Dark Matter as Ripples on a Cosmic Pond
The galaxy is not a smooth lake but a pond with ripples. These ripples are created by ultralight dark matter (particles billions of billions of times lighter than an electron).
Hearing the Silence: The Hunt for Scalar Dark Matter
The universe sounds with silence. The lion's share of matter — about 85%—remains invisible, manifesting only through gravity. Back when Vera Rubin Vera Rubin showed that galaxies spin as if wrapped in unseen mass.
Dark Matter in Extra Dimensions
A large underground tank of liquid xenon waits for a rare event — a nudge from a dark matter particle. Normally, gravity is too weak to notice such a nudge. But if space has hidden dimensions, everything changes: at tiny distances, gravity suddenly strengthens, and the chance of catching an elusive particle grows.
Gravitational Phantoms: Domain Walls Instead of Black Holes
On May 14, 2019, LIGO detectors registered a gravitational burst that didn't fit the usual mold. Event GW190521 appeared as a collision of two black holes weighing 85 and 66 solar masses. The resulting hole of 142 solar masses landed right in the "forbidden" range — where stellar collapses leave almost no trace.
Dark matter tugs at satellites like invisible strings
A stone thrown into water leaves ripples. A satellite orbiting Earth also leaves a trace — not on water, but in the laws of physics. Its orbit is not a frozen line: it slowly rotates, like the hand of a giant clock.
Dark Matter: One Survivor Among Triplets
Dark matter is the invisible scaffolding that keeps galaxies from falling apart. Back in the 1970s, Vera Rubin showed that without it, stars on the outskirts would fly away like a carousel without its bolts. Ever since, scientists have been hunting for the particles that make up dark matter.
Dark Matter Without Fine-Tuning
A pot of boiling water bubbles and churns, mixing everything inside. Take it off the heat, and the motion subsides as the water slowly cools. The Universe is like that: right after the Big Bang, it was a searing 'soup' of particles that constantly collided and transformed into one another. But as space expanded, the cosmos cooled, and particles met each other less and less often.
Cosmic Booster Solves the Hubble Riddle
In the 1920s, Edwin Hubble noticed galaxies were moving apart — thus discovering the expansion of the Universe.
Pulsars as Dark Matter Detectors: First Limits on Ultralight Particles
The universe is permeated by an invisible substance, dark matter, whose gravitational influence is obvious, but whose composition remains a mystery. One hypothesis suggests it consists of ultralight particles so light that they exhibit wave-like behavior, forming a kind of cosmic ripple.
Dark matter stars mimic black holes
A star made of dark matter is an invisible ocean of ultra-light particles, whose existence was first suspected by Fritz Zwicky back in the 1930s. Into this ocean plunges a neutron star — a tiny, yet unimaginably dense sphere.
Hunting Light Dark Matter with a Silicon Detector
Dark matter is the invisible substance that holds galaxies together, yet it has so far escaped direct detection. The BULLKID-DM detector is designed to catch candidate particles with a mass around 1 GeV (roughly that of a proton) and an extremely weak interaction with ordinary matter — a…