cosmology

Astronomers using JWST have discovered that massive early galaxies contain far more small, faint stars than expected. That hidden population could make some of these galaxies three to four times more massive than previous estimates. The finding makes it even harder to explain how enormous, mature galaxies formed so soon after the Big Bang. It could also suggest that planets around low-mass stars …

As the agency pivots to putting astronauts on the moon, this $3-billion space-copter is the agency’s last large-scale mission to explore the solar system.

Something in the young universe is shining like a star that should not be possible. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected a compact red object so luminous that ordinary nuclear fusion cannot plausibly explain it. Although the source has a star-like appearance and may be surrounded by gas on the scale of the solar […]

A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology: what happened in the roughly 150 million years of cosmic dark ages, before the universe’s first stars appeared?

Astronomers have discovered a hitherto unseen population of galaxies with fading radio lobes, revealing what happens to these vast outflows when their black hole engines stall.

The Universe can pull some wild monkeyshines, especially when it comes to scale. From giant...

This theoretical work presents a causal-geometric framework providing a structural unification of quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the cosmological dark sector. Rooted in a single ontological postulate—the existence of an external causal space Z_0 from which discrete impulses (khrons) are projected into observable spacetime—the framework unfolds from a unique, fundamental dimensionless …

The Cosmological Law of Communication proposes a universal framework in which communication is not a human convention but a fundamental cosmological process governing the emergence, preservation, and transmission of identity and meaning. Building on the four invariants of the ICDP architecture—Information, Continuity, Determinism, and Propagation—the work distinguishes between the interior cosmos…

Rocky planets may have gotten their start far earlier than anyone expected, almost as soon as the first stars gave the universe the ingredients to build them. New computer simulations suggest that planetesimals, the solid precursors of planets like Earth, could have formed only about 100 million years after the Big Bang. At that point, [...]

Something in the young universe is shining like a star that should not be possible. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected a compact red object so luminous that ordinary nuclear fusion cannot plausibly explain it. Although the source has a star-like appearance and may be surrounded by gas on the scale of the solar [...]

A faint gravitational-wave signal spreading across the universe may contain clues about mysterious stars that existed more than 13 billion years ago, according to new research. Scientists from Colgate University have investigated whether some of the earliest supermassive black holes could be responsible for much of the extremely low-frequency gravitational-wave background detected today. Their fi…

Some of the earliest massive galaxies in the universe may be hiding enormous numbers of small, faint stars, suggesting they contain much more mass than astronomers previously believed. Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), an international team led by researchers at Leiden University studied nine massive galaxies from the early universe. They discovered that […] The post Hidden Stars Revea…

On Aug. 21, 1914, a total solar eclipse over Europe on the eve of World War I drew much attention. Albert Einstein had been waiting for an eclipse to verify his theory of relativity – specifically the light-bending effects of gravity – and enlisted help from Erwin Findlay-Freundlich of Berlin Observatory. Findlay-Freundlich was to lead Continue reading "Aug. 21, 1914: Total solar eclipse tensions…

Hidden in the faint light coming from Neptune’s moons, scientists have found unexpected signs of a much older story. The discovery may explain why the planet’s satellite system looks so different from all the others.

Nature Astronomy, Published online: 21 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41550-026-02947-x JWST observations reveal that distant massive galaxies contain far more small stars than expected, increasing their masses by a factor of up to four compared with initial measurements. This finding suggests that early massive galaxies might be heavier than previously found, challenging galaxy formation models.

A new layer of silicon sensors is being tested at CERN before being sent to the International Space Station

In this study, we investigate the anisotropic Bianchi type-V spacetime in the context of Barber’s second self-creation theory (SCT) of gravitation with generalized ghost pilgrim dark energy (GGPDE) and dark matter (DM). We employ the vanishing trace condition of the energy momentum tensor as given by Reddy et al. and the relationship between metric potentials as given by Collins et al. to obtain …