Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about 27% of the Universe’s total energy content. We cannot see it directly, only infer its presence through the gravity it exerts. For decades, cosmologists have described dark matter haloes as the invisible scaffolding within which galaxies form and live. Every galaxy, including our own […]
When we look at the night sky, we see a scattered collection of stars and galaxies, but to an astrophysicist, these are merely the glowing foam on the crest of a much deeper, invisible ocean. The vast majority of the matter in our universe is dark matter, a substance that does not emit, absorb, or […]
Author: Enrique Gaztañaga, Professor at Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (University of Portsmouth) Wormholes are often imagined as tunnels through space or time — shortcuts across the universe. But this image rests on a misunderstanding of work by physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. In 1935, while studying the behaviour of particles in regions of […]
A Univerity of Sydney Ph.D. student has recreated a tiny piece of the universe inside a bottle in her laboratory, producing cosmic dust from scratch. The results shed new light on how the chemical building blocks of life may have formed long before Earth existed. Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate in materials and plasma physics […]
Scientists have created the highest resolution map of the dark matter that threads through the universe—showing its influence on the formation of stars, galaxies and planets. The findings, using new data from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) tells us more about how this invisible substance helped pull ordinary matter into galaxies like the Milky […]
One of the most striking discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope, together with earlier observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, is that many galaxies in the young universe look very different from those we see around us today. Instead of graceful spiral disks or rounded ellipses, a large fraction of galaxies observed when […]
Author: Mara Johnson-Groh, Simmons Foundation In 2023, astronomers detected a huge collision. Two unprecedentedly massive black holes had crashed an estimated 7 billion light-years away. The enormous masses and extreme spins of the black holes puzzled astronomers. Black holes like these were not supposed to exist. Now, astronomers with the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational […]
The mystery of dark matter remains one of the most profound puzzles in modern astrophysics. We know it outweighs ordinary matter by a factor of five, yet it neither shines nor absorbs light. Its presence is betrayed only by the pull of gravity, shaping galaxies and bending light from more distant objects. For decades, scientists […]
We’re often told it is “unscientific” or “meaningless” to ask what happened before the Big Bang. But a new paper by cosmologist Eugene Lim, of King’s College London, UK, and astrophysicists Katy Clough, of Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Josu Aurrekoetxea, at Oxford University, UK, proposes a way forward: using complex computer simulations […]
Astronomers have discovered potentially the most massive black hole ever detected. The cosmic behemoth is close to the theoretical upper limit of what is possible in the universe and is 10,000 times heavier than the black hole at the centre of our own Milky Way galaxy. It exists in one of the most massive galaxies […]