Hubble Solves Merger Mystery From Milky Way’s Early Years - UNIVERSE

About 12 billion years ago, a dwarf galaxy known as LKH collided with a young Milky Way and merged with it. This artist’s concept portrays that collision. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope uncovered definitive evidence of this collision by studying globular star clusters.

Illustration: NASA, ESA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, grew to its current size in part by consuming smaller galaxies. Now, new data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows definitive evidence of a dwarf galaxy merging with the young Milky Way galaxy in the earliest phases of its evolution. This finding extends our knowledge of our galaxy’s history 1.8 billion years farther back in time than before.

The results published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The Milky Way today is a massive spiral galaxy home to hundreds of billions of stars. However, our galaxy wasn’t always so large; it has grown by forming new stars from its gas clouds as well as collecting stars, gas, and dark matter from other galaxies through mergers.

The most recent massive merger in our galaxy’s history took place with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, beginning over 6 billion years ago and still ongoing today. Looking back into the even more distant past, researchers learned that the Milky Way galaxy consumed another dwarf galaxy called Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus 10 billion years ago. This ancient merger greatly affected the structure of our galaxy’s disk of stars. Other, smaller mergers occurred between these two.

But our galaxy’s history doesn’t stop there. Both observations and simulations have suggested that another large merger preceded these two, though the specifics of the event have been heavily debated. Now, Hubble has uncovered definitive evidence of an earlier merger that occurred about 11.8 billion years ago, or just 2 billion years after the big bang.

“Our home is the Milky Way galaxy, but we do not know how our house was built,” said Davide Massari, lead author, Astrophysics and Space Science Observatory of Bologna in Italy. “In this paper we discover where the first significant batch of bricks came from: a dwarf galaxy that we call LKH.”

Cosmic archaeological sites

Immense astronomical surveys and precision data from spacecraft like ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) Gaia mission have been instrumental in piecing together the history of our galaxy. The farther back into our galaxy’s history that scientists attempt to look, the more difficult it becomes to tell what happened. When our galaxy was young, it was smaller and much closer in size to the galaxies it clashed with. It was also more chaotic, and it’s possible that the signs of mergers have been erased over billions of years.

It’s into this murky past that Hubble peered. Researchers used Hubble to study some of the Milky Way galaxy’s globular clusters: immense, roughly spherical collections of tens of thousands to a few million stars. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars in our galaxy, and they can act as cosmic archaeological sites that preserve stars from other galaxies the Milky Way galaxy has collected.

“Thanks to the high resolution and depth of Hubble imaging, we could measure the age and the metal content of these clusters with unprecedented precision,” said Chiara Zerbinati, study co-author, University of Bologna in Italy. “Coupled with measurements from Gaia, this made it possible to distinguish a population of globular clusters that are different from the others. These are the clusters that were born in LKH, and they tell us when that galaxy was devoured by ours, and how massive it was.”

The team analyzed Hubble observations of 39 globular clusters in the inner 20,000 light-years of our galaxy, where evidence of the most ancient mergers should be preserved. They expected this sample to contain globular clusters that formed within the young Milky Way galaxy as well as those collected from the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus dwarf galaxy about 10 billion years ago.

Using Hubble’s sensitive observations to determine each cluster’s precise age and associated metallicity — the abundance of elements heavier than helium — they determined there was a third population of globular clusters in the inner regions of our galaxy. The team found that these clusters are older than the group collected in the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus merger, but younger than those born in the Milky Way, regardless of their metal content. These  clusters, therefore, came from a separate and even earlier merger — in which the Milky Way galaxy absorbed a dwarf galaxy containing roughly 500 million times the mass of the Sun in stars, a significant fraction of our galaxy’s mass at the time. They named this dwarf galaxy Low-energy-Kraken-Heracles, or LKH, in honor of three earlier research papers that championed the idea of a merger early in our galaxy’s history.

Such a large merger so early in the Milky Way galaxy’s formation has profound implications for the evolution of our galaxy.

“Some past studies have argued that the earliest phases of our galaxy’s evolution were defined by stars born only in our galaxy,” says Massari. “Here, we have shown that stars born in external galaxies also need to be considered.”

The team plans to continue their work to unravel the history of the Milky Way galaxy by studying its globular clusters, aiming to characterize all the massive mergers that our galaxy has experienced across cosmic history.

“Hubble is observing globular clusters that have never been studied before, and this will help us characterize the merger events that are far back in time in the Milky Way galaxy’s history,” said Fernando Aguado-Agelet, co-author, University of Vigo and the University of La Laguna in Spain.

The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for more than three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA. 

Source: Hubble Solves Merger Mystery From Milky Way’s Early Years - NASA Science 

The Enzyme Trapped in a Vicious Circle: How ETH Zurich’s “Compound 10” Could Slow Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s research moves at a punishing pace. Because the disease is age-related, scientists have to work with old mice, and each experiment can take a year and a half to two years before it even yields conclusions worth building on. “It’s all a great deal slower than in cancer research,” says Ursula Quitterer, Professor of Molecular Pharmacology at ETH Zurich. Her team has spent almost twenty years chasing a single culprit and they may have finally found a way to disarm it.

An enzyme with a split personality

The story starts with GRK2, an enzyme found throughout the body that normally helps cells respond to stress and signalling. In the brain, it supports the day-to-day function of nerve cells. But GRK2 comes in two forms: a healthy, active one, and a version that cellular metabolism has switched off.

Working with brain tissue samples collected from patients in Cairo, some with dementia, some without, and with a mouse model of Alzheimer’s, Quitterer’s team found that the inactive form of GRK2 piles up in dementia brains. Worse, it doesn’t stay harmlessly out of the way. It clumps together into aggregates that latch onto mitochondria, the cell’s energy factories, and physically block their pores. Energy production drops, and the cell is thrown into a state of chronic stress.

A feedback loop that feeds itself

Here’s where it gets nasty. The stressed mitochondria push nerve cells to produce more amyloid beta, the sticky protein fragment long implicated as a driver of Alzheimer’s. Amyloid beta then stresses the cells further, and that stress generates still more inactive, aggregating GRK2. Cause becomes effect becomes cause again, a self-perpetuating cycle that keeps the disease advancing.

Breaking a loop like that means finding the right point to intervene. The team synthesized a series of candidate compounds and tested them in cell cultures and in mice. One of them, referred to simply as “compound 10,” stood out: it stopped GRK2 molecules from aggregating in the first place. With the aggregates cleared out of the way, mitochondria worked properly again, amyloid beta deposits dropped, and nerve cells stopped dying off at their usual accelerated rate. Treated mice survived longer than untreated ones.

An unexpected bonus

Compound 10’s effects weren’t confined to the brain. Treated mice also showed better heart function and slower signs of ageing overall, including, notably, fewer grey hairs in old age. It’s a reminder that GRK2 dysfunction and mitochondrial stress aren’t purely a neurological story; they touch aging biology more broadly.

Why this matters

Current Alzheimer’s medications don’t cure the disease, at best, they delay its progression by a few months. What makes compound 10 interesting isn’t just that it worked in mice, but that it works through a completely different mechanism than existing drugs, by targeting GRK2 rather than amyloid beta directly. That opens the door to combination therapies down the line. Quitterer’s team has filed a patent on the compound and is now looking for a pharmaceutical partner willing to carry it through the long process of drug development. Given how slowly this field moves, that next stage could itself take years, but the basic science, two decades in the making, is done.

Original paper: Abd Alla J, Perhal A, Fu X, Langer A, el Faramawy Y, Quitterer U. Analysis of GRK2 aggregation in the pathology of Alzheimer disease in animal models. Cell Reports Medicine, 2026. 

Source: The Enzyme Trapped in a Vicious Circle: How ETH Zurich’s “Compound 10” Could Slow Alzheimer’s 

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NASA’s LRO Images Falcon 9 Crater on Moon, Learns New Details - UNIVERSE

This is an animated before-and-after view of the crater formed after a Falcon 9 upper stage struck the Moon’s surface on Aug. 5, 2026. These images were taken between Aug. 11 and 12 by the Narrow-Angle Camera on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. These images are enlarged three times from the original, with north facing up, and they cover an area about a quarter of a mile wide.

NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines

Between Aug. 11 and 12, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured a series of images of a new crater on the Moon. The crater formed on Aug. 5, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage impacted the surface following its January 2025 launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost 1 mission.

To capture imagery of the impact, engineers tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the crater each time LRO passed about 60 miles above the Moon, traveling 1 mile per second. The orbiter circles the Moon from pole to pole every two hours, while the Moon slowly rotates underneath it. To photograph a specific spot, the spacecraft must wait until that location turns into view, which took six days in this case.

Getting the pointing right was only half the challenge; timing had to be accurate as well. If the camera snapped even 10 seconds too early or too late, the target would drift off-center by 10 miles.

An artist concept video showing NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter circling the Moon.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Because of the variety of viewing angles, scientists could see the crater under multiple lighting conditions that revealed unique features. In images where the crater rim stood out, scientists measured its 60‑foot width. Scientists also determined the crater is less than 10 feet deep based on the length of its shadow.

To capture these details, LRO used its Narrow-Angle Camera, which can spot features as small as 3 feet wide. 

Collected between Aug. 11 and 12 by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, six days after a Falcon 9 upper-stage booster impacted the Moon, these images were taken from different viewing angles, bringing out different features. The darker area that fans around the crater in the upper-left image is rougher than the surroundings, as this surface material has been altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. The brighter rays and splotch above the crater in the lower-right image is fresher material that was excavated from deeper below the surface. The pictures are arranged in the order they were taken, starting at the top left and moving toward the bottom right, with the lighting angle from the Sun gradually changing from one image to the next. Each image is enlarged two times and shows an area of the Moon about 1,000 feet wide.

NASA Goddard/Intuitive Machines

The images above show bright and dark rays stretching out from the crater. The darker streaks are made of surface dust and rocks altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. This weathered material was excavated by the collision from 1.5 feet into the lunar surface. The brighter streaks near the crater rim are made of fresh material excavated from deeper underground.

This image from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows two oval regions where the Falcon 9 upper stage was likely to impact the Moon, based on calculations by engineers with NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. Both ellipses are 2.1 miles long and 0.4 miles wide. Both predictions use the same booster-trajectory calculations, but only the blue ellipse takes into account the lunar terrain (vs. a smooth sphere). The red and blue dots show predicted impact locations, whereas the cyan dot shows the actual impact site.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Finding the impact site took global coordination among experts and hobbyists. Independent astronomers first identified the rocket’s trajectory using publicly available data. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies, which tracks natural objects that could pose hazards to Earth for the agency’s Planetary Defense program, used this opportunity to test and validate tools and techniques for predicting impacts.

Based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the center incrementally refined the trajectory until identifying the location of impact, which it provided to the Republic of Korea for their Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (Danuri) team. The team used the high-resolution LUTI camera on Danuri a few hours later to image the crater, finding the prediction was accurate to about 0.6 miles. 

After capturing images of the crater, the Danuri mission sent coordinates to NASA’s LRO team to help refine their follow-up imaging sequence. Comparing their new crater images with the pre-impact images, the LRO team updated the crater center coordinates: 19.4759°N, 266.7138°E, 511 meters elevation. 

Source: Hubble Solves Merger Mystery From Milky Way’s Early Years - NASA Science

How Breast Tumors Hijack the Immune System to Grow Their Own Nerve Supply

Doctors have known for years that many solid tumors are threaded through with nerves, but exactly how those nerves get there has stayed murky. A new study from the University of Oklahoma, published in Cell Death & Differentiation, finally maps out the mechanism, at least for one especially aggressive cancer, and the answer involves an unexpected middleman: the tumor’s own immune cells.

Recruiting the Wrong Kind of Help

The team, led by Maureen Cox at the OU College of Medicine, focused on triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), a form of the disease that lacks the three most common receptor targets used in other breast cancer treatments, which makes it notoriously hard to treat. They found that TNBC tumors recruit macrophages, the immune cells normally responsible for clearing infection and helping wounds heal, into the tumor microenvironment.

Once inside, those macrophages start behaving very differently than they would at, say, a cut on your skin. They release brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein best known for helping neurons grow and form new connections inside the brain. In the tumor, BDNF acts as a chemical beacon, drawing nearby peripheral nerves inward, a process the researchers call axonogenesis. The nerves that grow into the tumor go on to support its growth and help it resist treatment.

“Macrophages are the critical source for drawing nerves into the tumor,” said Cox. “Although macrophages typically play a positive role in the body, they are facilitating a negative function in this scenario of breast cancer.”

Testing the Mechanism in Mice

To confirm macrophages were actually driving this process, rather than just being present alongside it, the researchers ran a set of causal experiments in mice. Tumors couldn’t grow when immune-derived BDNF was absent, and depleting macrophages from the tumor microenvironment compromised nerve infiltration. When the team then reintroduced normal macrophages into mice that otherwise lacked immune-derived BDNF, both tumor growth and nerve infiltration were restored, evidence that macrophages are both necessary and sufficient for this process.

The team then tested an intervention: a drug that blocks BDNF signaling. When nerves were prevented from infiltrating the tumor, tumor growth was significantly reduced. Notably, the drug used is already on the market for other conditions, which could shorten the path to clinical testing if the approach holds up in further research.

Does This Hold Up in People?

Mouse models are useful, but they don’t always predict what happens in human disease. So Cox’s team went back and analyzed data from actual triple-negative breast cancer patients. Tumors with higher levels of both macrophages and BDNF were associated with poorer survival outcomes, a pattern consistent with what the mouse experiments would predict, and a hint that the mechanism identified in the lab may be operating in real patients too.

Why Target the Nerves at All?

The strategic logic here is interesting: instead of attacking cancer cells directly, this approach targets the supporting cast around them. Cox’s working hypothesis is that the nerves growing into these tumors are immunosuppressive, meaning they may be actively dampening the body’s own anti-tumor immune response. If that’s true, stopping nerve infiltration in the first place could free up the immune system to do more of the work itself.

There’s still more to untangle. Some evidence suggests the nerves that infiltrate tumors also encourage new blood vessel growth, feeding the tumor oxygen and nutrients, while other research suggests tumor cells may use nerves as literal escape routes, crawling along them to spread to other parts of the body. Cox’s next steps include digging further into exactly how these nerves promote tumor growth, and testing the same BDNF-blocking approach in high-grade ovarian cancer, another notoriously difficult cancer to treat.

“Ultimately, we want to turn the anti-tumor immunity back on in cancer patients so their own immune systems can reject the tumors,” Cox said.

Original paper: Abbadi, J., Velayutham, R., Annan, A. C., et al. (2026). Macrophage-secreted brain-derived neurotrophic factor promotes tumor growth in triple-negative breast cancer by inducing axonogenesis. Cell Death & Differentiation. 

Source: How Breast Tumors Hijack the Immune System to Grow Their Own Nerve Supply 

When zombie credit cards attack—a loophole that can reanimate expired cards - Consumer & Gadgets - Security

The loophole that enables an expired credit card to be revived is based on a relay system using software that can be run on two standard smartphones and the physical card. The researchers found it worked across a variety of point-of-sale terminals. Credit: Raja Hasnain Anwar, UMass Amherst

A new security loophole discovered by researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst can bring some expired credit cards back to life. If stolen, these "zombie credit cards" could leave cardholders vulnerable to fraudulent charges, according to the new study, presented at the conference USENIX Security 2026.

The researchers discovered that thieves "can still use the victim's expired credit card, despite the victim receiving another card," says Taqi Raza, assistant professor in the Riccio College of Engineering at UMass Amherst.

This loophole exists because credit card accounts do not expire with the physical card. For instance, if you make a return, your account will be refunded, even if the purchasing credit card has expired. But this made Raza wonder: "If the card can get a refund, can the card make a payment?"

For some credit cards, the answer is yes. Raza and his research team devised a system using two off-the-shelf smartphones and basic emulator software to fool an in-store card reader, also known as a point-of-sale (POS) terminal, into thinking a card was active.

How the relay attack works

Using the same technology that enables tap-to-pay transactions (near-field communications, or NFC), the first phone is used to activate the credit card. It tells the card: A purchase is trying to be made, so send over the cardholder data and payment application. This includes the past-due expiration date. 

However, using a "man-in-the-middle" Wi-Fi-based relay system, the second phone takes the credit card information but rewrites the expiration date. Here is a video of the relay system in action.

Raja Hasnain Anwar, the lead author of the study and doctoral candidate with the Khwarizmi Lab at UMass Amherst, notes that this attack is particularly dangerous because thieves do not need to determine the actual expiration date of a replacement card; any arbitrary expiration date in the future is sufficient to successfully make a charge.

"The expiration date printed and stored on the card is the only way for the POS to know whether the card is active or expired," he says. "Yet it is not cryptographically protected. So we can easily modify it to fool the POS."

This second phone is then tapped to the card reader. To an outside observer, the behavior would look the same as using any kind of digital wallet.

Where the checks break down

"Now, you're expecting the bank should notice it," says Raza. But not all banks verify the terminal-read expiration date against authenticated data. If other security measures are not in place to recheck card lifecycle status, the fraudulent transaction will be successful.

In fact, credit cards have another expiration date in addition to the one printed on your card: a date embedded in the security key that encrypts the transaction between the card and the bank, referred to as a digital certificate. This digital certificate is checked first, enabling the card to "talk" to the POS.

"What we found is that the expiration date for the digital certificate for the security key is longer than the expiration date of return on the card," says Raza, making this date an ineffective check of the card's actual expiration status.

The researchers demonstrated that this loophole works both in the lab and in the wild—at local dining facilities and grocery stores. However, not all credit cards were equally affected by this loophole, and digital wallets included additional security measures that made them more resilient against this particular kind of attack.

However, separate research from Raza's lab has found digital wallets are susceptible to other types of exploitation.

A fragmented payment system

The root cause of such issues lies in how payment cards and systems have evolved over time. As we move to smarter but distributed systems, decisions are divided between the card chip, POS terminal, payment networks (e.g., Visa, Mastercard), and the bank. Discrepancies often arise, such as the ability to fool a terminal with a limited view of card expiration when the bank relies on that terminal's verification.

"With the rise of AI, it is becoming increasingly easy for attackers to spot these discrepancies and devise exploits, effectively putting millions of credit cards at risk," says Anwar.

How to dispose of old cards

While the major card companies have been notified of their discovery, Raza says consumers should still abide by safe credit card practices.

"The attack exploits a documented misconception—expired cards are widely assumed inert, so cardholders discard them carelessly," says Raza. "Always discard your expired card, no matter what. Even if you permanently close your credit card, still monitor transactions on the closed account."

Start by demagnetizing the card by slowly running a magnet along the magnetic strip. Next, destroy the embedded chip either with a hammer or scissors. Cut apart your card or put it through a paper shredder, ensuring you cut through any raised letters or numbers. Finally, separate the credit card pieces into different trash cans. For metal cards, contact your company's customer service department. Fraudulent charges should be immediately reported to your bank. 

Provided by University of Massachusetts Amherst 

by Julia Westbrook, University of Massachusetts Amherst

edited by Robert Egan 

Source: When zombie credit cards attack—a loophole that can reanimate expired cards

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