Fresh Findings Strengthen the Case for Dark Energy's Evolution

By Alan Boyle March 20, 2025
Long-exposure photo of Mayall Telescope with star trails
It’s looking more and more as if dark energy, the mysterious factor that scientists say is behind the accelerating expansion of the universe, isn’t as constant as they once thought. The latest findings from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, don’t quite yet come up to the level of a confirmed discovery, but they’re leading scientists to rethink their views on the evolution of the universe — and how it might end.
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How Warp Drives Don't Break Relativity

By Paul Sutter March 20, 2025
Somehow, we all know how a warp drive works. You're in your spaceship and you need to get to another star. So you press a button or flip a switch or pull a lever and your ship just goes fast. Like really fast. Faster than the speed of light. Fast enough that you can get to your next destination by the end of the next commercial break.
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JWST Cycle 4 Spotlight, Part 4: Stellar Populations and the Interstellar Medium

By Matthew Williams March 20, 2025
Welcome back to our five-part examination of Webb's Cycle 4 General Observations program. In the first and second installments, we examined how some of Webb's 8,500 hours of prime observing time this cycle will be dedicated to exoplanet characterization, the study of galaxies at "Cosmic Dawn," and the period known as "Cosmic Noon." Today, we'll look at programs that will leverage Webb's unique abilities to study stellar populations and the interstellar medium in galaxies.
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The Extremely Large Telescope Could Sense the Hints of Life at Proxima Centauri in Just 10 Hours

By Brian Koberlein March 20, 2025
The Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), currently under construction in northern Chile, will give us a better view of the Milky Way than any ground-based telescope before it. It's difficult to overstate how transformative it will be. The ELT's primary mirror array will have an effective diameter of 39 meters. It will gather more light than previous telescopes by an order of magnitude, and it will give us images 16 times sharper than the Hubble Space Telescope. It's scheduled to come online in 2028, and the results could start flooding in literally overnight, as a recent study shows.
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Bridging the Gap Between the Cosmic Microwave Background and the First Galaxies

By Carolyn Collins Petersen March 20, 2025
One of the Holy Grails in cosmology is a look back at the earliest epochs of cosmic history. Unfortunately, the Universe's first few hundred thousand years are shrouded in an impenetrable fog. So far, nobody's been able to see past it to the Big Bang. As it turns out, astronomers are chipping away at that cosmic fog by using data from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) in Chile.
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A Dyson Swarm Made of Solar Panels Would Make Earth Uninhabitable

By Mark Thompson March 19, 2025
As civilisations become more and more advanced, their power needs also increase. It’s likely that an advanced civilisation might need so much power that they enclose their host star in solar energy collecting satellites. These Dyson Swarms will trap heat so any planets within the sphere are likely to experience a temperature increase. A new paper explores this and concludes that a complete Dyson swarm outside the orbit of the Earth would raise our temperature by 140 K!
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A Simulated Universe Works Better When Dark Energy Changes Over Time

By Evan Gough March 19, 2025
Dark Energy is a mystery so daunting that it stretches and strains our most robust theories. The Universe is expanding, driven by the unknown force that we've named Dark Energy. Dark Energy is also accelerating the rate of expansion. If scientists could figure out why, it would open up a whole new avenue of understanding.
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The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope Gives Glimpses of its Deep Field

By Evan Gough March 19, 2025
The ESA's Euclid Space Telescope has already wowed us with some fantastic images. After launching in July 2023, the telescope delivered some stunning first images of the Perseus Cluster, the Horsehead Nebula, and other astronomical objects. Now, the telescope has released its first images of its three Deep Fields.
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Webb Directly Observers Giant Planets, Sensing Carbon Dioxide in their Atmospheres

By Mark Thompson March 19, 2025
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has achieved groundbreaking discoveries in the field of exoplanet studies. In particular, it has made strides in the analysis of their atmospheres by studying light from the parent star as it travels through the gas surrounding the planets. JWST has recently bucked the trend and observed a some gas giant planets in the system HR 8799 and detected the presence of carbon dioxide in their atmospheres, suggesting there are similarities between the formation of this system and our own.
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