R. Saglia

In Euclid's deep fields, stars flare up that were not in any catalog. A telescope built to map dark matter has worked like a camera trap: one frame, and a cosmic explosion is already on record.

Wide binary stars are like two dancers holding hands but standing at opposite ends of the hall. Their bond is weak, and any passerby can break them apart. Astronomers found 26 such pairs and tested how tightly they hold on. It turned out that 12 pairs dance by Newton's rules: their orbits can be calculated like those of planets around the Sun. But three pairs move too fast.

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.