andromeda, cosmic, dark matter, galaxies, globular clusters, greek mythology, local group, milky way, night sky, planets, spitzer space telescope, stars, sun, universe, vera rubin
In the grand tapestry of the cosmos, there exists a celestial wonder that has captured the imagination of humanity for eons — the Milky Way. Spanning vast stretches of the night sky, this cosmic masterpiece is more than just a distant spiral of stars. The Milky Way is humanity’s heavenly home, a beacon of mystery ...
Physicists believe most of the matter in the universe is made up of dark matter, an invisible substance that we only know about by its indirect effects on the stars and galaxies we can see. We’re not crazy! Without this “dark matter,” the universe as we see it would make no sense. But the nature ...
According to the Standard Model of cosmology, the vast majority of galaxies are surrounded by a dark matter halo. This halo is invisible, but its mass exerts a strong gravitational pull on galaxies in the vicinity. A new study led by the University of Bonn and the University of Saint Andrews (Scotland) challenges this view ...
In a new Nature Astronomy study, an international team led by astrophysicists from the University of California, Irvine and Pomona College report how, when tiny galaxies collide with bigger ones, the bigger galaxies can strip the smaller galaxies of their dark matter — matter that we can’t see directly, but that astrophysicists think must exist because, without ...
Primordial black holes created in the first instants after the Big Bang — tiny ones smaller than the head of a pin and supermassive ones covering billions of miles — may account for all of the dark matter in the universe. That’s the implication of a new model of the early universe created by astrophysicists ...
Researchers used computer modeling to study potential new phases of matter known as prethermal discrete time crystals (DTCs). It was thought that the properties of prethermal DTCs were reliant on quantum physics, the strange laws ruling particles at the subatomic scale. However, the researchers found that a simpler approach, based on classical physics, can be ...
The most accurate distance measurement yet of ultra-diffuse galaxy (UDG) NGC1052-DF2 (DF2) confirms beyond any doubt that it is lacking in dark matter. The newly measured distance of 22.1 +/-1.2 megaparsecs was obtained by an international team of researchers led by Zili Shen and Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University and Shany Danieli, a NASA Hubble ...
A new theoretical study has proposed a novel mechanism for the creation of supermassive black holes from dark matter. The international team finds that rather than the conventional formation scenarios involving “normal” matter, supermassive black holes could instead form directly from dark matter in high-density regions in the centers of galaxies. The result has key ...
A recent study suggests the possible existence of “stupendously large black holes” or SLABS, even larger than the supermassive black holes already observed in the centers of galaxies. The research, led by Queen Mary Emeritus Professor Bernard Carr in the School of Physics and Astronomy, together with F. Kühnel (Münich) and L. Visinelli (Frascati), investigated ...
New data from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope provides further evidence for tidal disruption in the galaxy NGC 1052-DF4. This result explains a previous finding that this galaxy is missing most of its dark matter. By studying the galaxy’s light and globular cluster distribution, astronomers have concluded that the gravitational forces of the neighboring galaxy ...