Universe

Planets rotate, stars rotate, galaxies and galaxy clusters all rotate. Astronomers have now discovered evidence that larger scale structures of the universe also rotate – mind-bogglingly gigantic filaments that pipe galaxies around the cosmos.

Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating? The leading hypothesis is a repellent force that astrophysicists refer to as “dark energy." But how does it work? What does it mean for our future? And how sure are we that it even exists?

The expansion of the universe is accelerating, and current models call the driving force dark energy. But perhaps this placeholder doesn’t exist – a new study has found that dark matter could produce the same effect if it had some form of magnetism.

On a scale that’s hard to fathom, the universe is structured like a “cosmic web." Astronomers have now directly observed light from filaments in this web, by staring at a patch of sky with a deep-field telescope to detect faint dwarf galaxies.

NRAO has announced a new addition to NASA’s upcoming moon-shot Artemis program. From the silent skies on the far side of the Moon, the DAPPER spacecraft will listen out for radio signals from the cosmic “Dark Ages,” before the first stars fired up.

Exactly why and how the expansion of the universe is accelerating remains unknown. One hypothesis blames strange black-hole-like objects made of dark energy, and now astrophysicists have theorized how these objects work and where they all went.

The universe will most likely end by slowly fading to black over trillions of years. Now a theoretical physicist has calculated the last interesting event that will ever happen: the explosions of stars called black dwarfs, which don’t even exist yet.

Astronomers have spotted a galaxy with a structure similar to the Milky Way. That’s not particularly surprising in itself, but the weird thing is that it's 12 billion light-years away, meaning its far more developed than it should be for its age.

The universe likes to play coy about its age, but we have a pretty good idea of the range. Now, a series of new studies has investigated the question using different methods, and have reached different answers, separated by more than a billion years.

A 20-year study of the sky has allowed astronomers to produce a comprehensive 3D map of the universe. A new analysis of this map has highlighted a mismatch in the Hubble Constant, and revealed when the expansion of the universe began to accelerate.

It’s generally believed that it took billions of years for galaxies to take on the familiar disk shape, but now astronomers have discovered an ancient disk galaxy, which emerged at least 4.5 billion years earlier than previously thought possible.

One of the core components of cosmology is the understanding that the universe is expanding evenly in all directions. But new X-ray observations now suggest that this may not be the case after all – certain areas may be expanding faster than others.