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Category: cosmology – Page 7

Dark matter could create dark dwarfs at the center of the Milky Way

Dark matter is one of nature’s most confounding mysteries. It keeps particle physicists up at night and cosmologists glued to their supercomputer simulations. We know it’s real because its mass prevents galaxies from falling apart. But we don’t know what it is.

Dark matter doesn’t like other matter and may prefer its own company. While it doesn’t seem to interact with regular baryonic matter, it could possibly react with itself and self-annihilate. It needs a tightly-packed environment to do that, and that may lead to a way astrophysicists can finally detect it.

New theoretical research outlines how this could happen and states that sub-stellar objects, basically , could host the process. The research is titled “Dark dwarfs: -powered sub-stellar objects awaiting discovery at the ,” and it’s published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. The lead author is Djuna Croon, a and assistant professor in the Institute for Particle Physics Phenomenology in the Department of Physics at Durham University.

Alex M. Vikoulov

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Amazon.com: The Intelligence Supernova: Essays on Cybernetic Transhumanism, The Simulation Singularity & The Syntellect Emergence (Audible Audio Edition): Alex M. Vikoulov, Ecstadelic Media Group, Virtual Voice: Books.

Globular clusters: The Vera Rubin Observatory is just getting started

Astronomers have studied the globular cluster 47 Tucanae extensively, but still have many questions. It may have an intermediate mass black hole in its center like Omega Centauri is expected to have. There are reasons to believe it may be the remnant of a dwarf galaxy that was gobbled up by the Milky Way, like other GCs. Also like other GCs, its center is extraordinarily dense with stars, and astronomers aren’t certain how far the cluster spreads.

Individual stars in 47 Tuc are difficult to observe because they’re so tightly packed in the center and because they’re difficult to differentiate from field stars on its outer edges. Can the Vera Rubin Observatory help?

Early data from the Vera Rubin and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) were designed to test and refine the telescope’s system. But it’s still good quality data, and researchers are using it to not only understand how the Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) performs, but also for concrete science results.

3200 Megapixels: The World’s Largest Telescope Unveils Its First Snapshot

In an era where technology constantly pushes the boundaries of space exploration, the Vera Rubin Observatory offers a new window into space. Its camera, the most powerful ever designed for a telescope, promises to unveil new aspects of our universe. Astronomers and sky enthusiasts eagerly await the first images that might redefine our view of distant galaxies and obscure cosmic phenomena.

Perched atop Cerro Pachón in Chile, the Vera Rubin Astronomical Observatory has just created a real event: its very first photographic capture of the universe in 3,200 megapixels. This site, dedicated to the in-depth study of the southern sky, is named after the astronomer Vera Rubin, famous for her research on dark matter. A feat that marks a new era for astronomy!

Black-hole solutions in quantum gravity with Vilkovisky-DeWitt effective action

Physicists propose that calculations of certain aspects of quantum gravity can currently be done even without a full theory of quantum gravity itself. Basically, they work backwards from the fact that quantum gravity on the macro scale must conform to Einstein’s relativity theories. This approach is effective until the small scale of a black hole singularity is close.

(See my Comment below for an article link to POPULAR MECHANICS that discussed the scientific article in an accessible manner.

We study new black-hole solutions in quantum gravity. We use the Vilkovisky-DeWitt unique effective action to obtain quantum gravitational corrections to Einstein’s equations. In full analogy to previous work done for quadratic gravity, we find new black-hole–like solutions. We show that these new solutions exist close to the horizon and in the far-field limit.

Is Earth inside a huge void? ‘Sound of the Big Bang’ hints at possible solution to Hubble tension

Earth and our entire Milky Way galaxy may sit inside a mysterious giant hole which makes the cosmos expand faster here than in neighboring regions of the universe, astronomers say.

Their theory is a potential solution to the “Hubble tension” and could help confirm the true age of our universe, which is estimated to be around 13.8 billion years old.

The latest research —shared at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting (NAM 2025) at Durham University—shows that sound waves from the early universe, “essentially the sound of the Big Bang,” support this idea.

Stars That Shouldn’t Shine Are Pointing Straight to Dark Matter’s Identity

Deep in the center of our galaxy, scientists believe a strange type of star may be quietly glowing—not from fusion like our Sun, but from the invisible fuel of dark matter.

These “dark dwarfs” could act like cosmic detectors, collecting heavy, elusive particles that heat them from the inside. If we find them—and especially if we spot one missing its lithium—it could finally point us toward what dark matter really is.

Dark dwarfs & dark matter basics

Dark dwarfs lurking at the center of our galaxy might hint at the nature of dark matter

Celestial objects known as dark dwarfs may be hiding at the center of our galaxy and could offer key clues to uncover the nature of one of the most mysterious and fundamental phenomena in contemporary cosmology: dark matter.

A paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics by a team of researchers based in the UK and Hawaii describes these objects for the first time and proposes how to verify their existence using current observational tools such as the James Webb Space Telescope. The paper is titled “Dark Dwarfs: Dark Matter-Powered Sub-Stellar Objects Awaiting Discovery at the Galactic Center.”

The Anglo-U.S. team behind the study named them dark dwarfs. Not because they are dark bodies—on the contrary—but because of their special link with dark matter, one of the most central topics in current cosmology and astrophysics research.

Radio signal from the very early universe offers clues about the first stars

Understanding how the universe transitioned from darkness to light with the formation of the first stars and galaxies is a key turning point in the universe’s development, known as the Cosmic Dawn. However, even with the most powerful telescopes, we can’t directly observe these earliest stars, so determining their properties is one of the biggest challenges in astronomy.

Now, an international group of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge has shown that we will be able to learn about the masses of the earliest stars by studying a specific radio signal—created by hydrogen atoms filling the gaps between star-forming regions—originating just a hundred million years after the Big Bang.

By studying how the first stars and their remnants affected this signal, called the 21-centimeter signal, the researchers have shown that future radio telescopes will help us understand the very early universe, and how it transformed from a nearly homogeneous mass of mostly hydrogen to the incredible complexity we see today. Their results are reported in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Machine learning outpaces supercomputers for simulating galaxy evolution coupled with supernova explosion

Researchers have used machine learning to dramatically speed up the processing time when simulating galaxy evolution coupled with supernova explosion. This approach could help us understand the origins of our own galaxy, particularly the elements essential for life in the Milky Way.

The findings are published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The team was led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan, along with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (MPA) and the Flatiron Institute.

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