Did a star blow up and hit Earth "10 million years" ago?

 

Image courtesy of muratart/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

According to evolution, did a supernova blow up some 10 millions years ago?

There are signs deep beneath the Pacific Ocean that an exploding star once sent cosmic rays blasting out towards Earth, and now we have an idea of which stars may be to blame have sent cosmic rays hurtling at Earth, ang star may have sent cosmic shrapnel flying to hit Earth 10 million years ago, and astronomers have now in arrowed down the most likely culprits behind this interstellar incident.

Earlier this year, Dominik Koll at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany and his colleagues discovered a spike of radioactive beryllium buried in metallic rocks 5 kilometres beneath the Pacific Ocean, which they dated to just over 10 million years old. This form of beryllium is produced only when cosmic rays smash into Earth’s atmosphere, so Koll and his team theorised that one possible cause could be from a supernova that exploded long ago.

Source: 

Alex Wilkins 2025 Did a star blow up and hit Earth 10 million years ago? | New Scientist 26 September 

We finally found the hot wind coming out of our black hole

 

Molecular gas and X-ray emission around Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s black hole. Image courtesy of Mark D. Gorski et al. (CC BY 4.0)

Joel Kontinen

Some scientists have found a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy:

We have found hot wind blasting out from our galaxy’s supermassive black hole for the first time, which could help us understand its mysterious inactivity.

Compared to many other supermassive black holes that lie at the centres of galaxies, our black hole, called Sagittarius A* or Sgr A*, is relatively quiet. It doesn’t shoot out vast, powerful jets like black holes in many other galaxies do, which are so bright we can spot them even in the earliest moments of the universe. But all supermassive black holes, including Sgr A*, are thought to produce winds – wafts of hot gas blasted out from near the black hole’s event horizon, where gas is swirling and violently heating up.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Sagittarius A*: We finally found the hot wind coming out of our black hole | New Scientist 24 September

Dinosaur found with a crocodile in its jaws named as new species

 

Artist’s reconstruction of dinosaur Joaquinraptor casali. Image courtesy of Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Joel Kontinen

Crocodiles are living fossils that are with us today. The dinosaur that nibbled it lived some 66 million years ago, before the extinction of the dinosaurs. That is what some evolutionists say.

A dinosaur that may have been one of the fiercest of the Cretaceous period has been excavated in South America – with an extinct crocodile’s leg in its jaws.

The remains of the dinosaur, named Joaquinraptor casali – a species of megaraptor that is new to science – were discovered in the headwaters of the Rio Chico river in Patagonia, Argentina, in 2019.

Now, Lucio Ibiricu at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council in Chubut, Argentina, and his colleagues have studied the fossil in detail, and were surprised by what they found in the mouth of the near-complete skull.

“The humerus, or legbone, of an extinct crocodile relative was between the jaws of Joaquinraptor and directly in contact with the teeth,” says Ibiricu. “This discovery is suggesting, though not proving, that the new megaraptor may have been eating the crocodyliform [the clade that modern crocodiles belong to] when it died.”

The researchers are still studying the crocodile’s humerus to determine how big it may have been, but preliminary work suggests it was large, says Ibiricu.

In addition to recovering most of the dinosaur’s skull, the team also excavated its vertebrae, feet, two claws, and an arm, leg and hand. The thumb claw, which is the size of a human forearm, would have been able to tear open the soft tissue of its prey, says Ibiricu.

Other megaraptoran fossils have been found in Asia, Australia and elsewhere in South America, but J. casali is the first to be found by scientists that lived so close to the end of the Cretaceous period and, also, one of the most complete.

The team determined the dinosaur would have been at least 19 years old when it died, based on the microstructure of its tibia. It also would have been about 7 metres long and weighed at least a tonne.

While Tyrannosaurus rex would have been larger and had a bigger head, J. casali had larger, more muscular arms, says Ibiricu. But both would probably have been the apex predators in their respective environments, he says.

 Source:

James Woodford 2025 Dinosaur found with a crocodile in its jaws named as new species | New Scientist 23 September 

Venus has lava tubes, and they're weird

 

Image courtesy of JSC/NASA

Joel Kontinen

Could massive underground tunnels exist on Venus?  Yes, according to recent studies.

It has been suggested that lava tubes - underground tunnels carved out by molten rock - might be on Venus, and now we have direct evidence that this is the case.

We now know for sure that massive underground tunnels, carved by lava, exist on Venus – and they are surprisingly wide and different from those on any other planet.

It is uncontroversial that lava tubes – underground tunnels carved out by molten rock – exist on Earth, the moon and Mars. Smaller planets with low gravity tend to form more cavernous tubes, in part because the rock walls are less likely to collapse with weaker gravity. On the moon, for instance, the tubes are so large that scientists have proposed using them as live-in shelters for astronauts, providing shielding from the harsh solar wind.

 Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Venus has lava tubes, and they're weird | New Scientist 22 September 

30,000-year-old toolkit shows what ancient hunter carried in a pouch

 

Image courtesy of Martin Novák

What did ancient hunters carry in their pouch? Nothing extraordinary, but the date seemed to be all wrong.

A set of 29 stone tools, including blades and points for hunting, butchering and cutting wood, were found neatly arranged as if carried in a leather pouch that decayed

A set of stone tools found in the Czech Republic appears to be the personal toolkit of a hunter-gatherer who lived about 30,000 years ago. The 29 artefacts, which include blades and points meant for hunting, skinning, basic butchering and cutting wood, offer a rare glimpse into the daily lives of ancient hunters, says Dominik Chlachula at the Czech Academy of Sciences in Brno.

In 2009, a village road collapsed in the Pavlovské vrchy mountains in the south-east of the country, opening up abandoned cellars that archaeologists began studying. In 2021, they found a deeper level of the site, called Milovice IV, containing charcoal dated to between 29,550 and 30,250 years ago. There, researchers found horse and reindeer bones, and – more recently – a bundle of stone tools, still positioned as if they had been wrapped in a leather pouch that had long since decayed.

 Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2025 30,000-year-old toolkit shows what ancient hunter carried in a pouch | New Scientist 16 September 

Mars once had an atmosphere that was thicker than Earth's today

 

Modern Mars barely has an atmosphere. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL/USGS

Joel Kontinen

According to some evolutionists, Mars had an atmosphere that was thicker than Earth’s  atmosphere. In their view, some 4 million years after the origin of the solar system Mars was already almost complete.

Mars’s atmosphere may have once been hundreds of times thicker than it is today, acting as a blanket that protected it from frequent asteroids that ravaged other planets

At this time, the planets existed in a vast ball of hot gas and dust that swirled around the young sun, called the solar nebula, which some planets would have temporarily absorbed into their atmospheres. However, once the solar nebula receded, it was thought that the planets would quickly have lost this gas, reducing the densities of their atmospheres.

Source:

Alex Wilkins 2025 Mars once had an atmosphere that was thicker than Earth's today | New Scientist 15 September 

Early Neanderthals hunted ibex on steep mountain slopes

 

Ibex can move nimbly across steep mountain slopes. Image courtesy of Serge Goujon/Shutterstock

Joel Kontinen

Ancient remains from a cave in Serbia show that Neanderthals were hunting mountain goats 300,000 years ago, adding to evidence of their ability to adapt to different environments

Did the early Neanderthals hunt Ibex sheep  many years ago? According to research, they did that,  but according to the Bible, they were descendants of Adam and Noah as secular scientists do not believe in Noah’s Flood. That also minimize the dates of the global flood.

Nearly 300,000 years ago, Neanderthals had already figured out how to hunt mountain goats along vertical cliffs and process them in well-organised camps.

Known for ambushing large animals in Western Europe’s flat meadows and forests, it seems Neanderthals adapted to the hills of Eastern Europe by adding nimble ibex to their hunting regime. The early humans skinned and butchered the animals in a nearby cave before roasting their bones for marrow and grease, showing impressive skill and knowledge far earlier than expected, says Stefan Milošević at the University of Belgrade in Serbia.

Source:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre 2025 Early Neanderthals hunted ibex on steep mountain slopes | New Scientist 11 September