Scientists May Have Spotted Light from the First Stars

Welcome to a special holiday edition of the Abstract! It’s been an incredible year for science, from breakthroughs in life-saving organ transplants to the , the third known interstellar object. But we can’t cover everything, so to cap off 2025 I’m pulling together a grab-bag of my favorite studies from the past year that fell through the cracks. discovery of 3I ATLAS First, a bitter feud that has divided dinosaur lovers for decades finally came to an end in 2025, proving at last that tyrannosaurs come in size small. Then: ye olde American cats, the search for the very first stars, and humanity’s chillest invention. As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter . the BeX Files The Vindication of Nanotyrannus For decades, a tiny tyrannosaur has inspired big debates. The remains of this dinosaur were initially judged to be a juvenile tyrannosaur, until a team in the 1980s suggested they might belong to a whole new species of pint-sized predator called Nanotyrannus-sort of like a T. rex shrunk down to the size of a draft horse. This argument has raged ever since, causing bad blood between colleagues and inspiring a longstanding quest to reveal this dinosaur's true identity. Now, in the closing months of 2025, peace has at last been brokered in these bone wars, according to a pair of new studies that cement Nanotyrannus as a distinct lineage of predators that coexisted alongside heavyweight cousins like T. rex . “Nanotyrannus has become a hot-button issue, and the debate has often been acrimonious,” said researchers led by Lindsay Zanno of North Carolina State University in an October study . “Over the past two decades, consensus among theropod specialists has aligned in favor of Nanotyrannus lancensi s representing a juvenile morph of Tyrannosaurus rex .” The only evidence that could shatter this consensus would be “a skeletally mature specimen diagnosable” as Nanotyrannus, the team continued. Enter: “Bloody Mary,” the nickname for a near-complete tyrannosaur skeleton found unearthed in Montana in 2006. After a scrupulous new look at the specimen, Zanno's team concludes that it demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt that Nanotyrannus is a valid taxon.” These results were reinforced by another study earlier this month that argues that Nanotyrannus was “a distinct taxon...that was roughly coeval with Tyrannosaurus rex and is minimally diagnosable by its diminutive body size,” according to researchers led by Christopher Griffin of Princeton University. Nanotyrannus supports the hypothesis that dinosaurs may have been flourishing in diversity at the end of the Cretaceous era-right before they got punched by a space rock. In addition to confirming the existence of a new tyrannosaur, the new studies “prompts a critical reevaluation of decades of scholarship on Earth’s most famous extinct organism,” meaning Tyrannosaurus rex , said Zanno’s team. In other words, tyrannosaurs of all sizes were running around together at the end of the Cretaceous period. While T. rex will always reign...

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