Astronomers have finally found the very first molecule to ever form in the universe. The helium hydride ion (HeH+) has long been a key theoretical part of how the chemistry of the cosmos kicked off. Now the first unambiguous evidence of the molecule in a planetary nebula has been found.
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Although dark matter makes up roughly 85 percent of all matter, it’s still never been directly detected. Now researchers from the State University of New York at Albany have developed a new dark matter detector using supercooled water.
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In 2015, a century-old prediction by Einstein was finally proven correct, as gravitational waves were detected for the first time. Now, the facilities behind this discovery, LIGO, are back up and running after a year-long upgrade, with a few new tricks up their sleeves.
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Physicists have been hunting for dark matter for decades. Hypothetical particles called axions are a long-standing candidate, but a new experiment has now found that they don’t exist – at least within a certain mass range.
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If you throw a particle at a wall, there’s a chance that it will suddenly appear on the other side. This is thanks to a phenomenon known as quantum tunneling, and now a team of physicists has measured just how long that process takes.
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CERN, the European research organization responsible for operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has released a report outlining a proposed particle accelerator that would be nearly four times as long and 10 times as powerful as its predecessor.
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An astrophysicist from Oxford has put forward a new theory that suggests that dark matter and dark energy are actually part of the same phenomenon: a “dark fluid” with negative mass that fills the universe.
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Scientists at CERN have switched off the Large Hadron Collider following its second round of experiments, gearing it up for a third run that will see particles smashed together harder than ever before.
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Gravitational waves are ripples in the very fabric of spacetime, caused by some of the biggest cataclysms in the cosmos. Now, an international team of scientists has presented the full catalog of these events, gathered over the last few years across two observation runs.
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In recent tests run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), experimental atomic clocks have achieved record performance in three metrics, meaning these clocks could help measure the Earth’s gravity more precisely or detect elusive dark matter.
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