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 […]
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 […]
There’s always a touch of melancholy when a chapter that has absorbed years of work comes to an end. In the case of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), those years amount to nearly 20—and now the telescope has completed its mission. Yet some endings are also important beginnings, opening new paths for the entire scientific […]
Author: Florian Neukart, Assistant professor of Physics, Leiden University For more than a century, physics has been built on two great theories. Einstein’s general relativity explains gravity as the bending of space and time. Quantum mechanics governs the world of particles and fields. Both work brilliantly in their own domains. But put them together and […]
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 […]
The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe – a singular moment when space, time and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our universe emerged from something else – something more familiar and radical at the same time? In a […]
The universe is decaying much faster than thought. This is shown by calculations of three scientists on the so-called Hawking radiation. They calculate that the last stellar remnants take about 1078 years to perish. That is much shorter than the previously postulated 101100 years. The research by black hole expert Heino Falcke, quantum physicist Michael […]
A new study suggests the universe may rotate—just extremely slowly. The finding could help solve one of astronomy’s biggest puzzles. Current models say the universe expands evenly in all directions, with no sign of rotation. This idea fits most of what astronomers observe. But it doesn’t explain the so-called Hubble tension—a long-standing disagreement between two […]