On October 9, 2022, two space telescopes, Swift and Fermi, picked up the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded. Researchers nicknamed it BOAT — “brightest of all time” — official designation GRB 221009A. The explosion happened in a galaxy roughly 2 billion light-years away, which means its light set out across space before complex life had […]

For the first time, astronomers have pointed NASA’s two flagship space telescopes at the same patch of sky beyond Neptune and let them work as a team. Hubble handled the visible light. Webb handled the infrared. Together, they picked out 27 previously unknown trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs — small, icy bodies that drift in the […]

The world’s most sensitive dark matter observatory, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, has detected a particle interaction that cannot be explained by conventional background radiation models, a finding that, although still far from being confirmed as a definitive discovery, has sparked cautious optimism in the international scientific community. The event, recorded nearly a mile underground at […]

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, have managed to reproduce in the laboratory the state of matter that filled the cosmos during its first millionth of a second after the Big Bang, using collisions between atomic nuclei much lighter than what was previously thought possible. This breakthrough, which the scientists […]