Ancient black hole lights up early universe
Many questions remain about what happened in the first billion years of the universe. At around 100 million years old, the universe was a dark place consisting of mostly neutral hydrogen without many...
HAWC clarifies cosmic positron excess
Since 2008, astronomers have been puzzled by a mysterious feature in the cosmic-ray energy spectrum. Data from the PAMELA satellite showed a significant increase in the ratio of positrons to electrons...
First cosmic-ray results from CALET on the ISS
The CALorimetric Electron Telescope (CALET), a space mission led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency with participation from the Italian Space Agency (ASI) and NASA, has released its first resul...
Extreme cosmic rays reveal clues to origin
The energy spectrum of cosmic rays continuously bombarding the Earth spans many orders of magnitude, with the highest energy events topping 108 TeV. Where these extreme particles come from, however,...
Gravitational waves and the birth of a new science
On 14 September 2015, the world changed for those of us who had spent years preparing for the day when we would detect gravitational waves. Our overarching goal was to directly detect gravitational ra...
First intermediate black-hole candidate
ago, numerous black-hole candidates have been found. These consist of both low-mass black holes, which have several times the mass of the Sun, and supermassive black holes (SMBHs), which are billions ...
Strangeness in quark matter
17th edition of the International Conference on Strangeness in Quark Matter (SQM 2017) held at Utrecht University in the Netherlands
Study links solar activity to exotic dark matter
The temporal distribution of solar flares is correlated with the positions of the Earth, Mercury and Venus.
Machine learning improves cosmic citizen science
Launched in 2014, the Distributed Electronic Cosmic-ray Observatory (DECO) enables Android smartphone cameras to detect cosmic rays. In response to the increasing number of events being recorded, howe...
Optical survey pinpoints dark-matter structure
During the last two decades the WMAP and Planck satellites have produced detailed maps of the density distribution of the universe when it was only 380,000 years old – the moment electrons and proto...
