Attention to the Unseen

Discover reports: In the universe’s earliest moments, it took the form of a scalding soup filled with particles called quarks and gluons. These particles zipped through liquidy plasma for just a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Now, physicists have recreated these conditions by producing tiny droplets of the same primordial soup that filled the universe right after it was born. Making a modern version of the primordial soup — known as quark-gluon plasma — entails smashing…

Read More Read More

By Phil Wiseman, University of Southampton and Mark Sullivan, University of Southampton A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism. Scientists had long known that the universe was expanding. But in the late 1990s, researchers discovered that this expansion…

Read More Read More

Jay Bennett writes: When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came…

Read More Read More

Steve Nadis writes: For those who see the world as a dark place, the universe seems to offer little solace. According to current estimates, approximately 70% of the stuff that makes up the cosmos consists of dark energy, an unknown force that pushes space to expand. And another 25% consists of dark matter, a mysterious material that holds galaxies together. But semantically speaking, dark energy and dark matter are not so much “dark” as they are invisible. They do not…

Read More Read More

Live Science reports: There’s a central crisis in cosmology: Different measurements yield different values for the expansion rate of the universe. Now, a comprehensive analysis combining decades of independent measurements suggests that this discrepancy is not due to error or uncertainty; instead, it’s a potential pathway to new physics beyond the standard cosmological model. Astronomers calculate the universe’s expansion rate, or Hubble constant, in two ways. One method is to use measurements of the distance to the cosmic microwave background…

Read More Read More

Paul Sutter writes: The universe is a vast, unseen loom, weaving galaxies into an intricate cosmic web through invisible threads of matter. This cosmic web is the fundamental scaffolding of everything we see, dictating where galaxies form and how they evolve. Much of this architecture remains a mystery, its delicate pathways hidden, and uncovering these cosmic threads requires new eyes and persistent effort. But a new observation has helped us trace one in the Ursa Major Supergroup. In a preprint…

Read More Read More