dark
A telescope dropped dark matter data from the edge of space. Here’s why
Doomsday came on May 25 for the payload of a pumpkin-shaped balloon at the edge of space. The floating gourd — inflated with more than 500,000 cubic meters of helium and large enough to fit 60 Goodyear blimps inside it — traversed the southern hemisphere some five times in 40 days, toting a telescope that…
Axions: The wonder particles that could solve more than just dark matter
IN 1977, physicist Frank Wilczek took a walk that would change the course of particle physics forever. “On that walk, I had the germs of two really good ideas,” he recalls. The first was how a theoretical particle, later dubbed the Higgs boson, might interact with other particles. This would be how the Higgs was…
Largest stream of stars ever found could teach us about dark matter
The black streak is the newly discovered Giant Coma Stream, which is ten times as long as the Milky Way William Herschel Telescope/Román et al. Astronomers have found the biggest stream of stars ever recorded. This tendril of stars is extraordinarily faint, but it and others like it could eventually help us unveil the true…
Unusual dark hedgehog from eastern China is new to science
The new-to-science hedgehog species has darker brown fur and spines, as well as slightly larger ears, than the European hedgehog ZooKeys Scientists have identified a new species of hedgehog: a dark brown creature that dwells in the forests of eastern China. In 2018, Kai He at Guangzhou University, China, and his colleagues stumbled across some mysterious-looking…