cosmology

FOR a $10 billion instrument, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spends a lot of its time staring at nothing. The shots of deep space this produces are remarkably beautiful, transforming an apparently empty sky…

  GLASS-z12, a very early galaxy viewed by the James Webb Space TelescopeNaidu et al, P. Oesch, T. Treu, GLASS-JWST, NASA/CSA/ESA/STScI Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to reveal…

The way Morgane König sees it, questioning how we came to be in the universe is one of the most fundamental parts of being human. When she was 12 years old, König decided the place to find answers was in…

A vast survey of more than 25 million galaxies confirms we still can’t be sure how much matter clusters together, suggesting something is awry with the standard model of cosmology

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope has sent back its first science images, and they are absolutely stunning. Each of the five images of sparkling cosmic objects will eventually be a part of…

GRB221009A surrounded by dust rings, pictured by the XMM-Newton X-ray space observatoryESA/XMM-Newton/M. Rigoselli (INAF) The unexpectedly powerful light from the brightest space explosion ever seen may mean that…

Yureisaito/Artgrab/Henvry/iStock FOR an experiment designed to help us find evidence of other universes, it looks surprisingly modest. As Zoran Hadzibabic walks me into the lab, it feels more like a classroom,…

How will the universe end?NASA/ESA/Hubble The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we hand over the keyboard to a physicist or two to tell you about fascinating ideas from their…

When we look out into space, all of the astrophysical objects that we see are embedded in magnetic fields. This is true not only in the neighborhood of stars and planets, but also in the deep space between…

A primordial black hole falling into a neutron star would sink to its centre and devour it in seconds, and we might be able to detect…