Dark Matter News

November 20, 2024

Top Headlines

Three Galactic 'Red Monsters' in the Early Universe

Nov. 13, 2024 — Astronomers have identified three ultra-massive galaxies -- nearly as massive as the Milky Way -- already in place within the first billion years after the Big Bang. This surprising discovery was made possible by the James Webb Space Telescope's ...

A Formula for Life? New Model Calculates Chances of Intelligent Beings in Our Universe and Beyond

Nov. 12, 2024 — The chances of intelligent life emerging in our Universe -- and in any hypothetical ones beyond it -- can be estimated by a new theoretical model which has echoes of the famous Drake Equation. This ...

Astronomers' Theory of How Galaxies Formed May Be Upended

Nov. 12, 2024 — The standard model for how galaxies formed in the early universe predicted that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) would see dim signals from small, primitive galaxies. But data are not confirming the popular hypothesis that invisible dark matter ...

Einstein's Equations Collide With the Mysteries of the Universe

Nov. 11, 2024 — Why is the expansion of our Universe accelerating? Twenty-five years after its discovery, this phenomenon remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries. Solving it involves testing the fundamental laws of physics, including Albert Einstein's ...

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updated 11:04pm EST

New ESO Image Captures a Dark Wolf in the Sky

Oct. 31, 2024 — For Halloween, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) reveals a spooktacular image of a dark nebula that creates the illusion of a wolf-like silhouette against a colourful cosmic backdrop. Fittingly ...

Evidence Mounts for Dark Energy from Black Holes

Oct. 28, 2024 — Researchers have strengthened the case that matter becomes dark energy when massive stars collapse and become black ...

Neutron Stars May Be Shrouded in Axions

Oct. 18, 2024 — Physicists have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that ...

Astronomers Detect Ancient Lonely Quasars With Murky Origins

Oct. 17, 2024 — Astronomers observed ancient quasars that appear to be surprisingly alone in the early universe. The findings challenge physicists' understanding of how such luminous objects could have formed so ...

Magnifying Deep Space Through the 'Carousel Lens'

Sep. 18, 2024 — A newly discovered cluster-scale strong gravitational lens, with a rare alignment of seven background lensed galaxies, provides a unique opportunity to study ...

A Wobble from Mars Could Be Sign of Dark Matter

Sep. 17, 2024 — Watching for changes in Mars' orbit over time could be new way to detect passing dark matter, according to ...

Early Dark Energy Could Resolve Cosmology's Two Biggest Puzzles

Sep. 13, 2024 — Physicists propose that a mysterious force known as early dark energy could solve two of the biggest puzzles in cosmology and fill in some major gaps in our understanding of how the early universe ...

AI Helps Distinguish Dark Matter from Cosmic Noise

Sep. 6, 2024 — An AI-powered tool can distinguish dark matter's elusive effects from other cosmic phenomena, which could bring us closer to unlocking the secrets of dark ...

Dark Matter Could Have Helped Make Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe

Aug. 28, 2024 — Supermassive black holes typically take billions of years to form. But the James Webb Space Telescope is finding them not that long after the Big ...

Astrophysicists Use AI to Precisely Calculate Universe's 'Settings'

Aug. 26, 2024 — The new estimates of the parameters that form the basis of the standard model of cosmology are far more precise than previous approaches using the same galaxy distribution ...

New Record in Search for Dark Matter

Aug. 26, 2024 — New results from the world's most sensitive dark matter detector put the best-ever limits on particles called WIMPs, a leading candidate for what makes up our universe's invisible ...

Dark Matter: A Camera Trap for the Invisible

July 29, 2024 — AI-powered image recognition could give researchers a new tool in hunt for dark ...

Dark Matter Flies Ahead of Normal Matter in Mega Galaxy Cluster Collision

July 24, 2024 — Astronomers have untangled a messy collision between two massive clusters of galaxies in which the clusters' vast clouds of dark matter have decoupled from the so-called normal ...

Astrophysicists Uncover Supermassive Blackhole/dark Matter Connection in Solving the 'Final Parsec Problem'

July 22, 2024 — Researchers have found a link between some of the largest and smallest objects in the cosmos: supermassive black holes and dark matter particles. Their new calculations reveal that pairs of ...

How Astronomers Are Using Pulsars to Observe Evidence of Dark Matter

July 16, 2024 — Tantalizing evidence of potential dark matter objects has been detected with the help of the Universe's 'timekeepers'. These pulsars -- neutron stars which rotate and emit ...

Cosmic Wrestling Match

July 15, 2024 — Our universe is around 13.8 billion years old. Over the vastness of this time, the tiniest of initial asymmetries have grown into the large-scale structures we can see through our telescopes in the ...

Dark Matter in Dwarf Galaxy Tracked Using Stellar Motions

July 11, 2024 — The qualities and behavior of dark matter, the invisible 'glue' of the universe, continue to be shrouded in mystery. Though galaxies are mostly made of dark matter, understanding how it is ...

The Origins of Dark Comets

July 10, 2024 — Up to 60% of near-Earth objects could be dark comets, mysterious asteroids that orbit the sun in our solar system that likely contain or previously contained ice and could have been one route for ...

Too Many Missing Satellite Galaxies Found

June 28, 2024 — Bringing us one step closer to solving the 'missing satellites problem,' researchers have discovered two new satellite ...

Precision Instrument Bolsters Efforts to Find Elusive Dark Energy

June 26, 2024 — Dark energy -- a mysterious force pushing the universe apart at an ever-increasing rate -- was discovered 26 years ago, and ever since, scientists have been searching for a new and exotic particle ...

Modified Gravity Theory: A Million Light Years and Still Going

June 17, 2024 — In a breakthrough discovery that challenges the conventional understanding of cosmology, scientists have unearthed new evidence that could reshape our perception of the cosmos. New research shows ...

Scientists Develop 3D Printed Vacuum System That Aims to Trap Dark Matter

June 17, 2024 — Using a specially designed 3D printed vacuum system, scientists have developed a way to 'trap' dark matter with the aim of detecting domain walls, this will be a significant step forwards ...

NASA's Roman Mission Gets Cosmic 'Sneak Peek' from Supercomputers

June 12, 2024 — Researchers used supercomputers to create nearly 4 million simulated images depicting the ...

How Did a Satellite Galaxy of the Milky Way Come to Be?

June 11, 2024 — Crater 2, located approximately 380,000 light years from Earth, is one of the largest satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Extremely cold and with slow-moving stars, Crater 2 has low surface ...

Exotic Black Holes Could Be a Byproduct of Dark Matter

June 6, 2024 — In the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear charge, MIT physicists propose. The gravitational pull from these tiny, ...

The Case of the Missing Black Holes

May 29, 2024 — Researchers have applied the well-understood and highly verified quantum field theory, usually applied to the study of the very small, to a new target, the early universe. Their exploration led to ...

First Pictures from Euclid Satellite Reveal Billions of Orphan Stars

May 23, 2024 — The first scientific pictures from the Euclid satellite mission have revealed more than 1,500 billion orphan stars scattered throughout the Perseus cluster of ...

Astronomers' Simulations Support Dark Matter Theory

Apr. 29, 2024 — Computer simulations by astronomers support the idea that dark matter -- matter that no one has yet directly detected but which many physicists think must be there to explain several aspects of the ...

Physicists Solve Puzzle About Ancient Galaxy Found by Webb Telescope

Apr. 12, 2024 — Physicists solve a puzzle linked to JWST-ER1g, a massive ancient galaxy that formed when the universe was just a quarter of its current ...

Neutron Stars Are Key to Understanding Elusive Dark Matter

Apr. 5, 2024 — Scientists may be one step closer to unlocking one of the great mysteries of the universe after calculating that neutron stars might hold a key to helping us understand elusive dark ...