Liz Kruesi – Quanta Magazine

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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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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Clashing Cosmic Numbers Challenge Our Best Theory of the Universe

Liz Kruesi — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:44:49 +0000

In the early 2000s, it seemed that cosmologists had solved the largest and most complex puzzle of all: how the universe works. “There was this amazing moment when all of a sudden, all the pieces in cosmology snapped together,” said J. Colin Hill, a theoretical cosmologist at Columbia University. All the ways of studying the universe — mapping galaxies and their larger structures...

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Why Are Black Holes So Bright?

Liz Kruesi — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 13:10:10 +0000

Black holes, by definition, are so dense that not even light can escape. But ask any astrophysicist, and they’ll report that black holes are among some of the brightest objects in the universe. What’s going on here? The answer, in part, is that black holes don’t live alone. The monster black holes at the centers of galaxies are typically surrounded by searing clouds of hot gas.

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Prepping for a Flood of Heavenly Bodies

Liz Kruesi — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 14:24:05 +0000

This is a story of getting the good out of the bad, said Mario Jurić. As a boy in Yugoslavia, he would page through an introductory physics book that belonged to his grandfather. He learned that stars came in different colors, and that these colors signified different temperatures. So for his eighth-grade science fair project, Jurić wanted to capture that spectral light. His teacher lent him a...

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