The universe has different time zones

This supernova remnant that's about 16,000 light years from Earth is from a particular class of supernovae called type Ia that astronomers use to measure cosmic distances. (University of Texas/Chandra X-ray Observatory/NASA)

There's a cosmic controversy brewing in the universe. It centers around the mysterious force known as "dark energy."

This concept emerged from observations of distant supernovae that, in the late 1990s, seemed to indicate the universe had been expanding at a faster and faster pace ever since the big bang. Astronomers made these observations from a certain type of supernovae that explode in such a way that allows astronomers to calculate their distance from us.

The picture emerging from that data didn't fit with previous explanations of the universe that theorized its expansion, driven by the big bang, would eventually slow down as gravity took over. This led scientists to come up with the idea that a force they called "dark energy" pushed against gravity to make the universe expand faster and faster, in keeping with the supernovae data.     READ MORE...

Largest Structure in the Universe

Is it possible to understand the universe without understanding the largest structures that reside in it? In principle, not likely. In practical terms? Definitely not. Extremely large objects can distort our understanding of the cosmos.


Astronomers have found the largest structure in the universe so far, named Quipu after an Incan measuring system. It contains a shocking 200 quadrillion solar masses.


Astronomy is an endeavor where extremely large numbers are a part of daily discourse. But even in astronomy, 200 quadrillion is a number so large it's rarely encountered. And if Quipu's extremely large mass doesn't garner attention, its size surely does. 

The object, called a superstructure, is more than 400 megaparsecs long. That's more than 1.3 billion light-years.     READ MORE...

Dark Matter and Gravity

Key Takeaways

1. Out there in the Universe, it isn’t just normal matter that’s present, but dark matter as well: a mysterious, invisible substance that, as far as we can tell, gravitates, but doesn’t interact through any other means.
2. When we look at the gravitational effects that massive objects have on space, we find dark matter forms a diffuse, halo-and-filament-like network of structure.
3. Normal matter, however, collapses into stars, galaxies, planets, and much more. If dark matter gravitates, and does so the same as normal matter does, then what prevents it from collapsing?

Here in our Universe, it may be the normal matter that we can directly detect, measure, manipulate, experiment with, and observe, but it’s the dark matter that represents most of the mass in the Universe. 

Whereas all the “stuff” that the planets, stars, gas, plasma, and dust are composed of represents about 4.9% of the total energy in the Universe, the mysterious dark matter — whose nature is unknown but for which the observational astrophysical evidence is overwhelming — makes up a whopping 27% of the cosmic energy budget. 

Only dark energy, making up 68% of the Universe, is more important from an energy density perspective.     READ MORE...

New Structure Discovered

Largest Structure In The 

Near Universe Discovered 

130,000 Times More 

Massive Than Our Galaxy

James Webb Space Telescope Validates Expansion

Through the lens of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, scientists are zeroing in on the Hubble Constant, a vital measure that indicates the universe’s expansion rate.

Recent studies, especially those involving the JWST, have provided more precise measurements, crucial for understanding the universe’s broader properties.

Understanding the Hubble Constant
In recent years, we’ve witnessed incredible advancements in our understanding of the universe, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Both telescopes have revolutionized astronomy, uncovering stunning discoveries. 

Among their shared focus has been refining the Hubble Constant, a key measurement that links the speed at which distant galaxies are moving away with their distances. A recent study confirms that JWST has validated earlier findings from HST, providing more precision in this critical measurement.     READ MORE...

Webb Telescope Confirms: Universe is Expanding

WASHINGTON, Dec 9 (Reuters) - Fresh corroboration of the perplexing observation that the universe is expanding more rapidly than expected has scientists pondering the cause - perhaps some unknown factor involving the mysterious cosmic components dark energy and dark matter.

Two years of data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have now validated the Hubble Space Telescope's earlier finding that the rate of the universe's expansion is faster - by about 8% - than would be expected based on what astrophysicists know of the initial conditions in the cosmos and its evolution over billions of years. The discrepancy is called the Hubble Tension.  READ MORE...

NASA: We Were Incorrect About the Universe

For decades, scientists have been grappling with what is considered to be the most fundamental question about the cosmos: How fast is our universe expanding?

The rate of expansion influences everything from how galaxies form to how they might one day drift apart.

Determining the expansion rate of the universe, a number called the “Hubble constant,” shapes our entire understanding of the cosmos, its age, and its ultimate fate.

“Hubble tension” expansion conundrum
Unfortunately, though many brilliant minds have dedicated their lives to finding the answer to this riddle, all who have tried thus far have failed, running repeatedly into a brick wall that has come to be known as the “Hubble tension.”

Adam Riess, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has been at the forefront of this debate. “With measurement errors negated, what remains is the real and exciting possibility that we have misunderstood the universe,” Riess admitted.     READ MORE...

Largest Universe Simulation EVER

The world’s largest simulation of the cosmos lays a new computational foundation for simultaneous extreme-scale dark matter and astrophysical investigations.

Researchers used the Frontier supercomputer to conduct the largest astrophysical simulation to date, simulating both atomic and dark matter across universe-sized scales. This was facilitated by advancements in HACC, a code developed to run on exascale-class supercomputers, now capable of performing quintillion calculations per second. 

This breakthrough in cosmological hydrodynamics simulations will aid in matching observational data with theoretical models.

Universe Simulation Breakthrough

The universe just expanded—at least in the realm of computer simulations.

Earlier this month, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory harnessed the power of the world’s fastest supercomputer to execute the largest astrophysical simulation of the universe ever achieved.   READ MORE...

An Anti-Universe Twin

Our universe has an anti-universe twin moving backwards in time, study finds

Seconds after the Big Bang, the Universe exhibited an astonishing simplicity. Observations reveal a spatially flat, radiation-dominated cosmos described by a Friedmann–Robertson–Walker (FRW) metric. This early state included small, Gaussian, and nearly scale-invariant scalar perturbations.

However, there is no evidence for primordial vector or tensor perturbations, nor for cosmic defects. These observations align with the prevailing inflationary model, which suggests that an era of rapid expansion preceded the Universe's observable state.


Despite its utility, inflation theory introduces complexities and arbitrary parameters, which many physicists view as unnecessary. A team led by Neil Turok and Latham Boyle challenges this conventional framework, offering an alternative grounded in the symmetry of the Universe itself.         READ MORE...

Our Universe is OLDER Than Originally Believed

In a groundbreaking discovery, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has presented data that directly challenges our current understanding of the universe. For years, cosmologists have pegged the universe's age at approximately 13.8 billion years. Yet, the new JWST findings suggest that this may be a vast underestimation. But how has one telescope managed to disrupt such a long-held belief?


The universe's secrets are vast, but none has been as puzzling as the presence of 'impossible early galaxies'—so named due to their peculiar formation periods.


According to existing models, these galaxies, emerging during the cosmic dawn, roughly 500 to 800 million years post-big bang, shouldn't have evolved disks and bulges so quickly. "It's akin to seeing a toddler with the wisdom of an octogenarian," says a scientist, explaining the paradox.     READ MORE...

Our Universe's Beginning

One of the biggest and also the toughest questions in modern astronomy is the origins of the universe. How did it come into existence? How did it evolve into what we know today? Though there’s still a lot that scientists don’t know, they do have a general idea of how energy, matter, stars, and galaxies were formed.

When trying to find answers for the origins of the universe, we need to look at the bigger picture — that is, how scientists view the early moments, minutes, years, or millions of years of the world we see today. Until relatively recently, this topic was largely approached from a religious perspective. Even when scientific observations didn’t align with biblical accounts of creation, scientists were hesitant to formulate their own theories.

In the first half of the 20th century, physicists and astronomers fiercely debated the idea that there was no true “beginning” to the universe — that it had always existed. While this assumption hasn’t been definitively disproven, it has since become more of a fringe theory.

Instead, science presents a completely different picture of the universe’s birth and early evolution, and we’re eager to explore it with you.     READ MORE...

Dark Matter Does Not Exist

For centuries, scientists have grappled with the fundamental forces that govern our universe, chief among them being gravity, and more recently, dark matter.

Gravity is the invisible force that attracts objects with mass towards each other, playing a crucial role in shaping the cosmos, from the formation of galaxies to the orbits of planets.

However, as our understanding of the universe has expanded, so too have the mysteries surrounding it.

Dark matter dilemma
One of the most perplexing of these mysteries is the concept of dark matter, a hypothetical form of matter that is believed to make up a significant portion of the universe’s total mass.

Unlike ordinary matter, which we can see and interact with directly, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it invisible to telescopes and other detecting instruments.  READ MORE...

Galaxy with Impossible Light Signature

This region of space, viewed first iconically by Hubble and later by JWST, shows an animation that switches between the two. Both images still have fundamental limitations, as they were acquired from within our inner Solar System, where the presence of zodiacal light influences the noise floor of our instruments and cannot easily be removed. The extra presence of point-like red objects in JWST images, also known as “little red dots,” has finally been explained, but other puzzles still remain.






Since its launch in December of 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has spotted record-setting objects all across the Universe, including at the greatest distances ever seen.

Many distant galaxies are energetic and show signatures of emission lines from specific atoms and molecules, particularly hydrogen. However, the Lyman-α line has never been seen earlier than 550 million years after the Big Bang.

Until now. With the discovery and spectroscopic follow-up on galaxy JADES-GS-z13-1-LA, we now have strong evidence for that emission line from a galaxy just 326 million years after the Big Bang. The question is: how?              READ MORE...

Center of the Universe

The universe is undeniably vast, and from our perspective, it may seem like Earth is in the middle of everything. But is there a center of the cosmos, and if so, where is it? If the Big Bang started the universe, then where did it all come from, and where is it going?


To start tackling these questions, let's go back about 100 years. In the 1920s, astronomer Edwin Hubble made two amazing back-to-back discoveries: Early in the decade, he found that "island universes," now known as galaxies, sit very far away from us; later that decade, he discovered that, on average, all galaxies are receding away from us.     READ MORE...

A Star Older Than the Universe

For as long as humans have contemplated the Universe, we’ve marveled at the vastness of it all. Was our Universe infinite? Was it eternal? Or did it spring into existence a finite amount of time ago? Over the 20th and 21st centuries, these existential questions for all-time have, one-by-one, fallen into the realm of science, and now have the best answers we’ve ever been able to assemble. 

As of today, in 2024, we can confidently state that we actually know how old the Universe is: 13.8 billion years old, marking time at the start of the hot Big Bang. If we could step back through time, we’d find that the universe as we know it was a very different place early on. Modern stars and galaxies arose from a series of gravitational mergers of smaller-mass objects, which themselves consisted of younger, more pristine stars. 

At the earliest times, there were no stars or galaxies, and even farther, no neutral atoms or stable atomic nuclei, going all the way back to the hot Big Bang. Today, astronomers and astrophysicists who study the early universe confidently state its age with an uncertainty of no more than ~1%: a remarkable achievement.      READ MORE...

Dark Energy Used to Map Universe

With 5,000 tiny robots in a mountaintop telescope, researchers can look 11 billion years into the past. The light from far-flung objects in space is just now reaching the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), enabling us to map our cosmos as it was in its youth and trace its growth to what we see today.


Understanding how our universe has evolved is tied to how it ends, and to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy, the unknown ingredient causing our universe to expand faster and faster.

To study dark energy's effects over the past 11 billion years, DESI has created the largest 3D map of our cosmos ever constructed, with the most precise measurements to date. This is the first time scientists have measured the expansion history of the young universe with a precision better than 1%, giving us our best view yet of how the universe evolved.  READ MORE...

Deciphering the Dark

Dark energy’s role in propelling the universe’s accelerated expansion presents a pivotal challenge in astrophysics, driving ongoing research and space missions dedicated to uncovering the nature of this mysterious force.

Some 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began with a rapid expansion we call the Big Bang. After this initial expansion, which lasted a fraction of a second, gravity started to slow the universe down. But the cosmos wouldn’t stay this way. Nine billion years after the universe began, its expansion started to speed up, driven by an unknown force that scientists have named dark energy.

But what exactly is dark energy?  The short answer is: We don’t know. But we do know that it exists, it’s making the universe expand at an accelerating rate, and approximately 68.3 to 70% of the universe is dark energy.     READ MORE...

Alone in the Universe

Are we alone in the universe?

It's a question that's been posed again and again. Carl Sagan posed it in the 1970s as a NASA mission scientist as the agency prepared to send its twin Viking landers to Mars.

And nearly 50 years after the first of two landers touched down on Mars, we're no closer to an answer as to whether there's life — out there.

Scientists haven't stopped looking. In fact, they've expanded their gaze to places like Saturn's largest moon, Titan and Jupiter's moon Europa.

The search for life beyond planet earth continues to captivate. And NASA has upcoming missions to both moons. Could we be closer to answering that question Carl Sagan asked some 50 years ago?     READ MORE...

The Dawn of Time

We finally know what brought light to the dark and formless void of the early Universe.


According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.


"This discovery unveils the crucial role played by ultra-faint galaxies in the early Universe's evolution," says astrophysicist Iryna Chemerynska of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris.


"They produce ionizing photons that transform neutral hydrogen into ionized plasma during cosmic reionization. It highlights the importance of understanding low-mass galaxies in shaping the Universe's history."     READ MORE...

Materialism Matters

A short disclaimer before we read further: I’m a materialist. Materialism is a branch of philosophy to which the sciences, particularly the physical and life sciences, owe a lot. Materialism posits that the material world — matter — exists, and everything in the Universe, including consciousness, is made from or is a product of matter. An objective reality exists and we can understand it. Without materialism, physics, chemistry, and biology as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Another branch of philosophy, idealism, is in direct contradiction to materialism. Idealism states that, instead of matter, the mind and consciousness are fundamental to reality; that they are immaterial and therefore independent of the material world.

A lot of scientists and researchers don’t necessarily have a conscious philosophy, or else don’t consider philosophy to be particularly relevant to their day-to-day work. But by not having a conscious philosophy, scientists – like anyone else – can unconsciously pick up other philosophies and outlooks in the society around them.   READ MORE...