All articles tagged with #dark matter
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope sits in a Kennedy Space Center clean room ahead of its Aug. 30 liftoff; with a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble, Roman will study dark matter and dark energy while directly imaging distant exoplanets.
A tabletop prototype using two ultracold strontium atom clouds demonstrates a differential atom interferometer can cancel laser phase noise, revealing faint signals that could indicate dark matter or primordial gravitational waves. This experimentally confirms a key principle for future large-scale quantum sensors (AION) and paves the way for scaling to facilities at CERN or Fermilab to explore new physics.
India’s six-decade partnership with CERN puts it at the center of the LHC upgrade and the global hunt for dark matter, with Indian labs contributing to magnet systems, cryogenics, detectors and high-performance computing that underpinned the Higgs boson discovery and will push physics beyond the Standard Model as CERN restarts after a $1.5B upgrade in 2030.
Despite four decades of ultra-sensitive searches—from deep underground xenon detectors (like LZ) to space-based instruments and colliders—no direct dark matter particle has been observed. Gravitational evidence from galaxy rotations, merging clusters, and the cosmic microwave background confirms dark matter’s dominance, but its particle nature remains elusive. Null results are tightening the WIMP parameter space and nudging researchers toward axions or modified gravity, with next steps focusing on larger detectors, sharper axion experiments, and more detailed sky maps to push for a direct signal or stronger exclusions.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has begun, capturing thousands of 30-second exposures every night for 10 years to create a digital color movie of the southern sky, with real-time alerts on unusual changes and public data access. The project aims to illuminate dark matter and dark energy, map stellar histories and asteroids, and possibly uncover unexpected phenomena that could revolutionize astronomy, while facing challenges from ultra-bright satellites and other technical hurdles.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun the decade‑long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), using the world’s largest digital camera to capture nightly, color‑rich images of the southern sky and stitch them into a living map of celestial evolution. The project aims to inventory the solar system and Milky Way, investigate dark matter and dark energy, and enable billions of objects with trillions of measurements to be released publicly, generating about 7 million alerts per night for notable events such as asteroids and supernovae. Preliminary imagery began in 2025, and the survey will repeatedly re-image the same sky patches to track changes over time.
Astronomers using the Keck Observatory measured the faint galaxy NGC 1052-DF9 and found its stars move as if it lacks a dark-matter halo, joining DF2 and DF4 along a tight line in the NGC 1052 field and pointing to a past high-speed collision that stripped ordinary matter from dark matter. DF9’s velocity dispersion is about 6.5 km/s, implying a stellar mass around 100 million solar masses—far less than the halo a galaxy of its size would normally have. While this supports a collision scenario (similar in spirit to the Bullet Cluster), alternative explanations like tidal dwarfs exist, and a smoking-gun test would be detecting gas along the trail.
Yale-led researchers using Keck's KCWI measured the faint dwarf galaxy DF9, part of a 45-million-light-year linear chain with DF2 and DF4, to have a mass around 100 million solar masses that matches only its visible matter, showing no dark matter and supporting a violent-collision formation scenario that could strip dark matter from newborn galaxies; the finding strengthens the case for galaxies forming without dark-matter halos and prompts follow-up observations (including with the Mothra telescope) to search for residual gas and validate the proposed formation mechanism, with the study published June 16 in The Astrophysical Journal.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has officially begun the decade-long Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), snapping color-rich images of the southern sky every night (and roughly every 40 seconds with its 6,600‑pound camera) to create a living map of objects—from asteroids to distant galaxies—and to probe dark matter and dark energy. The project will generate about seven million alerts each night and, after data processing, release billions of objects for scientists and the public, with thousands of new asteroids already spotted during testing and NSF/DOE funding backing the effort.
New DESI-based analysis finds directional patterns in the galaxy distribution that persist across billions of light-years, suggesting the universe may not be perfectly uniform on the largest scales. If confirmed, this challenges the cosmological principle and could force revisions to the standard Lambda-CDM model, including possibilities of more complex dark-matter interactions or larger-scale inhomogeneities. The observed patterns are stronger than those produced by simulations, underscoring the need for further data from DESI, Euclid and other surveys to verify the result and guide new theories of cosmic structure.
Rubin Observatory launches its ten-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time, using a 3.2 gigapixel camera to scan the southern sky repeatedly (about 800 visits per field) to create an ultra‑high‑definition, time‑resolved map that will probe dark energy and dark matter, track transient events, and reveal millions of solar-system objects; early months already yielded around 11,000 newly discovered asteroids.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has begun a decade-long cosmic survey using the largest digital camera ever built to map billions of stars and galaxies, repeatedly imaging the southern sky to reveal faint objects and help scientists study galaxy formation, dark matter, and dark energy.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile has officially begun its 10-year survey to image the southern sky, taking hundreds of images per night to build a deep census of billions of stars and galaxies and to probe dark matter and dark energy, with researchers hoping to shed light on how galaxies form and cluster over cosmic time.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has observed XLSSC 122, a massive galaxy cluster seen as it was about 10.4 billion years ago (roughly 3.4 billion years after the Big Bang). The cluster is unusually evolved, and it serves as a gravitational lens that magnifies distant background galaxies, making XLSSC 122 the most distant cluster observed with strong lensing. This finding could prompt revisions to theories of early structure formation and offers a new way to study dark matter’s distribution. The team presented their results at the 2026 American Astronomical Society meeting, highlighting JWST’s power to probe the distant universe and the potential discovery of many similar lensing clusters in the early cosmos.
JWST’s view of XLSSC 122, a galaxy cluster at z=1.98 (~10.4 billion light-years away), shows background galaxies lensed into arcs, enabling a map of the cluster’s dense inner mass. The unusually concentrated core for its cosmic noon era points to merger-driven growth, and XLSSC 122 also acts as a natural telescope, magnifying even more distant galaxies to probe dark matter and structure formation.