cosmology – Quanta Magazine

Diminishing Dark Energy May Evade the ‘Swampland’ of Impossible Universes

Steve Nadis — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 14:20:11 +0000

On the morning of April 4, physicists filed into a third-floor meeting room at Harvard University’s Jefferson Laboratory. Word had gotten out that there would be a big announcement from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, a group of physicists who are investigating dark energy — a mysterious, repulsive form of energy that permeates the universe. The meeting room at...

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The Webb Telescope Further Deepens the Biggest Controversy in Cosmology

Liz Kruesi — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 11:17:15 +0000

Nearly a century ago, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is getting larger. Modern measurements of how fast it is expanding disagree, however, suggesting that our understanding of the laws of physics might be off. Everyone expected the sharp vision of the James Webb Space Telescope to bring the answer into focus. But a long-awaited analysis of the telescope’s observations released late...

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Hopes of Big Bang Discoveries Ride on a Future Spacecraft

Elise Cutts — Wed, 17 Apr 2024 14:50:47 +0000

At a conference in Japan a few years ago, David Dunsky attended a talk about gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time created when massive objects like stars and black holes accelerate. Dunsky was a graduate student in particle physics at the time, and his interests seemingly lay elsewhere. Particle physicists seek the more fundamental truth underpinning the physical rules we’re...

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Dark Energy May Be Weakening, Major Astrophysics Study Finds

Charlie Wood — Thu, 04 Apr 2024 15:00:41 +0000

Physicists have deduced subtle hints that the mysterious “dark” energy that drives the universe to expand faster and faster may be slightly weakening with time. It’s a finding that has the potential to shake the foundations of physics. “If true, it would be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” said Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins...

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Fresh X-Rays Reveal a Universe as Clumpy as Cosmology Predicts

Liz Kruesi — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 15:26:00 +0000

Clusters of hundreds or thousands of galaxies sit at the intersections of giant, crisscrossing filaments of matter that form the tapestry of the cosmos. As gravity pulls everything in each galaxy cluster toward its center, the gas that fills the space between the galaxies gets compressed, causing it to heat up and glow in X-rays. The eRosita X-ray telescope, lofted into space in 2019...

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