Dark Matter

The highlight of the new chart is a wake of stars, stirred up by a small galaxy set to collide with the Milky Way. The map could also offer a new test of dark matter theories.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to explore even more cosmic questions, thanks to a new near-infrared filter. The upgrade will allow the observatory to see longer wavelengths of light, opening up exciting new opportunities for discoveries from the edge of our solar system to the farthest reaches of space.

Some of the Hubble Space Telescope’s most iconic images are the deep fields, which unveil myriad galaxies across the universe, stretching back to within a few hundred million years of the big bang. The galaxy tapestry was uncovered by Hubble peering at a single patch of seemingly empty sky for hundreds of hours.

This illustration shows Earth surrounded by theoretical filaments of dark matter called "hairs."

In 2018 an international team of researchers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories uncovered, for the first time, a galaxy in our cosmic neighborhood that is missing most of its dark matter.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will detect vestiges of sound waves that once rippled through the primordial cosmic sea. According to new simulations, Roman’s observations could extend these measurements into an unprobed epoch between the universe’s infancy and the present day.

Astronomers seem to have revealed a puzzling detail in the way dark matter behaves. They found small, dense concentrations of dark matter that bend and magni...

the formation of the first stars and galaxies in the early universe took place sooner than previously thought, suggest new Hubble results. A European team of astronomers have found no evidence of the first generation of stars, known as Population III stars, as far back as when the universe was just 500 million years old.

The behavior of one of nature's humblest creatures is helping astronomers probe the largest structures in the universe. There is an uncanny resemblance between the networks single-cell slime molds create to seek food and the vast cobweb structure of filaments gravity builds to tie galaxies and clusters of galaxies together.

Scientists are using AMS-02 on the Space Station to study fundamental particles originating from sources up to billions of light years away. These particles ...

Dark matter forms much smaller clumps than previously known. This result confirms one of the fundamental predictions of the widely accepted "cold dark matter" theory. All galaxies, according to this theory, form and are embedded within clouds of dark matter, a hard-to-detect form of matter making up the bulk of the universe's mass.

Dark matter forms much smaller clumps than previously known. This result confirms one of the fundamental predictions of the widely accepted "cold dark matter" theory. All galaxies, according to this theory, form and are embedded within clouds of dark matter, a hard-to-detect form of matter making up the bulk of the universe's mass.

Isolated for billions of years, a galaxy with more dark matter packed into its core than expected has been identified by astronomers using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the "normal" matter in the Universe. New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped them locate this elusive expanse of missing matter.

Astronomers have spent decades looking for something that sounds like it would be hard to miss: about a third of the "normal" matter in the Universe. New results from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory may have helped them locate this elusive expanse of missing matter.

A new study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton suggests that dark energy may have varied over cosmic time.