Dark Matter

Dark Matter

Raisin bread expanding Universe
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
gaia ESA milky way
Einstein's laws of gravity have been challenged many times, but have always emerged victorious. Could wide binary stars change all that?
X-ray view cartwheel galaxy
There are two types of missing, or "dark" matter: baryonic (made of normal matter) and non-baryonic. Have we finally found the normal stuff?
dark matter
Back in the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky postulated the existence of dark matter. No one took it seriously until Vera Rubin's work: 40 years later.
An image of a blue object in a blue box depicting axions.
The hunt for the elusive particles continues.
JADES galaxies
For many years, cosmologists have claimed the Universe is 13.8 billion years old. A new paper says no, it's 26.7 billion. How do we decide?
big bang mirage
A cute mathematical trick can "rescale" the Universe so that it isn't actually expanding. But can that "trick" survive all our cosmic tests?
a close up of two stars in the sky.
In many ways, we are still novices playing with toy models seeking to understand the stars. 
cold fuzzy dark matter simulations
In a far-reaching discovery with astrophysicist Karolina Garcia, we discuss what's in the Universe and how it grew up.
warm-hot intergalactic medium sculptor wall
Just by observing the tiny amount of deuterium left over from the Big Bang, we can determine that dark matter and dark energy must exist.
a computer generated image of a wave
There is no such thing as a void in the Universe.
Two breathtaking pictures of a galaxy and a star taken by the Hubble telescope, highlighting the beauty and cosmic magnitude that fuels the Hubble tension.
There are two methods to measure the expansion rate of the Universe. The results do not agree with each other, and this is a big problem.
multiverse
If our Universe were born a little differently, there wouldn't have been any planets, stars, galaxies, or chemically interesting reactions.
a painting of a blue and yellow ball on a black background.
We can reasonably say that we understand the history of the Universe within one-trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. That's not good enough.
lensing magnification curves dark matter wave
The best evidence for dark matter is astrophysical and indirect. Do new lensing observations point to ultra-light, wave-like dark matter?
JWST most distant galaxy proto-cluster
Finding out how the Universe grew up was the biggest science goal of JWST. This ultra-early proto-galaxy cluster is one amazing discovery.
JWST deep field vs hubble
JWST has brought us more distant views of the early Universe than ever before. Is the Big Bang, and all of modern cosmology, in trouble?
An image of a galaxy with a centrally-located star, illustrating the standard model of cosmology.
Cosmologists are largely still in the dark about the forces that drive the Universe.
a very large cluster of stars in the sky.
Stars orbiting black holes were observed to move significantly slower than expected. One explanation centers on dark matter.
cosmic epochs lookback hubble 13.8 billion
With a finite 13.8 billion years having passed since the Big Bang, there's an edge to what we can see: the cosmic horizon. What's it like?
a clock that is in the middle of a picture.
If the evolution of the Universe is a movie, what happens when we rewind it all the way backward?
JWST CEERS 1 hour field
Many galaxies really are ultra-distant, but some are just intrinsically red or dusty. Only with spectroscopy can JWST tell which is which.
inside of xenon
With a bigger, better, and more sensitive detector, the XENON collaboration joins LZ and PANDA-X in constraining WIMP dark matter.
borexino
If you're a massless particle, you must always move at light speed. If you have mass, you must go slower. So why aren't any neutrinos slow?
UNCOVER NIRCam mosaic
An incredible composite image of Pandora's Cluster, Abell 2744, simultaneously showcases both our impressive knowledge and vast ignorance.
From the Big Bang to dark energy, knowledge of the cosmos has sped up in the past century — but big questions linger.
timeline of the universe history
From the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang (and even before) to our dark energy-dominated present, how and when did the Universe grow up?
Bullet Cluster separation mass gravity x-ray lensing
19 years ago, the Bullet Cluster provided an empirical proof for dark matter. Even today, modified gravity still can't explain it.
The Universe isn't as "clumpy" as we think it should be.