Using the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have built a detailed map of dark matter, showing the density of this mysterious stuff across a field of view that encompasses around 800,000 galaxies. Dark matter is so puzzling to scientists because it doesn’t interact with electromagnetic radiation, or simply light,, and is thus effectively invisible to
One of Earth’s most dangerous glaciers has claimed a victim: a suite of instruments that became trapped deep within the ice. A team of researchers from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the Korea Polar Research Institute (KOPRI) was working to place instruments beneath Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier to understand how the ice was melting from
New tools unlock new discoveries in science. So when a new type of non-destructive technology becomes widely available, it’s inevitable that planetary scientists will get their hands on it to test it on some meteorites. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Estrid Naver of the Technical University of Denmark and her co-authors,
The southern lights captured from Brazil on Jan. 19. (Image credit: Egon Filter) A rare aurora appeared briefly over southern Brazil on Jan. 19 during a powerful geomagnetic storm. Luckily for us, one photographer was at the right place at the right time to capture the fleeting scene. Astrophotographer Egon Filter captured the faint purple-red
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows galaxy MoM-z14 – credit NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Rohan Naidu (MIT); Image Processing Joseph DePasquale (STScI) NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has topped itself once again, delivering the confirmation of a bright galaxy that existed a mere 280 million years after the Big Bang; so close to the beginning
A microscopic clump of sodium has become the largest object ever to be observed as a wave, improving upon previous records by thousands of atoms. Quantum physics defines particles in terms of waves, which effectively means all matter exists in a muddle of many possible states at once – known as a superposition – before
When AT2018hyz, aka “Jetty,” was first discovered, radio telescopes didn’t detect any signatures of an outflow emission of material within the first few months. According to Cendes, that’s true of some 80 percent of TDEs, so astronomers moved on, preferring to use precious telescope time for more potentially interesting objects. A few years later, radio data
Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed a groundbreaking plasma tunnel to simulate the extreme conditions spacecraft face during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. This cutting-edge facility generates plasma flows that mimic the intense heat and pressure of hypersonic flight, offering valuable insights into how spacecraft and materials respond to the violent forces
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An incredibly energetic “impossible” particle that hit Earth in 2023 may have been debris from an exploding primordial black hole formed during the Big Bang. If that is the case, then it could prove the existence of primordial black holes, which could then help explain what the universe’s most mysterious “stuff,” dark matter, is made