Curious Kids is a series for kids of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com. What is space made of – what does gravity actually bend? – Phil, aged 12, Birmingham When you think of space, what comes to mind? Imagine a friend bragging about… Read More »
When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn commission. A view of the Abell 1689 galaxy cluster, filled with purple galaxies and bright stars, showing off its enormous dark matter content. | Credit: NASA Dark matter is notoriously antisocial, refusing to interact with light and “normal” matter, effectively… Read More »
When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn commission. An illustration of MACS J0018.5’s colliding galaxies racing between dark matter (blue) and normal matter (orange). | Credit: WM Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko By observing a distant and complex collision of galaxy clusters, astronomers have discovered that the most mysterious… Read More »
When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn commission. Composite visible-light and X-ray image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2390, showing the large area of hot, X-ray emitting gas within the cluster. | Credit: ESA/XMM-Newton/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA By combining a new image of a giant image galaxy cluster with… Read More »
When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn commission. An illustration shows a rapidly spinning neutron star surrounded by a blue magnetic field emitting jets of radio waves. | Credit: NASA Goddard/Walt Feimer Scientists plan to use dead star “clocks” to shed light on the universe’s most mysterious… Read More »
The Hubble space telescope has shown that dark matter concentrated in the core of a nearby dwarf galaxy, a finding that comes to the aid of the Standard Model cosmologyThis model basically predicts that dark matter is “cold,” but recent findings have begun to hint that it is “hot.” But these new observations are on… Read More »
We think of galaxies as ancient. Our galaxy, Milky WayIt was formed 13.6 billion years ago and James Webb Space Telescope allowed us to look back some of the first galaxies in the early universe. So are galaxies still being born today? This is a fun question to tackle because it gives us the opportunity… Read More »
The hunt for dark matter is about to get a whole lot cooler. Scientists are developing super-cold quantum technology to hunt for the universe’s most elusive and mysterious stuff—one of the biggest mysteries in science right now. Despite there being about six times more dark matter in our universe than ordinary matter, scientists don’t know… Read More »
Astronomers have discovered two new satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, and the findings could help us better understand dark matter. Dark matter is the mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of the matter in the universe but is effectively invisible to us. The discoveries also bring scientists one step closer to solving an… Read More »
“Every good thing comes to an end.” This saying is valid both in the universe and on Earth. We realize that stars, like everything else, must die. When the fuel supply for nuclear fusion in their cores is exhausted, stars of all sizes collapse under their own gravity and die to form a dense cosmic… Read More »