cosmic neutrino

The night sky in neutrino light resembles a canvas worked on by two hands. One holds a broad, soft brush: these are supernova remnants, the shells left behind after stellar explosions. The other grips a fine, hard pen — microquasars, binary systems where a black hole twists matter into narrow jets.

Boiling milk develops a trembling skin. By watching its movements, you can guess the strength of the fire beneath the pot and the fat content of the milk. In a similar way, astrophysicists peer into the ancient microwave radiation — the oldest light that has reached us from an era when the universe was only 380,000 years old.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe underwent a rapid expansion — inflation. Space stretched faster than light, and quantum jitters of the vacuum turned into real particles. This is how dark matter, the invisible substance that holds galaxies together, could have been born.

Through three minutes after the Big Bang, the Universe played its first symphony. It was the big bang nucleosynthesis — the formation of light nuclei, where each element sounded its own note, and the tempo was set by the expansion of space.

The mystery of antimatter in space has long puzzled astrophysicists: where do positrons come from, settling like snowflakes into our detectors? The answer might lurk in the most ubiquitous gamma-ray background. The Universe is soaked in diffuse light — the cosmic photon background (CPB).

The invisible hand of dark matter squeezes galaxies in gravity's embrace, yet its nature has remained elusive for nearly a century.

The cosmic microwave background is not just a faint glow with a temperature of 2.7 K. It's a snapshot of the Universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when the primordial plasma finally became transparent to light. But for theoretical physicists, what came before is far more interesting.

Neutrinos are often compared to a radio broadcast picked up by different receivers. One station sends a signal, but antennas in Japan, Antarctica, and at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea hear it differently — due to distance, interference, and antenna orientation.

Two stones fall into a pond. Ripples spread from each, but when they collide, there's a splash and a short, sharp clap. That's roughly what the merger of two neutron stars sounds like: those ultra-dense remnants of exploded stars.

An architect checks the blueprint when building a house. For cosmologists, the blueprint is the Standard Model, and the measuring tape is the light from distant galaxies. Recently, a new 'tape measure,' the DESI instrument, measured distances to millions of galaxies with unprecedented precision. And the numbers didn't match the blueprint.

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe was a boiling soup of elementary particles. Even the light neutrinos were actively colliding with everything around. But the rapid expansion cooled this soup, and the neutrinos broke free, becoming almost indifferent to the surrounding world.

The mystery of the missing antimatter has haunted physics since the mid-20th century. The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, yet today's world is almost entirely matter. The Standard Model is powerless to explain this baryon asymmetry — we need new particles and mechanisms beyond it.

Beyond Neptune, in the icy belt, astronomers watched as object (612533) 2002 XV93 momentarily occulted a distant star. Using метод прохождений (when a planet dims the star's light for a second, like a fly in front of a lamp), Уильям Боруки and Дэвид Шарбонно determined: the light not only dimmed but also shifted…

Light from a distant star seeps through a planet's gaseous envelope, and astronomers try to guess what that envelope is made of. That's how we study the atmospheres of worlds we can never touch. When a planet passes in front of its sun's disk, its gaseous veil briefly intercepts some of the rays.

In dark, cold clouds of interstellar gas, astronomers have for several years been spotting aromatic molecules — compounds built around a benzene ring (a hexagon of carbon atoms), like the benzene we know. One such substance, benzonitrile (benzene with a cyano group attached), had only been found in very calm and cold places, like the Taurus cloud.

A translator gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. Gluons, the particles that carry the strong force inside protons, behave much the same way. Usually, they dart back and forth, holding quarks together.

Conventional dark matter detectors are like a soccer goalkeeper waiting for a powerful shot while the ball barely rolls. The invisible particles filling our galaxy often move too slowly to be noticed by sensitive sensors.

A powerful searchlight shines through thick fog. The beam itself is invisible, but the fog begins to glow faintly, and gives away the searchlight's presence.

Long before a star ignites in a gas cloud, chemical life is already bustling. In cold, dense clumps of gas, called starless cores, atoms stick together to form molecules, both simple and complex. To peer into this invisible kitchen, astronomers aimed a 40-meter radio telescope in Yebes at 23 such clouds in the Orion Nebula.

Around the star HD 163296, 330 light-years away, a dense ring of gas and dust is swirling. Astronomers have spotted a small but bright patch of hydrogen cyanide and ethynyl molecules within it. It hangs at a distance of 88 astronomical units from the star — farther than Pluto is from the Sun. The heat from a forming planet hidden in that patch melts the icy dust.

A massive galaxy cluster acts as a giant lens. Its gravity warps the fabric of space, and the light of distant objects, bending around this curvature, is amplified and split into multiple images.

Just as yeast turns flour into fluffy dough, radioactive 'seasoning' from a supernova — the explosion of a massive star at the end of its life helps mold a rocky planet. The key ingredient here is aluminum-26, a radioactive isotope that releases heat as it decays.