December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope launched successfully into orbit from an Ariane 5 rocket. Rocketry has been the only way we’ve ever successfully propelled a spacecraft any substantial distances through space, and we’ve successfully used rockets to...
A 3D map of the dark matter distribution in the cosmos. By measuring the average shape of galaxies throughout the Universe, scientists can detect whether there are any distortions due solely to the presence of intervening mass. This technique, of...
The Earth rotates on its axis and revolves around Sun, which in turn orbits around the galactic center at speeds of hundreds of km/s. In our neighborhood, the speed of the Sun and the other stars around the galactic center...
This image shows the inside of the spectrometer that’s part of the KATRIN experiment, which collects electrons and measures their energies from their emission due to the radioactive decay of tritium. Through this method, we can measure (or constrain) the...
An illustration of the first stars turning on in the Universe. Without metals to cool down the clumps of gas that lead to the formation of the first stars, only the largest clumps within a large-mass cloud will wind up...
During cosmological inflation, the space contained in the inflationary region grows exponentially, doubling in all three dimensions with each tiny fraction-of-a-second that passes. Where inflation ends, a hot Big Bang ensues. But due to quantum effects, each region where a...
Today, the Universe has evolved into the complex, life-friendly place we know it to be because we were able to form neutral atoms early on in the Universe. Yet without just the right quantum properties, the formation of stable, neutral...
This image shows a three-filter NIRCam view of galaxy MoM-z14: the new record holder (as of May 16, 2025) for the most distant galaxy ever discovered. Invisible at wavelengths below 1.8 microns, JWST has measured its spectrum and detected several...
While we conventionally think of quantum physics as bringing an inherent uncertainty and “quantum-ness” to the particles that exist in our Universe, these effects necessarily extend beyond the particles themselves to include the fields that permeate all of space, even...
What appears to be a double-lobed nuclear explosion is actually the result of a rare astronomical outburst known as a supernova impostor. A “small” nuclear explosion occurred in the massive star Eta Carinae nearly 200 years ago, but the star...
