Radon Hides Dark Matter
A dark matter detector is like a room where you're trying to hear a whisper while static electricity crackles nearby. This crackle is produced by radon atoms — a radioactive gas that seeps out from materials and air.
How to Tell Dark Matter from Noise
Underground, in a former gold mine, sits a tank of liquid xenon. If a dark matter particle flies through it, the xenon flashes. But it also flashes from ordinary particles, like neutrinos or leftover radioactivity. The task is to tell which flash comes from dark matter and which from noise.
Ripples of the Early Universe as a Chronicle of Its Birth
The Universe was born in the Big Bang and almost instantly passed through a phase of inflation — an ultra-fast expansion that blew up microscopic regions to cosmological scales.
How to Peer Inside a Neutron Star
A chef tastes tiny morsels from different edges of the plate and tries to reconstruct the recipe of a complex dish. Each morsel offers only a hint of flavor, and the samples are a bit blurred — too much salt here, not enough sugar there. That's roughly how nuclear physicists study the matter inside neutron stars — the densest objects in the universe after black holes.