Physics
World's Most Sensitive Lab Search for Axions Finds Nothing and Narrows the Hunt
Germany's ALPS II experiment shot a laser through a wall of magnets to look for the hypothetical particle, and its first results set robust new limits.
Topic
Dark matter
81 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: November 12, 2026.
PhysicsPhysicists Say a 26.7-Billion-Year-Old Universe Could Work Without Dark Matter or Dark Energy
University of Ottawa researchers tested a 'tired light' model with changing physical constants against galaxy rotation, cosmic expansion and early-element formation.
PhysicsLevitated Micromagnet Spins 2.3 Million Times a Second, a Record, in Dark Matter Search
A 30-micrometer magnet floating in a superconducting trap reached 138 million revolutions per minute and set preliminary limits on axion-like dark matter.
Physics'Stupendously Large' Primordial Black Holes Ruled Out as Dark Matter by Mainz Physicists
A Physical Review Letters analysis finds black holes of at least 100 billion solar masses would leave patterns in the cosmic microwave background that astronomers do not see.
ScienceWebb Counts 104 Magnified Stars in the Dragon Galaxy, a Record, and Hints at Fuzzy Dark Matter
JWST images of a galaxy 6.5 billion light-years away more than double the previous count of 44 individual stars brightened by gravitational lensing.
PhysicsChina's FAST Telescope Finds a Starless Hydrogen Cloud That May Be a True 'Dark Galaxy'
The isolated cloud J1351+0039 holds about 130 million suns of mass and shows no stars in deep optical images.
PhysicsSimulations Suggest Two-State Dark Matter Could Explain Giant Early Cluster El Gordo
The 7-billion-light-year-away collision is so massive for its age that some astronomers call it a challenge to the standard cosmological model. A new study finds dark matter that can be excited in collisions fits best, with a caveat.
PhysicsAI Finds 70 New Gravitational Lenses in the Largest 2D Map of the Universe, Astronomers Confirm
A neural network sifted a 5.6-trillion-pixel sky survey, and spectroscopy on the Very Large Telescope confirmed 70 of 76 candidates as true cosmic magnifying glasses.
PhysicsCosmoCube, a Suitcase-Sized Probe, Would Listen From the Moon's Far Side for the Universe's Dark Ages
Cambridge-led researchers plan a lunar orbiter to catch a faint hydrogen radio signal from before the first stars, a window Earth's radio noise blocks.
PhysicsSeven-Year Dark Matter Hunt Tests Whether the Universe's Missing Mass Has 'Dark Nuclei'
The DarkSide-50 detector under Italy's Gran Sasso mountain found no ultraheavy composite dark matter, but ruled out a wide range of its possible properties.
PhysicsVerlinde's Emergent Gravity Predicts a Key Dark Matter Pattern With No Dark Matter at All
Galaxies whose brightness differs 400,000-fold share nearly the same central dark matter surface density. A Sejong University physicist derived 170 solar masses per square parsec from gravity alone, inside the observed range.
PhysicsFirst 3D Wave Simulations of 'Fuzzy' Dark Matter Match a Real Lensed Quasar
If dark matter is made of ultralight particles that ripple like waves, those ripples should shift the multiple images of a distant quasar. The simulations matched a real lensed quasar better than standard models.
PhysicsPhysicists Dismiss Primordial Black Holes as a 'Fine-Tuned' Dark Matter Idea and Treat Particles as the 'Natural' Default
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.'
ScienceAstronomers Stared at the Deepest Images Ever Taken of Three Galaxies and Found 47 'Ghost' Dwarfs Hiding in the Dark
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.
PhysicsThree Odd Crystals Could Make Dark Matter Detectors 100 to 1,000 Times More Sensitive, and Two of Them Would Show the Signal Rising and Falling as Earth Turns
Titanium diselenide, strontium ruthenate and hole-doped diamond host low-energy electron waves called plasmons that amplify the faint kick a light dark matter particle would deliver, physicists report in Physical Review Letters. All three can be made today.
PhysicsThey Pointed One of the World's Largest Telescopes at a Gas Cloud for Two Nights and Found No Stars at All
Ultra-deep imaging of Cloud-9 with the Gran Telescopio Canarias reached 31.4 magnitudes per square arcsecond and caps any stellar mass at 16,000 suns, against a million suns' worth of hydrogen.
PhysicsRice Physicists Floated a Grain-of-Sand Magnet and Waited for Dark Matter to Knock It
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.
PhysicsChina's FAST Telescope Found Two Hydrogen Clouds Near M51 With No Stars in Them at All
Each holds about three million suns' worth of hydrogen inside a halo weighing 3.7 billion solar masses. If the interpretation holds, they are dark matter halos that never lit up.
PhysicsA Black Hole the Weight of a Loaded Semitruck Can Live Inside a Star, If Dark Matter Feeds It
Hawking radiation should evaporate anything that small in an instant. Three physicists calculated the point where dark matter falling in outruns the radiation leaking out.
ScienceNASA’s Roman Telescope Is on Its Way to a Point a Million Miles Out. It Will Send Home 1.4 Terabytes a Day
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope lifted off on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26 a.m. on August 30. Its 300-megapixel infrared camera surveys the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble.
PhysicsA Dark Matter Detector Under an Italian Mountain Just Caught the Sun’s Faintest Neutrinos at 17,000 Electron Volts
XENONnT pushed the direct detection threshold for neutrinos lower than anyone has managed before. The signal comes from the proton-proton fusion that powers the Sun.
PhysicsA Xenon Tank a Mile Under South Dakota Logged One Event It Cannot Explain
LUX-ZEPLIN found a single high-energy interaction sitting exactly where dark matter should appear and where almost no background should. At 2.6 sigma, it is nowhere close to a discovery.
PhysicsA Mile Under Ontario, 24 Crystals Colder Than Deep Space Just Started Hunting Light Dark Matter
SuperCDMS SNOLAB has begun taking its first science data. Its shielding includes lead salvaged from ancient ballast on the floor of the Mediterranean.
PhysicsAstronomers Tested Newton's Inverse-Square Law Across Hundreds of Millions of Light-Years. It Held
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.
PhysicsAstronomers Simulated 15,000 Star Streams With No Dark Matter Clumps at All. Only 70 Came Out Smooth
A University of Washington team found that a galaxy's own lumpy disk can carve the same gaps and kinks astronomers have been reading as fingerprints of dark matter.
PhysicsThe First Limits on Dark Matter Decaying Into Gravitons Came From the Magnetic Threads Between Galaxies
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.
PhysicsA Tank of Liquid Xenon Under an Italian Mountain Just Pushed Dark Matter Into the 'Neutrino Fog'
XENONnT found nothing — and that nothing is the tightest limit yet on axion-like particles and dark photons. It is the first detector to reach the boundary where the sun's own neutrinos start masquerading as a signal.
PhysicsPhysicists Turned the Entire Planet Into a Dark Matter Detector and Tightened the Limits 100-Fold
A Japanese team used the cavity between Earth's surface and its ionosphere as a natural resonator, then searched a decade of magnetic-field recordings from a Scottish observatory for the signature of axions.
PhysicsDark Matter May Feel a Force of Its Own — and It Does the Opposite of What Cosmologists Assumed
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.
PhysicsNew Theory Says Dark Matter Comes in Two 'Flavors' That Slowly Separate Inside Galaxies
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.
PhysicsPhysicists Build a Quantum Sensor That Cancels Its Own Noise, Clearing a Path to Detect Dark Matter
An Imperial College team paired two clouds of ultracold strontium atoms under a single laser, letting them subtract the vibrations that have long blinded such instruments to faint cosmic signals.
ScienceNew Cosmic Map Suggests the Universe Isn't the Same in Every Direction — and Cosmology May Need a Rethink
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.
ScienceAstronomers Find One of the Faintest Galaxies Ever, an Ancient Speck Orbiting Andromeda With Just 46 Stars
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.
PhysicsA Strange LIGO Signal May Be the First Real Fingerprint of 'Primordial' Black Holes From the Dawn of Time
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.
ScienceAstronomers Find a Third Galaxy With No Dark Matter, Strung Along a Mysterious Cosmic Trail
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.
PhysicsRice Physicists Design a Tunable 'SQWARE' Chip to Hunt Axion Dark Matter With a Magnetic Field
A proposed semiconductor detector would convert theoretical dark-matter particles into light and tune itself simply by changing a magnetic field, potentially opening mass ranges that have long eluded searches.
PhysicsA Strange LIGO Signal May Be the First Sign of Black Holes Born at the Dawn of Time
A gravitational wave from an impossibly light object has scientists asking whether primordial black holes could explain dark matter.
- Science
AI Could Speed the Hunt for New Physics Tenfold — but Scientists Found a Catch
Transfer learning slashes the cost of cosmological simulations, yet a Princeton team warns the same shortcut can trick AI into missing real discoveries.
PhysicsPhysicists Propose the Universe 'Remembers,' Offering a New Path to Dark Matter and Dark Energy
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.
- Physics
Finnish Physicists Measure an Energy Pulse Smaller Than a Zeptojoule, a Record for Quantum Sensing
A superconducting calorimeter at Aalto University detected just 0.83 zeptojoules — a sensitivity that could sharpen quantum computers and even help hunt for dark matter.
- Science
Webb Telescope Unveils the Most Detailed Map of the Cosmic Web Ever Made
Using its largest survey to date, the James Webb Space Telescope traced the vast network of filaments and voids connecting more than 164,000 galaxies back to when the universe was just a billion years old.
PhysicsFinnish Physicists Measure an Energy Pulse Smaller Than a Zeptojoule, Setting a Record for Sensitivity
A superconducting detector built at Aalto University registered just 0.83 zeptojoules — about the work needed to lift a single red blood cell one nanometer — a milestone for quantum computing and the hunt for dark matter.
PhysicsAfter 87 Years, Physicists Capture the 'Ghost' Migdal Effect — a New Window on Dark Matter
A Chinese team reported in Nature the first direct observation of a 1939 prediction: an electron flung from a recoiling atom, a trick that could finally reveal lightweight dark matter.
PhysicsUltra-Sensitive Quantum Sensor Detects Energy Below One Zeptojoule, Could Hunt Dark Matter
Finnish researchers achieve breakthrough precision that could improve quantum computers and enable detection of elusive dark matter particles from space.
- Physics
Scientists Develop Ultra-Sensitive Quantum Sensor Capable of Detecting Dark Matter Particles
Finnish researchers achieve breakthrough detection of energy below one zeptojoule, opening new possibilities for quantum computing and astrophysics research.
PhysicsBlack Holes May Reveal Dark Matter Secrets Through Gravitational Wave Fingerprints
MIT physicists develop new method to detect dark matter interactions hidden within cosmic collisions, with one LIGO signal showing potential evidence.
- Physics
Gravitational Waves May Carry First Dark Matter Fingerprints From Black Hole Collisions
MIT physicists have developed a new method to search for dark matter signatures in ripples from merging black holes, with one LIGO signal showing promising results.
ScienceNASA's Roman Space Telescope Moves Up Launch to September 2026
Accelerated timeline brings infrared observatory ahead of original May 2027 deadline to explore dark energy, dark matter, and exoplanets.
- Physics
Gravitational Waves May Carry First Fingerprints of Dark Matter from Colliding Black Holes
MIT physicists detect potential dark matter signature in LIGO data, offering new way to study the universe's most mysterious substance.
PhysicsJames Webb Telescope Stitches 164,000 Galaxies Into the Clearest Map Ever of the Cosmic Web Just a Billion Years After the Big Bang
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.
ScienceAstronomers Capture Sharpest Image Ever of Cosmic Web's Hidden Structure
Scientists revealed a 3-million-light-year filament connecting galaxies from 12 billion years ago, offering new insights into how galaxies form and evolve.
- Science
First-Ever Direct Image of Cosmic Web Reveals Universe's Hidden Structure
Astronomers capture the clearest view of a cosmic filament stretching 3 million light-years, offering insight into how galaxies formed 12 billion years ago.
PhysicsUndergraduate Students Build 'Cosmic Radio' to Hunt for Dark Matter Particles
Hamburg university students construct functional axion detector with limited resources, establishing new experimental limits on dark matter properties.
ScienceUC Riverside Study: Decaying Dark Matter Could Have Seeded the Universe's First Supermassive Black Holes
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.
PhysicsSelf-Interacting Dark Matter Solves Three Cosmic Puzzles at Once, UC Riverside Theorist Reports
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.
- Physics
Students Build Revolutionary 'Cosmic Radio' to Hunt for Dark Matter Particles
Undergraduate researchers from Hamburg University constructed their own dark matter detector and used it to search for axions, establishing new experimental limits despite working with limited resources.
PhysicsGravitational Waves May Have Created Dark Matter in Early Universe
New research suggests ancient ripples in spacetime could have transformed into the invisible particles that shape galaxies today.
- Physics
Scientists Discover Gravitational Waves May Have Created Dark Matter in Early Universe
New research suggests ancient ripples in spacetime could have transformed into particles that became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.
- Physics
Gravitational Waves May Have Created Dark Matter in Universe's First Moments
New research suggests ancient ripples in spacetime could have transformed into particles that became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.
- Physics
Scientists Create Ancient Dark Matter Using Gravitational Wave Breakthrough
Researchers discover that spacetime ripples from the Big Bang may have transformed into particles that became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.
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