Saturday, March 7, 2026

Paleontologists have discovered the oldest known complete bony fish fossil, Eosteus chongqingensis, dating back 436 million years to the early Silurian period, in Chongqing, China, along with new fossils of Megamastax amblyodus—the largest known Silurian vertebrate—revealing key insights into early vertebrate evolution.^[1]

The European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft has captured the first detailed images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS using its JANUS science camera, revealing a bright coma, sweeping tail, and jets of material—marking only the third known interstellar object to pass through our solar system.^[2]

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified the most distant jellyfish galaxy ever observed, appearing as it was 8.5 billion years ago and streaming tentacle-like trails of gas and newborn stars as it speeds through a dense galaxy cluster.^[3]

Infrared observations from the James Webb Space Telescope have revealed previously unobserved temperature structures and dramatic density variations in Jupiter's northern auroral footprints, particularly those linked to its moons Io and Europa.^[4]

South Korea has implemented a new law banning students from using smartphones during class in elementary, middle, and high schools, with exceptions for educational purposes and emergencies approved by school officials.^[5]

The ALMA radio telescope has produced the largest-ever image of the Milky Way's core, revealing a complex network of cold gas filaments spanning 650 light-years around the galaxy's central black hole and detecting dozens of molecules that could shed light on extreme star formation processes.^[6]

Japan's first HTV-X cargo spacecraft departed the International Space Station on March 6 after a four-month stay, delivering about 12,000 pounds of supplies; it will now spend three months as a free-flying scientific platform conducting experiments before reentering Earth's atmosphere.^[7]

Space station developer Vast has raised $500 million in new funding to advance its Haven commercial space station program, with plans to launch the single-module Haven-1 station in 2027 and a multi-module successor designed to replace the International Space Station by 2030.^[8]

Astronomers have discovered that the Milky Way sits within a giant, flat cosmic sheet of dark matter stretching tens of millions of light-years, solving a decades-old mystery about why most nearby galaxies move away from us rather than being drawn in by our galaxy's gravity.^[9]

The Vera Rubin Observatory, equipped with a 3.2-gigapixel camera, is now scanning the night sky and sending up to seven million nightly alerts to astronomers worldwide about transient events like supernovae, gravitational lenses, and near-Earth objects ahead of its decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time.^[10]