeding Sgr A*. Its sparse consumption of material and the fact it is obscured by the plane of the Milky Way from our vantage point have made tracing this wind difficult. Gorski's Northwestern colleague and team co-leader Lena Murchikova pointed out that the scientists were the first to detect molecular gas very close to Sgr A* feeding the supermassive black hole. That makes Sgr A* reassuringly like other supermassive black holes. "The wind is not powerful, and its direction probably wanders with time. It shows that our black hole is not unique, and our place in the universe is not unique," Murchikova added. "To observe our own black hole, we have to look through the plane of our galaxy. That means we have to peer through gas, dust and ionized structures, and you can't really see through all of that easily." While the team's results confirm that Sgr A* is extremely quiet compared to the supermassive black holes that sit in bright, turbulent regions of other galaxies called active galactic nuclei (AGN), this black hole wind is no slouch. In fact, the scientists think that it has been raging for around 20,000 years. "The majority of other galaxies spend most of their lives in a state where they are not particularly active," Murchikova said. "But we can only see them when they are in a fireworks stage. It is very attractive to study black holes when they are in the fireworks stage, but that's not actually their dominant state. "Sgr A* finally gives us a window into the life of a black hole in this quiet state." The team's research was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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Vercel customers are at risk of compromise after an attacker hopped through multiple internal systems to steal credentials and other sensitive data, the company said in a security bulletin Sunday. 

The attack, which didn’t originate at Vercel, showcases the pitfalls of interconnected cloud applications and SaaS integrations with overly privileged permissions. 

An attacker traversed third-party systems and connections left exposed by employees before it hit the San Francisco-based company that created and maintains Next.js and other popular open-source libraries. 

Researchers at Hudson Rock said the seeds of the attack were planted in February when a Context.ai employee’s computer was infected with Lumma Stealer malware after they searched for Roblox game exploits, a common vector for infostealer deployments.

Each of the companies are pinning at least some blame for the attack on the other vendor.

Context.ai on Sunday said that breach allowed the attacker to access its AWS environment and OAuth tokens for some users, including a token for a Vercel employee’s Google Workspace account. Vercel is not a Context customer, but the Vercel employee was using Context AI Office Suite and granted it full access, the artificial intelligence agent company said. 

“The attacker used that access to take over the employee’s Vercel Google Workspace account, which enabled them to gain access to some Vercel environments and environment variables that were not marked as sensitive,” Vercel said in its bulletin. 

The company said a limited number of its customers are impacted and were immediately advised to rotate credentials. Vercel, which declined to answer questions, did not specify which internal systems were accessed or fully explain how the attacker gained access to Vercel customers’ credentials. 

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said customer data stored by the company is fully encrypted, yet the attacker got further access through enumeration, or by counting and inventorying specific variables. 

“We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI,” he said in a post on X. “They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.”

A threat group identifying itself as ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack in a post on Telegram and is attempting to sell the stolen data, which they claim includes access keys, source code and databases.

The attacker “is likely an imposter attempting to use an established name to inflate their notoriety,” Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Regardless of the threat actor involved, the exposure risk is real.”

Vercel also warned that the attack on Context’s Google Workspace OAuth app “was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting its hundreds of users across many organizations.” It published indicators of compromise and encouraged customers to review activity logs, review and rotate variables containing secrets.

Context and Vercel said their separate and coordinated investigations into the attack aided by CrowdStrike and Mandiant remain underway.

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