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A highly detailed three-dimensional map of six million galaxies was recently unveiled by a group of scientists. The map is believed to have the potential to unravel some hidden secrets of dark matter and the future of our universe.

The map was created with the help of data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona. The first-of-its-kind map has scaled some galaxies for the first time that were never recorded earlier for the study of the universe.

DESI is an instrument that can capture light from 5,000 galaxies many million light years away from Earth. It becomes the backbone of research in the development of the biggest 3D map of galaxies that could alter the way we think about dark matter and the universe.

The new research culminated in a 3D map that measures how the universe has been expanding over the past 11 billion years. The data was collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a part of the Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

Five thousand tiny robots on the telescope collect data at an unprecedented rate, per a statement from the observatory. Since it started scanning the sky in 2021, DESI has observed 5,000 galaxies every 20 minutes, totaling more than 100,000 galaxies each night.

Continue reading “Dark Energy Could Be Evolving Over Time, Raising Questions About the Nature of the Cosmos” »

Scientists have found a large black hole that “hiccups,” giving off plumes of gas, revealing another black hole.

A new model describes the population of black hole binaries without assumptions on the shape of their distribution—a capability that could boost the discovery potential of gravitational-wave observations.

Since the first groundbreaking observation of gravitational waves from a black hole merger [1], a worldwide network of observatories–LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA—has discovered nearly a hundred mergers involving black holes and neutron stars (Fig. 1). The nature of this population of compact objects has implications for nearly every aspect of astrophysics and cosmology. However, understanding how gravitational-wave sources fit into our astrophysical theories has proved challenging. Many of the discoveries have confirmed our expectations, but some—such as those of asymmetric black hole binaries or of unexpectedly massive black holes—defy them.

Operating at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) since 2022, the FASER experiment is designed to search for extremely weakly interacting particles. Such particles are predicted by many theories beyond the Standard Model that are attempting to solve outstanding problems in physics such as the nature of dark matter and the matter-antimatter imbalance in the universe.

BREAD’s innovative approach to dark matter detection uses a coaxial “dish” antenna to scan for mysterious particles.

One of the great mysteries of modern science is dark matter. We know dark matter exists thanks to its effects on other objects in the cosmos, but we have never been able to directly see it. And it’s no minor thing—currently, scientists think it makes up about 85% of all the mass in the universe.

A new experiment by a collaboration led by the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as the Broadband Reflector Experiment for Axion Detection or BREAD, has released its first results in the search for dark matter in a study published in Physical Review Letters. Though they did not find dark matter, they narrowed the constraints for where it might be and demonstrated a unique approach that may speed up the search for the mysterious substance, at relatively little space and cost.

Despite their ancient ages, some stars orbiting the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole appear deceptively youthful. But unlike humans, who might appear rejuvenated from a fresh round of collagen injections, these stars look young for a much darker reason.

If this is true, this just turns cosmology upside down.

The universe is still expanding at an accelerating rate, but it may have slowed down recently compared with a few billion years ago, early results from the most precise measurement of its evolution yet suggested Thursday.

The preliminary findings are far from confirmed, but if they hold up, it would further deepen the mystery of dark energy — and likely mean there is something important missing in our understanding of the cosmos.

These signals of our universe’s changing speeds were spotted by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, which is perched atop a telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in the U.S. state of Arizona.