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Category: cosmology

Meet the universe’s earliest confirmed black hole: A monster at the dawn of time

An international team of astronomers, led by The University of Texas at Austin’s Cosmic Frontier Center, has identified the most distant black hole ever confirmed. It and the galaxy it calls home, CAPERS-LRD-z9, are present 500 million years after the Big Bang. That places it 13.3 billion years into the past, when our universe was just 3% of its current age. As such, it provides a unique opportunity to study the structure and evolution of this enigmatic period.

“When looking for , this is about as far back as you can practically go. We’re really pushing the boundaries of what current technology can detect,” said Anthony Taylor, a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Frontier Center and lead on the team that made the discovery.

The research is published in The Astrophysical Journal.

From Algebra to Cosmology: Stephen Wolfram on Physics & the Nature of the Universe

Physicist and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram explores how simple rules can generate complex realities, offering a bold new vision of fundamental physics and the structure of the universe.

Stephen Wolfram is a British-American computer scientist, physicist, and businessman. He is known for his work in computer algebra and theoretical physics. In 2012, he was named a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He is the founder and CEO of the software company Wolfram Research, where he works as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine.

Watch more CTT Chats here: https://t.ly/jJI7e

Ghost particles may secretly decide the fate of collapsing stars

Neutrinos are cosmic tricksters, paradoxically hardly there but lethal to stars significantly more massive than the sun. These elementary particles come in three known “flavors”: electron, muon and tau. Whatever the flavor, neutrinos are notoriously slippery, and much about their properties remains mysterious. It is almost impossible to collide neutrinos with each other in the lab, so it is not known if neutrinos interact with each other according to the standard model of particle physics, or if there are much-speculated “secret” interactions only among neutrinos.

Now a team of researchers from the Network for Neutrinos, Nuclear Astrophysics, and Symmetries (N3AS), including several from UC San Diego, have shown, through theoretical calculations, how collapsing massive stars can act as a “neutrino collider.” Neutrinos steal thermal energy from these stars, forcing them to contract and causing their electrons to move near light speed. This drives the stars to instability and collapse.

Eventually the collapsing star’s density becomes so high that the neutrinos are trapped and collide with each other. With purely standard model interactions, the neutrinos will be mostly electron flavor, the matter will be relatively “cold,” and the collapse will likely leave a neutron star remnant. However, secret interactions that change neutrino flavor radically alter this scenario, producing neutrinos of all flavors and leading to a mostly neutron “hot” core that may lead to a black hole remnant.

JWST observations shed more light on the nature of a distant galaxy

Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team of astronomers has observed a distant faint galaxy designated JADES-GS-z14-1. Results of the observational campaign, published July 30 on the arXiv preprint server, provide more insights into the nature and properties of this galaxy.

Launched into space in 2021, JWST is designed to find and investigate the most distant galaxies, providing insights into the . It enables the detection of galaxies within the first 500 million years after the Big Bang.

One of such early galaxies is JADES-GS-z14-1—the faintest spectroscopically confirmed galaxy, at a redshift of about 14.0. The galaxy has an absolute ultraviolet magnitude of-19.0 and is relatively compact as its half-light radius is estimated to not exceed 520 light years. Previous observations of JADES-GS-z14-1 have found that it has a mass of some 100 million , and a (SFR) at a level of about two solar masses per year.

Experiment Recreates The Universe’s Very First Chemical Reactions

The first chemical reactions in the wake of the Big Bang have been recreated for the first time in conditions similar to those in the baby Universe.

A team of physicists led by Florian Grussie of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in Germany has reproduced the reactions of the helium hydride ion (HeH+), a molecule made from a neutral helium atom fusing with an ionized atom of hydrogen.

These are the first steps that lead to the formation of molecular hydrogen (H2), the most abundant molecule in the Universe and the stuff from which stars are born. The new work, therefore, elucidates some of the earliest processes that gave rise to the Universe as we know it today.

Dark Mirror of Our Own Universe Could Explain Quirks in Gravity

Since conventional explanations have failed to pony up dark matter, one physicist is looking towards the unconventional.

In a series of two papers, physicist Stefano Profumo of the University of California, Santa Cruz has proposed two strange, but not impossible, origins for the mystery material responsible for the excess gravitational effects we see out there in the Universe.

In the first, published in May 2025, he proposes that dark matter could have been born in a dark matter ‘mirror’ of our own Universe, where matter is made of dark versions of particles akin to our protons and neutrons.

JWST uncovers hidden black holes devouring stars in dusty galaxies

Astronomers at MIT, Columbia University, and elsewhere have used NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to peer through the dust of nearby galaxies and into the aftermath of a black hole’s stellar feast.

In a study appearing today in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers report that for the first time, JWST has observed several tidal disruption events—instances when a galaxy’s central black hole draws in a nearby star and whips up tidal forces that tear the star to shreds, giving off an enormous burst of energy in the process.

Scientists have observed about 100 tidal disruption events (TDEs) since the 1990s, mostly as X-ray or optical light that flashes across relatively dust-free galaxies. But as MIT researchers recently reported, there may be many more star-shredding events in the universe that are “hiding” in dustier, gas-veiled galaxies.

Solving a 13-Billion-Year-Old Mystery: Scientists Recreate the Universe’s First Chemical Reaction

Researchers have uncovered new insights into the reaction pathways of the universe’s first molecule. Shortly after the Big Bang, which took place around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was a seething, dense expanse of extreme heat. In just a matter of seconds, it began to cool enough for the f

Sweeping survey maps hundreds of satellite systems orbiting dwarf galaxies

We usually think of satellites as small objects orbiting planets or stars. But in the broader universe, galaxies themselves can have satellites—smaller galaxies bound by gravity that orbit a larger host, carrying with them stars, gas, dust, and dark matter.

Most of what we know about satellite galaxies comes from studying the Milky Way and other similarly large galaxies. But a new study led by Dartmouth astronomers broadens that understanding by exploring the satellites of dwarf galaxies—systems less than a tenth the size of the Milky Way.

The multi-institutional survey triples the number of dwarf galaxies surveyed for satellites, the researchers report in The Astrophysical Journal. The study identifies 355 candidate satellite galaxies, including 264 that were previously undocumented. The researchers suggest that 134 of these candidates are highly likely to be satellite galaxies.

Theories on dark matter’s origins point to ‘mirror world’ and universe’s edge

Two recent studies by Professor Stefano Profumo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, propose theories that attempt to answer one of the most fundamental open questions in modern physics: What is the particle nature of dark matter?

Science has produced overwhelming evidence that the mysterious substance, which accounts for 80% of all matter in the universe, exists. Dark matter’s presence explains what binds galaxies together and makes them rotate. Findings such as the large-scale structure of the universe and measurements of the cosmic microwave background also prove that something as-yet undetermined permeates all that darkness.

What remains unknown are the origins of dark matter, and hence, what are its particle properties? Those weighty questions primarily fall to theoretical physicists like Profumo. And in two recent papers, he approaches those questions from different directions, but both centered on the idea that dark matter might have emerged naturally from conditions in the very early universe—rather than dark matter being an exotic new particle that interacts with ordinary matter in some detectable way.

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