Astronomers have discovered a galaxy shaped like an infinity symbol that may contain the first directly observed newborn supermassive black hole. Yale astronomer Pieter van Dokkum and his team have identified a remarkable object in deep space, which they’ve named the “Infinity” galaxy. This struc
Dark matter, a type of matter that does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, is predicted to account for most of the universe’s mass. While theoretical predictions hint at its abundance, detecting this elusive matter has so far proved to be very difficult, leaving its composition and origin a mystery.
One widely explored hypothesis is that dark matter consists of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs for short. These particles are theorized to only interact with ordinary matter via gravity and potentially via weak nuclear forces.
The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment is a large-scale research effort aimed at searching for signals associated with the presence of WIMPs using a sophisticated detector known as a dual-phase xenon time projection chamber. The researchers involved in the experiment recently published their most recent findings in a paper in Physical Review Letters, which places more stringent constraints on lighter dark matter particles that could have gained energy after colliding with cosmic rays.
Solar cells and computer chips need silicon layers that are as perfect as possible. Every imperfection in the crystalline structure increases the risk of reduced efficiency or defective switching processes.
If you know how silicon atoms arrange themselves to form a crystal lattice on a thin surface, you gain fundamental insights into controlling crystal growth. To this end, an international research team analyzed the behavior of silicon that was flash-frozen. The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The results show that the speed of cooling has a major impact on the structure of silicon surfaces. The underlying mechanism may also have occurred during phase transitions in the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.
Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the night sky, and the closest red supergiant to Earth. It has an enormous volume, spanning a radius around 700 times that of the sun. Despite only being ten million years old, which is considered young by astronomy standards, it’s late in its life.
Located in the shoulder of the constellation Orion, people have observed Betelgeuse with the naked eye for millennia, noticing that the star changes in brightness over time. Astronomers established that Betelgeuse has a main period of variability of around 400 days and a more extended secondary period of around six years.
In 2019 and 2020, there was a steep decrease in Betelgeuse’s brightness—an event referred to as the “Great Dimming.” The event led some to believe that a supernova death was quickly approaching, but scientists were able to determine the dimming was actually caused by a large cloud of dust ejected from Betelgeuse.
It took about 50 exploding stars to upend cosmology. Researchers mapped and measured light from Type Ia supernovae, the dramatic explosion of a particular kind of white dwarf. In 1998, they announced their surprising results: Instead of slowing down or staying constant, our universe was expanding faster and faster. The discovery of “dark energy,” the unknown ingredient driving the accelerated expansion, was awarded a Nobel Prize.
Since the late ’90s, dozens of experiments using different telescopes and techniques have captured and published more than 2,000 Type Ia (pronounced “one A”) supernovae. But without correcting for those differences, using supernovae from separate experiments is often a case of comparing apples and oranges.
To unite the supernovae and more precisely measure dark energy’s role in our universe, scientists built the largest standardized dataset of Type Ia supernovae ever made. The compilation is called Union3 and was built by the international Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP), which is led by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Lightning might not strike twice, but black holes apparently do. An international group of researchers led by Tel Aviv University astronomers observed a flare caused when a star falls onto a black hole and is destroyed.
Scientists have developed a more precise method for analyzing gravitational waves, offering a sharper view into the Universe’s most violent and mysterious collisions. A newly developed technique for analyzing gravitational-wave data could significantly enhance how scientists investigate some of t
A record-breaking black hole collision has stunned scientists with its sheer scale and speed. Detected by the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA observatories, the event merged two enormous black holes—each over 100 times the mass of the Sun—into a single, spinning cosmic titan. The final result? A black hole more
Physicists have detected the biggest ever merger of colliding black holes. The discovery has major implications for researchers’ understanding of how such bodies grow in the Universe.
“It’s super exciting,” says Priyamvada Natarajan, a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in the research. The merger was between black holes with masses too big for physicists to easily explain. “We’re seeing these forbidden high-mass black holes,” she says.
The discovery was made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), a facility involving two detectors in the United States. It comes at a time when US funding for gravitational-wave detection faces devastating cuts. The results, released as a preprint on the arXiv server1, were presented at the GR-Amaldi gravitational-waves meeting in Glasgow, UK, on 14 July.
Join us as we journey beyond the birth of the universe to unravel the mysteries of what might have preceded the Big Bang—and whether time itself had a beginning.
Credits: Before the Big Bang — What Came Before Time? Episode 738; July 20, 2025 Written, Produced & Narrated by: Isaac Arthur. Select imagery/video supplied by Getty Images. Music Courtesy of Epidemic Sound http://epidemicsound.com/creator. 0:00 Intro Asking the Impossible. 2:08 The Limits of Time and Spacetime. 7:45 Beyond the Big Bang: Alternate Beginnings. 14:38 Other Realities: Higher Dimensions and Shadow Universes. 18:28 Emergent Time. 22:38 Bubble Collisions and Multiverse Scars. 24:44 Conclusion: What Came Before Time?