Indisputable physical calculations state that approximately 27 percent of the universe is dark matter, but there are indications that we might never see it. Now researchers in Denmark turn this somehow depressing scenario into an advantage and propose a new model for what dark matter might be — and how to test it.
By pushing the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to its limits, astronomers have shattered the cosmic distance record by measuring the distance to the most remote galaxy ever seen in the universe. The galaxy, named GN-z11, has a redshift of 11.1, which corresponds to 400 million years after the Big Bang when the universe was only three percent of its current age.
Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory to discover a jet from a very distant supermassive black hole being illuminated by the oldest light in the universe. This discovery shows that black holes with powerful jets may be more common than previously thought in the first few billion years after the Big Bang.
Galaxy clusters, which consist of thousands of galaxies, are important for exploring dark matter because they reside in a region where such matter is much denser than average. Scientists believe that the heavier a cluster is, the more dark matter it has in its environment. But new research suggests the connection is more complicated than that.
How did the universe begin? And what came before the Big Bang? Astrophysicists have asked these questions ever since discovering that our universe is expanding. New research suggests that subatomic heavy particles act as “primordial standard clocks,” offering a way of probing the beginning of space and time to determine which of the competing cosmological theories is correct.
At number 10 in our top stories of the year: one of the most perplexing problems of modern cosmology and astrophysics was solved. For decades scientists had puzzled over where all the lithium in stars had disappeared to. Fortunately for the Big Bang model, Italian scientists at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste discovered that it was the stars that were to blame.
Astronomers harnessing the combined power of NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have found the faintest object ever seen in the early universe. It existed about 400 million years after the big bang, 13.8 billion years ago. The new object is comparable in size to the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a diminutive satellite galaxy of our Milky Way.
ESO’s VISTA survey telescope has spied a horde of previously hidden massive galaxies that existed when the universe was in its infancy. By discovering and studying more of these galaxies than ever before, astronomers have, for the first time, found out exactly when such monster galaxies first appeared.
Researchers are sifting through an avalanche of data produced by one of the largest cosmological simulations ever performed. The simulation, run on the Titan supercomputer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, modelled the evolution of the universe from just 50 million years after the Big Bang to the present day.
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