Astronomers have used the ages of more than 155,000 stars in the Milky Way to independently estimate the age of the universe, and their findings may be good news for the standard cosmological model. The new research was reported in a paper submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 1.

The age of the universe is tied to a discrepancy known as the Hubble tension. There are two main ways to measure how fast the universe is expanding, known as the Hubble constant. The first uses the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the “afterglow” of the Big Bang, and gives a certain value. The other uses local measurements in our cosmic neighborhood, including Cepheid stars and supernovae, and gives a noticeably higher value.

The two figures disagree by about 9%—a mismatch known as the Hubble tension.

There must be some extra mass that we can’t see – and astronomers call this ‘dark matter’

Astronomers don’t know what dark matter is. And it turns out there’s quite a lot they don’t know about ordinary matter, either.

In fact, quite a lot of ‘normal’ matter is missing. But astronomers now think they might have found it – and it’s been hiding in plain sight all along.

Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the City University of New York Graduate Center (CUNY-ASRC) have demonstrated something English mathematician and physicist Sir Roger Penrose predicted over 50 years ago. According to Penrose, it would be possible to extract energy from a rapidly spinning (Kerr) black hole by inserting an object into the region just beyond its event horizon (the ergosphere). This object would be accelerated and ejected from the region, carrying more energy than it did when it entered/

In 1971, Soviet physicist Yakov Zeldovich came along and built on this theorem (the Penrose Process), predicting that a wave interacting with a rapidly-spinning object could not only extract energy from it, but amplify it. In a paper recently published in Nature, the team (all members of CUNY-ASRC Photonics Initiative) demonstrated a new approach for amplifying waves through interaction with rotating bodies. Using a radio-frequency device modulated to mimic spinning, they created a synthetic form of ultrafast rotation far beyond what can be achieved mechanically.

Their device and the physical principles it utilizes could allow researchers to overcome limitations that have long hindered experimental studies of ultra-fast rotational dynamics. It consists of a ring-shaped network of electronic resonators whose properties were rapidly modulated in a timed sequence to produce a traveling pattern around the ring. While the device remained still, the traveling pattern of electromagnetic waves created a form of synthetic motion that mimics an object rotating at ultra-fast speed.

A collection of newfound objects discovered by the Euclid telescope more than doubles the number of known quasars from the universe’s first billion years.

New observations appear to have undermined our leading theories of the universe — so claims Kansas State University computer scientist Lior Shamir, who has identified that far more spiral galaxies spin clockwise than counter-clockwise as seen from Earth. This is a near 50% asymmetry, visible to the naked eye. And it grows stronger the deeper into cosmic history we look. Under the cosmological principle, the century-old assumption that the universe looks the same from every vantage point, an observer anywhere should see a roughly even split. Shamir’s data suggests otherwise, and the implications may require a whole new cosmological theory. Furthermore, the same systematic bias that could explain the spiral galaxy asymmetry may also be inflating the measurements behind two of cosmology’s most stubborn open problems: dark energy, the unexplained force thought to be accelerating the universe’s expansion, and the Hubble tension, the unresolved disagreement over how fast the universe is expanding.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most powerful astronomical imaging device ever built. With its ability to image the early universe, it provides observations that challenge our understanding of the cosmos, gradually leading to a new era in cosmology.

One of the unexpected observations made by JWST is the asymmetry between the number of galaxies that rotate in one direction and the number of galaxies that rotate in the opposite direction. That is, the number of galaxies imaged by JWST that rotate clockwise is not the same as the number of galaxies that rotate counterclockwise. That can be seen by observing spiral galaxies imaged by JWST deep field images.