For years, textbooks painted the first stars as cosmic blowtorches – monstrously hot, lighting up the dark with ferocious energy. But a puzzling radio whisper from deep time suggests a quieter beginning, a chillier dawn that defies expectations. The mystery pivots on a faint hydrogen signal, stretched by the universe’s expansion and now echoing in ...
From a distance, the universe looks calm and almost empty, a vast black canvas scattered with lonely points of light. But as astronomers have learned over the past few decades, this first impression is spectacularly wrong: on the very largest scales, the cosmos is woven into a kind of three‑dimensional lace, a sprawling network ...
On the largest scales we can see, the universe is doing something deeply counterintuitive: instead of slowing down under the pull of gravity, galaxies are racing away from each other faster and faster. For more than two decades, this runaway expansion has been blamed on a vague, unsettling concept called dark energy, a kind ...
In the faintest reaches of the sky, where even large telescopes once saw only darkness, astronomers are now finding sprawling cities of ancient stars that should not, by any reasonable model, exist so early in cosmic history. These are the universe’s oldest known galaxies, blazing into view from a time when the cosmos was ...
Imagine a cosmic drill bit boring through the universe, not made of steel, but of galaxies – thousands of them – twisting together in a majestic, silent whirl. That is roughly what astronomers have just uncovered: a gigantic, rotating structure that behaves like a tornado made of galaxies, stretching across almost unimaginable distances. This ...
The universe is vast and mysterious, with over 85% of its mass composed of an invisible substance known as dark matter. Unlike ordinary matter, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it challenging to study directly. Scientists continue to delve deeper into this enigma, uncovering its role in cosmic phenomena and the ...
Picture this: somewhere in the vast darkness of space, two cosmic monsters are locked in a death spiral. These aren’t your average black holes – they’re giants, each containing the mass of dozens or even hundreds of suns. They’ve been orbiting each other for millions of years, slowly drawing closer. What happens next is one ...
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has found one of the strangest things in the vast cosmic menagerie: a celestial owl staring back at us from 11 billion light-years away. This strange structure is not just any old galactic formation; it is known as the “Cosmic Owl.” It’s the result of two very rare ring ...
