A. Bernal

Dark matter is like an invisible glue that holds galaxies together. It emits no light, but if its particles collide, gamma rays can flash. Scientists hunted for such flashes in dwarf galaxies — small stellar clusters with lots of dark matter and almost no ordinary matter.

The birth of the universe resembles not an explosion, but a traffic jam. At first, a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, space expanded sluggishly, like cars stuck in gridlock. Then came a sharp surge — accelerated expansion, which cosmologists call inflation.

A spotlight shines ever brighter, but at some limit the bulb suddenly burns out, and no more light comes through. Astrophysicists have seen something similar in the distant blazar Markarian 421. This is an active galaxy whose jet of superheated plasma points almost straight at Earth, like the beam of a cosmic lighthouse.