The greatest challenge facing astrobiologists is that there is only one planet known to us that has life. Of all the bodies of the Solar System, only Earth has a dense atmosphere, liquid water on its surface, and the organic chemistry that supports life. However, these conditions did not exist billions of years ago when Earth was still young. While …
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A tiny blob of red light spotted at the beginning of the Universe could represent the first direct evidence for a supermassive black hole formation pathway. In a dazzling new paper, a large international team led by astrophysicist Ignas Juodžbalis of the University of Cambridge in the UK has directly measured the mass of one of the mysterious ‘Little Red …
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Since its launch in late 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been glimpsing some of the earliest epochs of cosmic time. Its observations have stretched cosmologists’ timelines of when galaxies may have first started to form. And now some of the telescope’s farthest observations yet have revealed sources of blue ultraviolet light from an epoch when stars shouldn’t …
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New research suggests that primordial black holes created during the Big Bang could have played a major role in forming the universe’s first stars. The findings could help to assess how suitable primordial black holes are as candidates for dark matter, the universe’s most mysterious “stuff.” But the study team isn’t sure yet whether these black holes helped star formation, …
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