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74 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 20, 2026.
Stefano Profumo applied the Barbieri-Giudice fine-tuning measure, which asks how wildly a model's prediction swings when you nudge one input, to WIMPs, Higgs-portal particles and several ways the early universe could have made black holes. 'The tuning lives in the specific model, not in the kind of dark matter you started with.'
The INAF-led VST survey reached depths the Rubin Observatory won't hit for years. The satellites around NGC 5084 appear to line up in a plane, the same puzzling arrangement seen around the Milky Way.
Using the Large Binocular Telescope to read helium lines in 48 metal-poor galaxies, the LBT Yp Project pinned the primordial helium fraction at 0.2458 ± 0.0013, cut the uncertainty from about 2% to nearly 0.5%, and found no room for a fourth neutrino in the universe's first seconds.
The levitated sensor can register a nudge one-hundredth the width of an atom. Over a month of quiet nights it saw nothing — and that silence rules out a swath of ultraheavy dark matter nine orders of magnitude wide.
When a supermassive black hole switches its jets off, the leftover lobes were thought to glow for a long, slow stretch. A survey with MeerKAT found the afterlife is short — and earlier searches were looking for the wrong thing.
Yonsei University researchers say the June rebuttal to their work contains a methodological flaw that flattens the very effect it was measuring. Their corrected supernova results now line up with DESI.
Penn researchers used the Atacama Cosmology Telescope to watch galaxy clusters pull on each other at the largest scale ever measured — and squeezed the room left for modified-gravity alternatives to dark matter.
Nobody has ever detected a graviton. An NYU physicist found a way to hunt for them anyway — by treating million-light-year filaments of cosmic magnetic field as a detector.
Tidal torque theory says a galaxy's rotation was set before the galaxy existed, by uneven gravity tugging on the clump of matter that became it. A Xiamen University team reconstructed the primordial density field and found the fingerprint intact.
A survey of 1,428 galaxies in James Webb Space Telescope spectra finds that cosmic reionization was driven by a minority of extreme 'leakers,' not by the crowd.
A new analysis finds that if dark matter particles attract each other through a hidden force, they clump more efficiently but also get lighter as the universe expands — and the net effect slows the growth of cosmic structure rather than speeding it up.
A model proposing that dark matter is made of at least two kinds of particles — a heavier one that sinks toward galactic centers and a lighter one that drifts outward — could resolve puzzles that have frustrated cosmologists for years.
A massive, chemically mature spiral with a 14,700-light-year central bar existed just over a billion years after the Big Bang — a structure astronomers thought could not form so early.
Astronomers argue the universe's X-ray-silent, seemingly overmassive black holes are actually smaller objects feeding at furious rates — a finding that could defuse one of cosmology's freshest crises.
A University of Birmingham experiment shows the flow of time can arise from a quantum system's own behavior, no external clock required. The setup could let scientists test ideas about the Big Bang in the lab.
Data from the DESI survey point to a lopsided cosmos, with galaxy patterns stretching across billions of light-years that clash with a bedrock assumption behind modern cosmology.
The European space telescope found 31 ancient quasars — two of them shining from when the universe was just 5% of its current age.
So dim it nearly escaped detection, the newly confirmed dwarf galaxy And 35 is about 12.5 billion years old and offers a rare window into the universe's first generations of stars — and the nature of dark matter.
The galaxy M1149-BSG-z5 already had a central bar of stars less than 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang — a structure astronomers assumed couldn't exist so early, and one that rewrites the timeline for how galaxies grow up.
Physicists say a collision between two objects lighter than the Sun, detected last November, could point to black holes born in the first instant after the Big Bang — and to the identity of dark matter.
The faint galaxy DF9 joins two earlier oddballs in a straight line of objects that appear to lack the invisible mass thought to bind galaxies together — hinting at a violent birth.
The most detailed spectrum yet of one of these ancient objects strongly favors a black hole cloaked in hot gas over a galaxy full of stars — evidence, researchers say, of heavy black-hole seeds being born in real time.
A gravitational wave from an impossibly light object has scientists asking whether primordial black holes could explain dark matter.
Transfer learning slashes the cost of cosmological simulations, yet a Princeton team warns the same shortcut can trick AI into missing real discoveries.
Spectra from a glowing red object called GLIMPSE-17775 reveal a supermassive black hole wrapped in a dense cocoon of gas just 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang.
A Leiden University team's 'Quantum Memory Matrix' theory suggests spacetime stores an imprint of every interaction, a single framework its authors say could also resolve the black-hole information paradox.
Revolutionary gravastar theory suggests massive stellar collapse triggers miniature universe creation, challenging conventional black hole formation.
Researchers found that a controversial 2025 study made key mistakes when analyzing supernova data, confirming cosmic acceleration remains strong.
Scientists propose that massive stellar collapse might trigger the birth of a tiny cosmos inside the dying star.
Transfer learning dramatically reduces simulation costs for cosmological research, yet scientists warn the technique could overlook truly novel phenomena.
New research reveals artificial intelligence can become too dependent on familiar patterns, potentially overlooking evidence of something truly new in the universe.
Transfer learning dramatically reduces simulation costs but may struggle to recognize truly groundbreaking discoveries, new study reveals.
Scientists demonstrate machine learning can slash simulation costs by factor of ten, yet warn AI might overlook truly novel physics by relying too heavily on familiar patterns.
Using the James Webb Space Telescope and a cosmic magnifying glass, scientists measured a dormant giant in a galaxy 10 billion light-years away, smashing the previous distance record fifteenfold.
Astronomers were stunned to find that XMM-VID1-2075, a massive galaxy formed less than two billion years after the Big Bang, shows no sign of rotation — a trait normally seen only in much older, evolved systems.
New simulations suggest small 'seed' black holes gorged on gas faster than thought possible, explaining the monsters the James Webb telescope found just after the Big Bang.
In a 'little red dot' 13 billion light-years away, a supermassive black hole makes up most of the object's mass — a finding scientists call a paradigm shift.
Physicists at the University of Portsmouth argue that the 'bridges' in Einstein's equations are not tunnels through space but mirrors of time — a framework they say could resolve the black hole information paradox and hint that our universe predates the Big Bang.
XMM-VID1-2075, identified by a UC Davis–led team using JWST's NIRSpec integral-field spectrograph and published in Nature Astronomy on May 4, has a rotation-to-dispersion ratio below 0.3 — making it dynamically indistinguishable from fossil galaxies that should not exist for another five billion years.
MIT physicists develop new method to detect dark matter interactions hidden within cosmic collisions, with one LIGO signal showing potential evidence.
UC Riverside-led COSMOS-Web survey resolves filaments and voids that earlier maps smeared together, revealing that galaxy clusters were assembling much faster than the leading dark-matter simulations predict.
Groundbreaking study suggests fundamental constants sit within incredibly narrow range that allows biological fluids to flow properly inside living cells.
New research suggests fundamental constants appear precisely tuned to allow liquids to flow properly inside living cells, making life possible.
New research suggests fundamental constants exist within an incredibly narrow range that allows liquids to flow properly inside living cells.
Catalogued EGS-z11-R0 contains carbon, multiple stellar generations and thick interstellar dust at a redshift of 11 — features that current cosmological models say should require a billion years or more to assemble.
A new Nature paper from the Niels Bohr Institute slashes black-hole mass estimates 100-fold and finally explains the strange crimson points scattered across Webb's deep-field images.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument collaboration completed the largest high-resolution cosmic map ever created, ahead of schedule despite wildfire disruptions.
Modeling shows axion-like particles in a narrow mass window can trigger direct collapse of gas clouds into billion-solar-mass black holes — the kind James Webb keeps finding too early in cosmic history.
Hai-Bo Yu's model of dense, million-solar-mass dark-matter clumps explains anomalies in gravitational lensing, stellar streams, and satellite galaxies that have stumped the standard cold dark matter picture.
New research suggests ancient ripples in spacetime could have transformed into the invisible particles that shape galaxies today.
Scientists completed the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever created, gathering unprecedented data that hints dark energy may behave in unexpected ways.
New research suggests ancient ripples in spacetime could have transformed into particles that became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.
New research suggests ancient ripples in spacetime could have transformed into particles that became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.
Researchers discover that spacetime ripples from the Big Bang may have transformed into particles that became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.
A new paper in Physical Review Letters proposes that stochastic gravitational waves generated in the first moments after the Big Bang could have been converted into dark matter particles — a mechanism never before proposed that could solve one of physics' most fundamental mysteries.
The HETDEX survey has increased the known number of these cosmic structures tenfold, revealing the vast hydrogen reservoirs that powered galaxy formation 10-12 billion years ago.
New Year 2 data from 7.8 million galaxies shows dark energy may be evolving over time, adding to a growing tension with the prevailing Lambda-CDM model.
New theory suggests dark matter consists of multiple components that interact differently depending on their cosmic environment.
A Nobel laureate-led team at STScI measured the universe's expansion rate at 73.50 ± 0.81 km/s/Mpc using a new unified statistical framework, confirming beyond doubt that the 'Hubble tension' between early- and late-universe measurements cannot be explained away.
International astronomers led by Stockholm University's Oskar Klein Centre discovered SN 2025mkn, a Type II supernova 9 billion light-years away whose light is bent and amplified by an entire foreground galaxy, creating a natural telescope of unprecedented power.
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