A powerful new telescope has captured its first glimpse of the cosmos, and could transform our understanding of how stars, galaxies and black holes evolve.
The 4MOST (4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope), mounted on the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope in Chile, achieved its ‘first light’ on 18 October 2025: a milestone marking the start of its scientific mission.
Unlike a typical telescope that takes pictures of the sky, 4MOST records spectra—the detailed colors of light from celestial objects —revealing their temperature, motion and chemical makeup. Using 2,436 optical fibers, each thinner than a human hair, the telescope can study thousands of stars and galaxies at once, splitting their light into 18,000 distinct color components.
Researchers have harnessed nonlocal artificial materials to create optical systems that emulate parallel spaces, wormholes, and multiple realities. A single material acts as two distinct optical media or devices simultaneously, allowing light to experience different properties based on entry boundaries. Demonstrations include invisible optical tunnels and coexisting optical devices, opening new avenues for compact, multifunctional optical devices by introducing nonlocality as a new degree of freedom for light manipulation.
What if a single space could occupy two different objects at once, depending on how photons access this space? Scientists have brought this sci-fi concept to life, creating optical systems that mimic the exotic phenomena of parallel universes and wormholes.
In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers in China used nonlocal artificial materials to develop “photonic parallel spaces.”
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope hint that the universe’s first stars might not have been ordinary fusion-powered suns, but enormous “supermassive dark stars” powered by dark matter annihilation. These colossal, luminous hydrogen-and-helium spheres may explain both the existence of unexpectedly bright early galaxies and the origin of the first supermassive black holes.
In the early universe, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars emerged from vast, untouched clouds of hydrogen and helium. Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that some of these early stars may have been unlike the familiar (nuclear fusion-powered) stars that astronomers have studied for centuries. A new study led by Cosmin Ilie of Colgate University, together with Shafaat Mahmud (Colgate ’26), Jillian Paulin (Colgate ’23) at the University of Pennsylvania, and Katherine Freese at The University of Texas at Austin, has identified four extremely distant objects whose appearance and spectral signatures match what scientists expect from supermassive dark stars.
“Supermassive dark stars are extremely bright, giant, yet puffy clouds made primarily out of hydrogen and helium, which are supported against gravitational collapse by the minute amounts of self-annihilating dark matter inside them,” Ilie said. Supermassive dark stars and their black hole remnants could be key to solving two recent astronomical puzzles: i. the larger than expected extremely bright, yet compact, very distant galaxies observed with JWST, and ii. the origin of the supermassive black holes powering the most distant quasars observed.
The nature of dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries in cosmology. Within the standard framework of non-collisional cold dark matter (CDM), various models are considered: WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, with masses of around 100 GeV/c2), primordial black holes, and ultralight axion-like particles (mass of 10-22 to 1 eV/c2). In the latter case, dark matter behaves like a wave, described by a Schrödinger equation, rather than as a collection of point particles. This generates specific behaviors at small scales, while following standard dynamics (CDM) at large scales.
Philippe Brax and Patrick Valageas, researchers at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, studied models of ultralight cold dark matter with repulsive self-interactions, whose dynamics are described by a non-linear variant of the Schrödinger equation, known as the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, also encountered in the physics of superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates. In their work, the authors follow the formation and dynamics of particular structures, called “vortices” (whirlpools) and “solitons” (cores in hydrostatic equilibrium), within halos of rotating ultralight dark matter.
New research shows that dark matter has a different distribution in our galaxy than previously thought, and that advances dark matter’s status as a potential source of the observed gamma ray excess in the Milky Way’s center. High-resolution simulations reveal that the dark matter distribution in the inner galaxy is not spherical, but flattened and asymmetrical. The findings confirm the theory that the gamma ray excess is due to dark matter annihilation.
Scientists have long suspected dark matter annihilation to be a source of these rays, but the rays’ spatial spread did not match the arrangement of dark matter they had predicted. Another theory argues that ancient millisecond pulsars could produce the rays.
For the new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers modeled the formation of Milky Way-like galaxies under environmental conditions similar to those of Earth’s cosmic neighborhood, thereby reproducing simulated Milky Way-like galaxies that bear strong resemblance to the real thing.
Many Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder for giving me puzzles.
What if everything — gravity, light, particles, and even the flow of time — came from a single equation? In Chavis Srichan’s Unified Theory, the universe isn’t built from matter, but from the curvature of entanglement — the twists and turns of quantum information itself. Space, energy, and even consciousness are simply different ways this curvature vibrates.
The One Equation.
At the smallest scale, every motion and interaction follows one rule:
[D_μ, D_ν]Ψ = (i/ħ) [(8πG/c⁴)⟨T_μν(Ψ)⟩ − Λ_q g_μν + λ ∇_μ∇_ν S]Ψ
It means that the “shape” of space itself bends in response to energy and information — and that same bending is quantum mechanics, gravity, and thermodynamics combined.
Mass: When Curvature Loops Back.
When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations, one of its earliest surveys was of galaxies that existed during the very early universe. In December 2022, these observations revealed multiple objects that appeared as “little red dots” (LRDs), fueling speculation as to what they might be. While the current consensus is that these objects are compact, early galaxies, there is still debate over their composition and what makes them so red. On the one hand, there is the “stellar-only” hypothesis, which states that LRDs are red because they are packed with stars and dust.
This means that they could be similar to “dusty galaxies” that are observed in the universe today. On the other hand, there is the” MBH and galaxy” theory, which posits that LRDs are early examples of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) that exist throughout the universe in modern times. Each model has significant implications for how these galaxies subsequently evolved to become the types of galaxies observed more recently.
In a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, an international team of astronomers considered the different scenarios. They concluded that LRDs began as “stellar only” galaxies that eventually formed the seeds of the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of galaxies today.
Detecting dark matter—the mysterious substance that holds galaxies together—is one of the greatest unsolved problems in physics. Although it cannot be seen or touched directly, scientists believe dark matter leaves weak signals that could be captured by highly sensitive quantum devices.
In a new study published in Physical Review D, researchers at Tohoku University propose a way to boost the sensitivity of quantum sensors by connecting them in carefully designed network structures. These quantum sensors use the rules of quantum physics to detect extremely small signals, making them far more sensitive than ordinary sensors. Using these, accurately detecting the faint clues left behind from dark matter could finally become possible.
The study focuses on superconducting qubits, which are tiny electric circuits cooled to very low temperatures. These qubits are normally used as building blocks of quantum computers, but here they act as powerful quantum sensors. Just as a team working together can achieve more than a single person, linking many of these superconducting qubits in an optimized network allows them to detect weak dark matter signals much more effectively than any single sensor could on its own.