The driving force behind our universe’s accelerated expansion remains one of the greatest mysteries in astronomy. While this force, which scientists refer to as dark energy, pervades our universe, we know almost nothing about it. Located on a remote mountain in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has spent the past five
When Soundgarden Wrote “Black Hole Sun,” they may have inadvertently been onto something. In a new paper in Nature, scientists have chronicled a “black hole star” that’s the size of our solar system and glows bright red in the depth of space. The findings are based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, which
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To test these new ideas, researchers are exploring the infant universe through simulations. “There’s actually been really remarkable progress since Webb launched, really in the last year or so, on numerical simulations,” Somerville told attendees, adding that these new simulations “perhaps are more appropriate and more informative for interpreting observations in the high-redshift universe.” As
