Yuchen Zhang

Fast radio bursts are brilliant cosmic flashes that, like a starting signal, set off a race of radio waves across the universe. Astronomers used them as a natural laboratory to test whether the photon, the quantum of light and the carrier particle of the electromagnetic interaction, has mass.

The universe is like dough rising in an oven. Galaxies are flying apart, and the rate of this expansion is accelerating. To explain the accelerating expansion, cosmologists came up with dark energy — a mysterious force that pushes space apart from within. The standard recipe, called Lambda-CDM, works pretty well, but it has its inconsistencies.