Water is all around us, yet its surface layer—home to chemical reactions that shape life on Earth—is surprisingly hard to study. Experiments at SLAC's X-ray laser are bringing it into focus.

If you’ve been following astronomy headlines, you might have noticed a curious new arrival to the neighborhood: Comet 3I/ATLAS. It’s not just another “regular” comet from the outer solar system–this one’s an interstellar visitor, meaning it was born around another star entirely.

For the first time, scientists have detected two black hole mergers with spins so unusual they may reveal a new generation of cosmic collisions. The twin discoveries, labeled GW241011 and GW241110, were announced by the international LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA collaborations—teams that have been tuning their instruments to detect the faintest ripples in space and time. Each signal, lasting less than a second, was a final whisper from black holes that collided billions of years ago.