Then, in the 1980s, neutrinos from this supernova were picked up by the Irvine-Michigan-Brookhaven detector deep underground in Ohio. The discovery marked one of the first measurements of neutrinos from beyond our solar system, helped kickstart the field of observational neutrino astronomy, and provided a starting point that next-generation neutrino detectors continue to build on.

But the discovery was also lucky: The detector was built primarily to study proton decay, rather than neutrinos. “When you build a new detector with new capabilities, you’re sensitive to things that you never expected,” says Henry Sobel, a physics professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of IMB’s original collaborators. The unexpected supernova would shape the legacy of IMB, which was recently recognized as an APS Historic Site for its role in neutrino science.

In the mid-1970s, teams of physicists were racing to build detectors that could measure proton decay, a hypothesized phenomenon that would confirm Howard Georgi and Sheldon Glashow’s new Grand Unified Theory, one that sought to unite three of the four fundamental forces of nature. The winner emerged in Painesville, Ohio, a small city northeast of Cleveland: The IMB detector, the world’s first kiloton-scale nucleon decay detector, began collecting data in 1982.

Black holes are one of the most enigmatic stellar objects. While best known for swallowing up their surroundings into a gravity pit from which nothing can escape, they can also shoot off powerful jets of charged particles, leading to explosive bursts of gamma rays that can release more energy in mere seconds than our sun will emit in its entire lifetime.

For such a spectacular event to occur, a black hole needs to carry a powerful magnetic field. Where this magnetism comes from, however, has been a long-standing mystery.

Using calculations of black hole formation, scientists at the Flatiron Institute and their collaborators have finally found the origin of those magnetic fields: the collapsing parent stars of the black holes themselves. The researchers report their results November 18 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Recent research by a student-faculty team at Colgate University unlocks new clues that could radically change the world’s understanding of the origin of dark matter.

Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy Cosmin Ilie and Richard Casey have explored an idea put forth by two scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, Katherine Freese and Martin Winkler, suggesting that dark matter may have originated from a separate “Dark Big Bang,” occurring shortly after the birth of the universe.

It is widely accepted that all the matter filling our universe (including dark matter) originated from one major event—the Big Bang. This corresponds to the end of the cosmic inflation period, when the vacuum energy that drove the very brief extreme expansion initial phase of our universe was converted into a hot plasma of radiation and particles.

Dutch astrophysicists have observed the collision of two neutron stars, capturing unprecedented data that offers new insights into the formation of black holes.

The team, based at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, documented the birth of the smallest black hole ever recorded through their observations. Their findings, published in Astronomy and Astrophysics, illuminate the immense cosmic forces at play and how such events have shaped the universe and the creation of atoms.