dark matter

These Violent Collisions Could Be Producing Dark Matter

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A collision of two extraordinarily dense, collapsed stars in the distant universe is providing potential clues to the axion, a dark matter candidate first proposed half a century ago. Kara Swisher on All the Nonsense in the Tech Industry The stellar remnants are neutron stars, the corpses that remain after massive stars collapse in on … Read more

There’s a New Theory About Where Dark Matter Is Hiding

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But there may be opportunities to indirectly spot the signatures of those gravitons. One strategy Vafa and his collaborators are pursuing draws on large-scale cosmological surveys that chart the distribution of galaxies and matter. In those distributions, there might be “small differences in clustering behavior,” Obied said, that would signal the presence of dark gravitons. … Read more

9 Things You Didn’t Know About Black Holes

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An artist’s impression of GRB 221009A, which may have heralded the birth of a black hole.Image: NASA/Swift/Cruz deWilde Black holes. Despite their names, the enigmatic objects are opposite of vacuous. They are some of the universe’s densest objects, with masses ranging from the size of stars to several hundred million stars. Their gravitational fields are … Read more

Physicists Designed an Experiment to Turn Light Into Matter

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Plasma could be wrangled to collide photons and yield matter, according to physicists who ran simulations to explore the practical applications of a world-famous equation. Gizmodo’s Top Five Gadgets of 2023 The equation at work here is Einstein’s E = mc^2, which establishes a relationship between energy and mass; specifically, the equation holds that energy … Read more

The Milky Way’s Stars Reveal Its Turbulent Past

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To make maps of these structures, astronomers turn to individual stars. Each star’s composition records its birthplace, age, and natal ingredients, so studying starlight enables a form of galactic cartography—as well as genealogy. By situating stars in time and place, astronomers can retrace history and infer how the Milky Way was built, piece by piece, … Read more

The Euclid Space Telescope Is Off to a Faltering Start

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The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope launched from Earth on July 1 and has since been getting set up to begin its investigation of the dark universe. But the instrument commissioning hasn’t been rainbows and butterflies, as the telescope’s engineers and scientists have worked to untangle several issues that have come up in the … Read more

A New Map of the Universe, Painted With Cosmic Neutrinos

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The unique model of this story appeared in Quanta Journal. Of the 100 trillion neutrinos that cross via you each second, most come from the solar or Earth’s environment. However a smattering of the particles—these transferring a lot quicker than the remaining—traveled right here from highly effective sources farther away. For many years, astrophysicists have … Read more

Right here Comes Euclid, the Telescope That Will Seek for Darkish Power

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After Euclid blasts off, it would journey to a spot known as Lagrange level 2, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the place the telescope could have a transparent view of deep house whereas with the ability to talk with astronomers and revel in steady daylight on its photo voltaic panels. The telescope is supplied … Read more