cosmological

Last week, the Ingenuity Mars helicopter made its final flight, far exceeding the expectations of a mission that began nearly three years ago. Now, NASA may be looking at a fixed-wing aircraft to hit the red planet's skies next.In 2021 the Perseverance rover landed on Mars carrying a small helicopter under its belly named Ingenuity. The twin rotor craft was a demonstrator to test if a vehicle could fly in the thin Martian air, which is only about one per cent as dense as our atmosphere on Earth.It became the first…

An international team of astrophysicists and cosmologists have submitted five papers suggesting the “clumpiness” (S8 value) of the universe’s dark matter is 0.76, a figure that aligns with other gravitational lensing surveys but not with the 0.83 value derived from the Cosmic Microwave Background.An international team of scientists used advanced techniques and the Hyper Suprime-Cam to study dark matter’s “clumpiness,” finding an S8 value of 0.76, conflicting with the 0.83 value from the Cosmic Microwave Background. This…

Artist’s impression of a supermassive black hole. Cosmological coupling allows black holes to grow in mass without consuming gas or stars. Credit: UH ManoaSearching through existing data spanning 9 billion years, a team of researchers led by scientists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa has uncovered the first evidence of “cosmological coupling” – a newly predicted phenomenon in Einstein’s theory of gravity, possible only when black holes are placed inside an evolving universe.Astrophysicists Duncan Farrah and Kevin…

A lonely Milky Way analog galaxy, too massive for its wall. The background image shows the distribution of dark matter (green and blue) and galaxies (here seen as tiny yellow dots) in a thin slice of the cubic volume in which we expect to find one of such rare massive galaxies. Credit: Images: Miguel A. Aragon-Calvo, Simulation Data: Illustris TNG project (CC BY 4.0)Milky Way Discovered To Be More Unique Than Previously ThoughtIs the <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt"…

It has been an exciting week with the release of breathtaking photos of our Universe by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).Images such as the one below give us a chance to see faint distant galaxies as they were more than 13 billion years ago.  It's the perfect time to step back and appreciate our first-class ticket to the depths of the Universe and how these images allow us to look back in time.(NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI)Above: The SMACS 0723 deep field image was taken with only a 12.5-hour exposure. Faint galaxies…