Dark energy—the hypothetical force accelerating our universe’s expansion—sometimes raises more questions than it answers. A new study, however, presents surprising evidence that black holes may be an incubator for dark energy—suggesting that the force may be less constant than we believed. In a paper published August 21 in Physical Review Letters, researchers used data from […]
Astronomers Discover the Earliest Black Hole Ever Confirmed
An international team of astronomers has identified the earliest black hole ever confirmed, an ancient behemoth that existed just 500 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery could offer new clues to a mysterious class of ancient galaxies that confounded prevailing theories of cosmology. In a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, […]
Radical New Theory Rewrites the Story of the Earliest Universe
Following the Big Bang, our universe expanded at an exponential rate. According to this theory, known as cosmic inflation, the explosive growth produced tiny quantum fluctuations that later evolved into galaxies. Cosmic inflation neatly explains how our universe got so large and mostly homogenous, and that’s why it’s remained a strong theory in cosmology for […]
Dozens of ‘Ghost Galaxies’ Are Orbiting the Milky Way, Astronomers Suspect
The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) theory suggests that most galaxies are low-mass dwarf galaxies, many of which orbit larger galaxies like the Milky Way. More broadly, the LCDM represents our best understanding of how the universe works. But there’s a problem. According to the theory, the Milky Way should have significantly more satellite galaxies […]
Astronomers Detect a Black Hole Merger That’s So Massive It Shouldn’t Exist
Gravitational waves—ripples in space-time caused by violent cosmic events—travel at the speed of light in every direction, eventually fading out like ripples in water. But some events are so destructive and extreme that they create disturbances in spacetime more like powerful waves than small ripples, with enough energy to reach our own detectors here on […]
This Weird Pyramid Always Lands on the Same Face, Confirming 40-Year-Old Theory
“Bille” is the first-ever monostable tetrahedron, or a pyramid-like shape with four triangular faces that has one stable resting position. What this means is that Bille, no matter how you throw it and how it lands, will flip back on exactly the same side every single time. In a recent preprint submitted to arXiv, mathematicians […]
How Webb Telescope’s ‘Little Red Dots’ Nearly Broke Cosmology—and Helped Fix It
About a year after launching into orbit around the Sun, the James Webb Space Telescope began imaging an abundance of little red dots, which scientists called, um, “little red dots.” I know—not only is the name highly unimaginative, it also conveys a false impression of insignificance. In reality, these little red dots almost “broke” modern […]