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Matter and antimatter behave the same way under the influence of gravity, a new study found, leaving scientists no wiser as to what makes the two different. Antimatter is the puzzling stuff created during the Big Bang together with normal matter. It is virtually normal matter’s mirror — exactly the same, only with the opposite … Read more
“The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the Universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning.” So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. … Read more
Astronomers have found yet another ghostly galaxy that appears to be devoid of dark matter. Researchers have reported several such sightings over the past few years, each time flagging so-called ultradiffuse galaxies that can be as large as the Milky Way but relatively bereft of stars. This latest object, known as AGC 114905, is similar … Read more
The James Webb Space Telescope will rest in space at Lagrange Point 2, a spot directly behind Earth from the sun’s perspective. There, the instrument will make powerful observations of far-off celestial bodies; the telescope’s infrared view will be able to penetrate interstellar dust. (Image credit: Northrop Grumman) The James Webb Space Telescope could help … Read more
The nature and origin of black holes and their role in the evolution of the universe still puzzles scientists. Now, a new study suggests that the existence of black holes from the earliest moments of the universe could explain more than one astronomical mystery. The new study suggests that small primordial black holes filled the … Read more
The Universe is too heavy. According to our measurements of the normal matter in the Universe, there’s not nearly enough of it to account for the strength of the gravitational effects we can see. Whatever is making up the rest of the mass is nothing we can detect directly, and the quest to figure … Read more
Scientists have spotted a long hypothesized, never-seen-before state of matter in the laboratory for the first time. By firing lasers at an ultracold lattice of rubidium atoms, scientists have prodded the atoms into a messy soup of quantum uncertainty known as a quantum spin liquid. The atoms in this quantum magnetic soup quickly became connected, … Read more
In a feat of scientific repurposing, a team of physicists has used a detector designed to sense gravitational waves—fleeting ripples in space and time set off by, for example, the collisions of two black holes—to search for something even more elusive, dark matter. Although researchers found no sign of the particular hypothetical particles they sought, … Read more
A new discovery has deepened the mystery of galaxies without dark matter. In a galaxy named AGC 114905, 250 million light-years away, astronomers could find no trace of the mysterious stuff, even after 40 hours of detailed observation and subsequent analysis. The result, to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical … Read more