Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific developments and more. For about fifty years, the scientific community has been grappling with a substantial problem: there isn’t enough visible matter in the universe. All the matter we can see — stars, planets, cosmic dust and everything … Read more
Small, primordial black holes that formed in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang may have had company, in the form of even smaller supercharged black holes with the mass of a rhinoceros that quickly evaporated. A team of researchers has theorized that these tiny rhino black holes, which would represent an … Read more
Strange behavior in a huge cluster of merging galaxies could be explained if dark matter, the universe’s most mysterious stuff, can collide with itself. However, the most favored model of cosmology at the moment is the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model – and it suggests that dark matter, which is effectively invisible because it does … Read more
The hunt for missing, tiny black holes left over from the Big Bang may be about to heat up. Just when the trail for such small black holes seemed to have gone cold, an international team of scientists has found clues in quantum physics that could reopen the case. One of the reasons why the … Read more
On Thursday (May 23), the European Space Agency (ESA) and its collaborators released a series of five images taken by the revolutionary Euclid space telescope. The Euclid consortium had previously released five images from the space telescope on November 7, 2023. Euclid has been called Europe’s ‘detective of the dark universe’ because its wide field … Read more
At first glance, the image doesn’t look like much: a few small bright yellow stars among fainter white stars. And in the middle a spot that looks like a collection of stars. But zooming in reveals a completely different story. That spot does not consist of stars at all, but of dozens and dozens of … Read more
Editor’s note: The new Euclid Telescope images were released at 5 a.m. EDT (12 p.m. CEST). You can view the five new views of the cosmos here in our image release story. The European Space Agency (ESA) will release five new images from the Euclid Space Telescope today (May 23). And if the previous set … Read more
An amateur astronomer from Italy has discovered five new dwarf galaxies surrounding a distant spiral galaxy – a spiral that is one of the largest galaxies in the sky above Earth. His name is Giuseppe Donatiello, and those five dwarf galaxies are now called Donatiello V, Donatiello VI, Donatiello VII, Donatiello VIII and Donatiello IX … Read more
Scientists propose that some dead stars made of the densest material in the known universe, so-called ‘neutron stars’, could act as traps for dark matter particles to collide at high speed and destroy each other. The crew says the destruction process likely heats the dead stars from within. In general, dark matter is a problematic … Read more