Universe Today
The Primordial Black Hole Saga: Part 1 - The Dark Matter Mystery
Do I really need to go over the evidence for dark matter again? Okay, fine, for those of you in the back who weren’t paying attention the first time.
Physics
The physics of the universe
Recent Articles
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The Case for an Antimatter Manhattan Project
Chemical rockets have taken us to the Moon and back, but traveling to the stars demands something more powerful. Space X’s Starship can lift extraordinary masses to orbit and send payloads throughout the Solar System using its chemical rockets but it cannot fly to nearby stars at thirty percent of light speed and land. For missions beyond our local region of space, we need something fundamentally more energetic than chemical combustion, and physics offers or in other words, antimatter.
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After a Century of Searching, We May Have Finally Seen Dark Matter
Ninety five years after Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky inferred its existence from galaxies moving impossibly fast, researchers may have detected the first direct evidence of dark matter, the invisible scaffolding that holds the universe together. Using gamma ray data from NASA's Fermi Space Telescope, a Japanese physicist has identified a halo of extremely energetic photons around the Milky Way's center that matches predictions for annihilating dark matter particles. If confirmed, humanity has finally "seen" the unseeable.
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New Research Helps Narrow the Search for Elusive Neutrino Sources
A research team has conducted the first systematic search for optical counterparts to a neutrino "multiplet," a rare event in which multiple high-energy neutrinos are detected from the same direction within a short period. The event was observed by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a massive detector buried deep within the Antarctic ice.
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Dwarf Galaxies May Hold the Answers to the Debate on Dark Matter
An international team of researchers, led by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), has shed light on a decades-long debate about why galaxies rotate faster than expected, and whether this behaviour is caused by unseen dark matter or a breakdown of gravity on cosmic scales.
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Are the cosmic voids truly empty?
If we take out all the matter, neutrinos, dark matter, cosmic rays, and radiation from the deepest parts of the voids the only thing left is empty space.
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What's it like to live inside a void?
The cosmic voids of the universe are empty of matter. But we all know there’s more to the universe than just matter.
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We Could Use Neutrino Detectors As Giant Particle Colliders
There is a limit to how big we can build particle colliders on Earth, whether that is because of limited space or limited economics. Since size is equivalent to energy output for particle colliders, that also means there’s a limit to how energetic we can make them. And again, since high energies are required to test theories that go Beyond the Standard Model (BSM) of particle physics, that means we will be limited in our ability to validate those theories until we build a collider big enough. But a team of scientists led by Yang Bai at the University of Wisconsin thinks they might have a better idea - use already existing neutrino detectors as a large scale particle collider that can reach energies way beyond what the LHC is capable of.
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What are the cosmic voids made of?
Now that we have tools to find vast numbers of voids in the universe, we can finally ask…well, if we crack em open, what do we find inside?
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How do we find cosmic voids?
To answer that question of what’s inside a void, we have to first decide what a void…is.
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Rise of the Axion
So where do we go after years of empty searches for dark matter? We haven’t learned nothing.
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The Empty Search for Dark Matter
What if I told you that while you can’t see dark matter, maybe you can hear it?
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Why the WIMPs Became the Toughest Particle in Physics
As a kid you ever play that game Guess Who? If you haven’t, it’s actually kinda fun.
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Fifty Years of Dark Matter
In the 1970’s Vera Rubin didn’t set out to upend modern cosmology.
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An Einstein Cross Reveals the Universe's Hidden Matter
When astronomers pointed their telescopes at a distant galaxy called HerS-3, they discovered something really quite remarkable. The galaxy, located 11.6 billion light years away, appeared not once but five times in their observations, arranged in a nearly perfect cross pattern. This rare phenomenon, known as an Einstein Cross, has revealed exciting evidence for a massive halo of dark matter lurking in the space between us and that distant galaxy.
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Could a Primordial Black Hole Explain that Mysterious Neutrino?
If a new proposal by MIT physicists bears out, the recent detection of a record-setting neutrino could be the first evidence of elusive Hawking radiation.
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Does the Multiverse Explain the Nature of the Universe?
One possibility to explain the constants of nature is that there’s more than one universe.
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What are the Most Important Constants of Nature?
Of course physicists debate about which of the constants are the important ones, because physicists debate EVERYTHING.
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What's So Fundamental About the Fundamental Constants?
What are the constants of nature? What do they do? What do they tell us…and what do they not tell us?
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New Study Follows Planetary Nebula Through 130 Years of Evolution
A study published in a recent edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters by researchers at the University of Manchester and Hong Kong University has charted the growth and evolution of IC418, spanning observations going all the way back to years after its discovery in the late 19th century.