Cosmology
New Horizons Measures the Background Light of the Universe
Think about background radiation and most people immediately think of the cosmic background radiation and stories of pigeon excrement during…
Galaxies Filled With Old Stars Seen Shortly After the Big Bang
How can young galaxies in the early Universe have ancient stars? That's the question a team of astronomers set out…
Webb Sees Globular Clusters Forming in the Early Universe
Picture the Universe's ancient beginnings. In the vast darkness, light was emitted from a particular galaxy only 460 million years…
Baby Stars are Swarming Around the Galactic Center
The vicinity of Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center, is hyperactive. Stars, gas,…
Rotation Curves of Galaxies Stay Flat Indefinitely
In his classic book On the Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher Thomas Kuhn posited that, for a new scientific…
New Simulation Explains how Supermassive Black Holes Grew so Quickly
One of the main scientific objectives of next-generation observatories (like the James Webb Space Telescope) has been to observe the…
If Gravity Can Exist Without Mass, That Could Explain Dark Matter
Dark Matter is Nature's poltergeist. We can see its effects, but we can't see it, and we don't know what…
Primordial Black Holes Can Only Explain a Fraction of Dark Matter
What is Dark Matter? That question is prominent in discussions about the nature of the Universe. There are many proposed…
The JWST is Re-Writing Astronomy Textbooks
When the James Webb Space Telescope was launched at the end of 2021, we expected stunning images and illuminating scientific…
Some Clever Ways to Search for Primordial Black Holes
Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) have recently received much attention in the physics community. One of the primary reasons is the…