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Category: cosmology – Page 4

The key to why the universe exists may lie in an 1800s knot idea science once dismissed

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 can arise in a realistic particle physics framework, one that also tackles deep puzzles such as neutrino masses, , 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.

Scientists Propose Quantum Network to Finally Detect Universe’s Mysterious Missing Substance

Researchers at Tohoku University have shown that linking quantum sensors in optimized networks can dramatically boost their sensitivity. Uncovering dark matter, the invisible substance thought to bind galaxies together, remains one of the greatest mysteries in physics. While it cannot be directly

New telescope opens window to southern sky

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 —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.

Nonlocality-enabled photonic analogies unlock wormholes and multiple realities in optical systems

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 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.”

JWST may have found the Universe’s first stars powered by dark matter

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.

Vortices in ultralight dark matter halos could reveal new clues to cosmic structure

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.

The papers are published in the journal Physical Review D.

Milky Way shows gamma ray excess due to dark matter annihilation, study suggests

New research shows that dark matter has a different distribution in our galaxy than previously thought, and that advances dark matter’s status as a potential source of the observed gamma ray excess in the Milky Way’s center. High-resolution simulations reveal that the dark matter distribution in the inner galaxy is not spherical, but flattened and asymmetrical. The findings confirm the theory that the gamma ray excess is due to dark matter annihilation.

Scientists have long suspected to be a source of these rays, but the rays’ spatial spread did not match the arrangement of dark matter they had predicted. Another theory argues that ancient millisecond pulsars could produce the rays.

For the new study published in Physical Review Letters, researchers modeled the formation of Milky Way-like galaxies under environmental conditions similar to those of Earth’s cosmic neighborhood, thereby reproducing simulated Milky Way-like galaxies that bear strong resemblance to the real thing.

Unified Equation: A Berry-Curvature Theory of Quantum Gravity, Entanglement, and Mass Emergence

Many Thanks to Sabine Hossenfelder for giving me puzzles.

What if everything — gravity, light, particles, and even the flow of time — came from a single equation? In Chavis Srichan’s Unified Theory, the universe isn’t built from matter, but from the curvature of entanglement — the twists and turns of quantum information itself. Space, energy, and even consciousness are simply different ways this curvature vibrates.

The One Equation.

At the smallest scale, every motion and interaction follows one rule:

[D_μ, D_ν]Ψ = (i/ħ) [(8πG/c⁴)⟨T_μν(Ψ)⟩ − Λ_q g_μν + λ ∇_μ∇_ν S]Ψ

It means that the “shape” of space itself bends in response to energy and information — and that same bending is quantum mechanics, gravity, and thermodynamics combined.

Mass: When Curvature Loops Back.

Continue reading “Unified Equation: A Berry-Curvature Theory of Quantum Gravity, Entanglement, and Mass Emergence” | >

What happened to those ‘little red dots’ Webb observed?

When the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations, one of its earliest surveys was of galaxies that existed during the very early universe. In December 2022, these observations revealed multiple objects that appeared as “little red dots” (LRDs), fueling speculation as to what they might be. While the current consensus is that these objects are compact, early galaxies, there is still debate over their composition and what makes them so red. On the one hand, there is the “stellar-only” hypothesis, which states that LRDs are red because they are packed with stars and dust.

This means that they could be similar to “dusty galaxies” that are observed in the universe today. On the other hand, there is the” MBH and galaxy” theory, which posits that LRDs are early examples of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) that exist throughout the universe in modern times. Each model has significant implications for how these galaxies subsequently evolved to become the types of galaxies observed more recently.

In a recent paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, an international team of astronomers considered the different scenarios. They concluded that LRDs began as “stellar only” galaxies that eventually formed the seeds of the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of galaxies today.

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