Ten years after the first detection of gravitational waves, scientists have captured the clearest signal yet — and it confirms one of Stephen Hawking’s most famous predictions.
Using the upgraded LIGO detectors, researchers observed two black holes colliding over a billion light-years away, producing space-time ripples so precise they could “hear” the black holes ring like cosmic bells.
A new window on the universe.
This week, researchers reported the discovery of four Late Bronze Age stone megastructures likely used for trapping herds of wild animals. Physicists have proven that a central law of thermodynamics does not apply to atomic-scale objects that are linked via quantum correlation. And two Australian Ph.D. students coded a software solution for the James Webb Space Telescope’s Aperture Masking Interferometer, which has been producing blurry images.
Additionally, researchers are networking tiny human brain organoids into a computing substrate; evolutionary biologists have proposed that environmental lead exposure may have influenced early human brain evolution; and physicists have provided a predictive model to explain accelerating universal expansion without dark matter:
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have captured the most detailed look yet at how galaxies formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang—and found they were far more chaotic and messy than those we see today.
The team, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, analyzed more than 250 young galaxies that existed when the universe was between 800 million and 1.5 billion years old. By studying the movement of gas within these galaxies, the researchers discovered that most were turbulent, “clumpy” systems that had not yet settled into smooth rotating disks like our own Milky Way.
Their findings, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest that galaxies gradually became calmer and more ordered as the universe evolved. But in the early universe, star formation and gravitational instabilities stirred up so much turbulence that many galaxies struggled to settle.
In 1867, Lord Kelvin imagined atoms as knots in the aether. The idea was soon disproven. Atoms turned out to be something else entirely. But his discarded vision may yet hold the key to why the universe exists.
Now, for the first time, Japanese physicists have shown that knots can arise in a realistic particle physics framework, one that also tackles deep puzzles such as neutrino masses, dark matter, and the strong CP problem.
Their findings, in Physical Review Letters, suggest these “cosmic knots” could have formed and briefly dominated in the turbulent newborn universe, collapsing in ways that favored matter over antimatter and leaving behind a unique hum in spacetime that future detectors could listen for—a rarity for a physics mystery that’s notoriously hard to probe.
A powerful new telescope has captured its first glimpse of the cosmos, and could transform our understanding of how stars, galaxies and black holes evolve.
The 4MOST (4-meter Multi-Object Spectroscopic Telescope), mounted on the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope in Chile, achieved its ‘first light’ on 18 October 2025: a milestone marking the start of its scientific mission.
Unlike a typical telescope that takes pictures of the sky, 4MOST records spectra—the detailed colors of light from celestial objects —revealing their temperature, motion and chemical makeup. Using 2,436 optical fibers, each thinner than a human hair, the telescope can study thousands of stars and galaxies at once, splitting their light into 18,000 distinct color components.
Researchers have harnessed nonlocal artificial materials to create optical systems that emulate parallel spaces, wormholes, and multiple realities. A single material acts as two distinct optical media or devices simultaneously, allowing light to experience different properties based on entry boundaries. Demonstrations include invisible optical tunnels and coexisting optical devices, opening new avenues for compact, multifunctional optical devices by introducing nonlocality as a new degree of freedom for light manipulation.
What if a single space could occupy two different objects at once, depending on how photons access this space? Scientists have brought this sci-fi concept to life, creating optical systems that mimic the exotic phenomena of parallel universes and wormholes.
In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers in China used nonlocal artificial materials to develop “photonic parallel spaces.”
New observations from the James Webb Space Telescope hint that the universe’s first stars might not have been ordinary fusion-powered suns, but enormous “supermassive dark stars” powered by dark matter annihilation. These colossal, luminous hydrogen-and-helium spheres may explain both the existence of unexpectedly bright early galaxies and the origin of the first supermassive black holes.
In the early universe, a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, the first stars emerged from vast, untouched clouds of hydrogen and helium. Recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) suggest that some of these early stars may have been unlike the familiar (nuclear fusion-powered) stars that astronomers have studied for centuries. A new study led by Cosmin Ilie of Colgate University, together with Shafaat Mahmud (Colgate ’26), Jillian Paulin (Colgate ’23) at the University of Pennsylvania, and Katherine Freese at The University of Texas at Austin, has identified four extremely distant objects whose appearance and spectral signatures match what scientists expect from supermassive dark stars.
“Supermassive dark stars are extremely bright, giant, yet puffy clouds made primarily out of hydrogen and helium, which are supported against gravitational collapse by the minute amounts of self-annihilating dark matter inside them,” Ilie said. Supermassive dark stars and their black hole remnants could be key to solving two recent astronomical puzzles: i. the larger than expected extremely bright, yet compact, very distant galaxies observed with JWST, and ii. the origin of the supermassive black holes powering the most distant quasars observed.
The nature of dark matter remains one of the greatest mysteries in cosmology. Within the standard framework of non-collisional cold dark matter (CDM), various models are considered: WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, with masses of around 100 GeV/c2), primordial black holes, and ultralight axion-like particles (mass of 10-22 to 1 eV/c2). In the latter case, dark matter behaves like a wave, described by a Schrödinger equation, rather than as a collection of point particles. This generates specific behaviors at small scales, while following standard dynamics (CDM) at large scales.
Philippe Brax and Patrick Valageas, researchers at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, studied models of ultralight cold dark matter with repulsive self-interactions, whose dynamics are described by a non-linear variant of the Schrödinger equation, known as the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, also encountered in the physics of superfluids and Bose-Einstein condensates. In their work, the authors follow the formation and dynamics of particular structures, called “vortices” (whirlpools) and “solitons” (cores in hydrostatic equilibrium), within halos of rotating ultralight dark matter.