It has never been detected, only speculated. But scientists estimate that up to 85% of the matter in the universe could be made of what’s called dark matter. Scientists cannot define dark matter with any certainty, but that hasn’t stopped the search for it. Our largest and newest space-based telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope … Read more
From the smallest bacterium to the greatest galaxy, death looms on the horizon; even if, in cosmic terms, the time scales are too large for us to truly comprehend. Eventually, even the Universe itself should come to an end – when the last light winks out, and the cold, dense lumps of dead stars are … Read more
From the smallest bacterium to the greatest galaxy, death looms on the horizon; even if, in cosmic terms, the time scales are too large for us to truly comprehend. Eventually, even the Universe itself should come to an end – when the last light winks out, and the cold, dense lumps of dead stars are … Read more
It’s a record that has been broken multiple times over the past two years alone, and one that we expect to see broken again soon. Astronomers using the newly operational James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have announced the discovery of what appears to be the most distant galaxy yet. If this sounds familiar, it’s already … Read more
What little we know of dark matter comes from calculations based on the glow of surrounding galaxies. The further away we look, however, the dimmer that starlight gets, making it harder to see the subtle influence of this most mysterious of forces. Now a collaboration between astronomers from Japan and the US has found a … Read more
The aftermath of an epic collision involving at least one neutron star has been captured for the first time in the millimeter range of radio frequency wavelengths. The result is a recording of a short-duration gamma-ray burst – one of the most energetic ever observed, and one of the brightest lingering afterglows we’ve ever seen. … Read more
Grab any physics textbook and you’ll find formula after formula describing how things wobble, fly, swerve and stop. The formulas describe actions we can observe, but behind each could be sets of factors that aren’t immediately obvious. Now, a new AI program developed by researchers at Columbia University has seemingly discovered its own alternative physics. … Read more
There’s something very odd about this image from the Hubble Space Telescope. If you look closely, you can see two almost-mirror image, orange-colored galaxies, seemingly connected by a long filament. Fascinatingly, that’s not two galaxies at all, but one, named SGAS J143845+145407. It just appears to be two, thanks to the way the gravity of … Read more
Just a week after its first images were shown to the world, the James Webb Space Telescope may have found a galaxy that existed 13.5 billion years ago, a scientist who analyzed the data said Wednesday. Known as GLASS-z13, the galaxy dates back to 300 million years after the Big Bang, about 100 million years … Read more
Some of the brightest, most energetic objects in the Universe are the mystery source of high-energy cosmic neutrinos, new research has confirmed. A comprehensive analysis has pretty conclusively linked galaxies hosting blazing nuclei known as blazars with these enigmatic particles. It’s a result that provides a really unexpected solution to a problem that has had … Read more