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This could be the first step to studying the oldest explosions in the universe.

New research shows a direct interaction between dark matter particles and those that make up ordinary matter.

A new paper, published in the *Astronomy and Astrophysics* journal, discovered unexpected characteristics for the elusive dark matter that likely goes against our best theory of the universe — the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter model.

What is dark matter?

We’re only days into James Webb’s scientific operations, and the giant infrared observatory has already broken its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed.

Last week, a team unearthed an observation of a galaxy that existed 400 million years after the Big Bang. This week, a new analysis revealed a galaxy a mere 235 million years after the Big Bang. It is located 35 billion light-years away from Earth.

James Webb peers further into the universe than ever before

Continue reading “James Webb breaks its own record for the most distant galaxy ever observed” »

A new artificial intelligence system has been asked to produce an image from inside of a black hole, and the results are stunning.

Early data from the James Webb Space Telescope is already starting to come in, with exciting finds like views of Jupiter and a potential sighting of the most distant galaxy ever observed. But there’s a lot more Webb data being shared, and much of it is publicly available through the Space Telescope Science Institute’s MAST archive. That means enterprising astronomers are already digging through James Webb data to perform their own analyses, and have created some amazing visuals.

Gabriel Brammer, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, composed and shared this incredible and faintly terrifying image on Twitter. It shows the galaxy Messier 74, captured in the mid-infrared range by Webb’s MIRI instrument as part of the PHANGS-JWST project.

“Let’s just see what JWST observed yesterday …” Brammer wrote on Twitter. Then, echoing all of our sentiments, “Oh, good god.”

Last year, scientists used gravitational waves to detect an elusive intermediate-mass black hole for the first time. Now, Australian astronomers have spotted another – this time using gamma-ray bursts.

Black holes are formed when massive stars reach the end of their lives and collapse under their own gravity. But they aren’t all the same – stellar mass black holes are small, just a few times the mass of our Sun, while supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxy are enormous, with masses millions or even billions of times greater than our sun.

Intermediate mass black holes are the missing link between these two populations, thought to span between 100 and 100,000 solar masses. The black hole discovered in 2020 was 142 solar masses – while this newly discovered monster is on the other end of the scale, at approximately 55,000 solar masses.

Two scientific teams have proposed new models of wormholes, one focusing on microscopic wormholes and one focusing on traversible ones for human travel.