Tag: The Universe

Dark matter is notoriously antisocial, refusing to interact with light and “normal” matter, making it effectively invisible. But what scientists aren’t sure about is if dark matter interacts with itself. If whatever particles make up dark matter do self-interact by colliding, and possibly even annihilating one another, new research suggests that clusters of galaxies could be used as natural dark matter colliders. This dark matter detection method would hinge on two of these vast groupings of galaxies meeting and smashing into each other. As these galaxy clusters are packed with…

When it opens its eye to the cosmos, NASA‘s next big off-Earth observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, will peer back to a distant period in the universe’s history called “cosmic dawn.” Though Roman’s predecessor telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), take full advantage of the fact that the cosmos is now transparent to light, the universe wasn’t always this way. Up to around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the cosmos was opaque, full of an obscuring “fog” of particles absorbing photons,…

Observing a distant and messy collision between galaxy clusters, astronomers have discovered that dark matter, the most mysterious “stuff” in the universe, passed through the wreckage like a cosmic phantom. The dark matter was detected racing away from the conventional “normal” matter that comprises stars, planets, moons and everything we see around us in the colliding clusters. The galactic clusters “getting ghosted” in this research are part of a complex of thousands of galaxies that are collectively known as MACS J0018.5+1626, which is located around 5 billion light-years from Earth.…