Brian Schmidt

A rock chronicle where each layer is a page, and spectral analysis reads the rhythm of the lines. In the Realmonte salt mine in Sicily, geologists measured the thickness of 120 three-part cycles: a millimeter-scale clay parting, a thin anhydrite or polyhalite layer, and then a decimeter-scale halite bed.

The three planets in the Kepler-51 system have long intrigued astronomers: they are Saturn-sized but less dense than water. These 'super-puff' worlds, with masses no more than ten Earths, are like cosmic dandelions — massive yet almost weightless. Their orbits are arranged like musicians in an orchestra, each playing its part, beating the rhythm with transits.

The Solar System takes 210 million years to complete one orbit around the center of the Milky Way. The last time we were on this same side of the Galaxy, early dinosaurs were roaming the Earth. That number, 243.72 km/s, has now been refined thanks to rare stars that streak through the Galaxy like cannonballs.

In the boiling broth of the newborn Universe, all particles lost their distinctions, like vegetables at hellish temperatures. Recovering that simple recipe is the goal of modern physics. The SO(10) theory — an extension of the Standard Model — offers such a recipe. It unifies all forces and links the masses of any particles with a single formula.

The universe is expanding, and the pace of that expansion is set by dark energy, the mysterious force accelerating the recession of galaxies. In the standard cosmological model, its density is constant: a cosmological constant, an unwavering metronome since the birth of the cosmos.

An electron flies out of a tritium nucleus with an energy of 18.57 keV, leaving behind an invisible partner: a neutrino. If that neutrino has access to a fifth dimension, its mass splits into a whole tower of states, and each one takes its own bite out of the spectrum.

The ACT telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert stared at the sky from 2007 to 2022. Its target: the cosmic microwave background, light that has been traveling toward us for 13.8 billion years. This light is polarized: its waves oscillate in specific planes, like strings stretched in different directions.

The light from a distant galaxy split into two, then three, then four, and in the center a fifth ghost appeared. That is HerS-3: a young galaxy full of dust and newborn stars, whose light passed through a gravitational lens, a massive object that bends rays like a magnifying glass bends light.

The universe is putting on a show, and the lead role goes to dark energy. For a long time, the actor seemed unchanging: the cosmological constant (the vacuum energy that accelerates cosmic expansion) set the same tone throughout.

NGC 3627, a spiral beauty in the constellation Leo, harbors a trail that fits no standard scenario. A narrow band of cold gas, a molecular trail, stretches more than 8 kiloparsecs (thousands of parsecs, each about 3260 light-years) with a width of about 200 parsecs. That is like a thread as long as a football field and as thick as a pencil.

Astronomers have found an invisible object in the Universe weighing just a million Suns — for cosmic scales, that’s a mere trifle, a hundred times lighter than anything they’ve been able to “weigh” at such distances. The object itself doesn’t shine, but it gave itself away by bending the light from an even more distant galaxy.

The Milky Way's stellar disk is like a glowing pinwheel, and тёмное вещество is an invisible cloud around it. For the first time, its shape has been precisely measured. Astronomers tracked the motions of millions of stars and built a 3D map of the тёмное гало out to 160,000 light-years.

As early as Vera Rubin found that stars on the outskirts of galaxies move too fast — as if held by an invisible web. And Fritz Zwicky was the first to suspect that clusters of galaxies hide enormous invisible mass. Today we call it dark matter and try to understand what it's made of.

Dark matter is the invisible scaffold of the Universe, revealing itself only through gravity. Vera Rubin, studying the rotation of galaxies, found that stars at the periphery move too fast, as if held by an unseen mass. This became compelling evidence for the existence of dark matter, yet its particles still elude direct detection.

Particles of dark matter can behave like molasses: in one model they don't interfere with each other; in another, they gently jostle, creating viscosity. This determines how quickly giant black holes at the centers of galaxies fall into each other and merge.

When Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe, and Vera Rubin discovered dark matter, the framework of cosmology seemed solid.

Predicted by Wolfgang Pauli and named by Enrico Fermi, neutrinos are nearly elusive particles. Inside dying supernova giants and merging neutron stars, an immense number are born. Each particle has a flavor that can change.

Scientists have described a new type of invisible star that behaves like a breathing lens. Such a star is made of ultralight boson particles (not yet discovered). Its gravity causes spacetime curvature — this is the lens, which rhythmically expands and contracts, as if breathing.

On a high-speed highway, a steady flow of cars sometimes clumps into a traffic jam because of random slowdowns. In the young Universe, the overall expansion of galaxies after the Big Bang resembled this orderly movement. But each galaxy also performed its own maneuvers — braking or accelerating under the pull of neighboring galaxies.

A black hole doesn't just suck in matter — like a giant cosmic whirlpool, it warps the very fabric of reality and bends light rays around itself, focusing them. The effect is even stronger for black holes that spin at nearly the speed of light: their rotation twists space into a tight spiral.

Ultracold atoms can act as one. When a neutrino is born inside such a cloud, it usually slips away unnoticed.

Data from the DESI galaxy survey hint: dark energy was more powerful in the past than today. This 'phantom' behavior threatens the Universe with a Big Rip — a finale where even atoms disintegrate. But the KMIX model explains this as an illusion. Two fundamental fields — like a distorting mirror — warp our picture: constant energy appears variable.

Type Ia supernovae are the 'standard candles' of cosmology: their peak luminosity is nearly identical, allowing distances to be determined from apparent brightness — the fainter the object, the farther away it is.

Dark matter is an invisible ocean that, as shown by observations by Vera Rubin, keeps stars in galaxies from flying apart. Physicists suspect that if dark matter consists of ultralight particles, in the cosmic cold it turns into a frictionless fluid — a so-called condensate.

After the Big Bang, the universe was hot and dense. In clumps of dark matter, invisible stuff felt only through gravity, its particles, colliding, annihilated, giving birth to powerful radiation. This hidden heat, like an invisible furnace, warmed gas clouds from within.

Two methods of measuring the Universe's expansion rate yield conflicting results. Measurements from supernova explosions, carried out by Adam Riess's team, show faster expansion than data from the cosmic microwave background — the light left over from the Big Bang.

Our Sun emits streams of neutrinos — particles that barely interact with matter. Passing through the dense solar material, they change their type — scientists call this 'flavor.' It's like a voice that changes as it moves through a crowd: the thicker the crowd, the more it gets distorted.

The Universe is expanding, and every galaxy cluster takes part in a grand dance. The tempo of this dance is set by the Hubble constant, first measured by Edwin Hubble nearly a century ago. Pinpointing the number is tough because you need a ruler that spans billions of light-years.

The James Webb telescope spotted “red dots” in the early Universe — dense objects tens of light-years across. Spectroscopic analysis of their light revealed the hue of hydrogen. Yet in X-rays they are nearly invisible, like a powerful spotlight wrapped in layers of gas curtains.

In the darkness of interstellar space drift millions of rogue planets — worlds not bound to any star. They are almost impossible to see, but when such a wanderer passes in front of a distant star, its gravity bends the light and momentarily creates a cosmic magnifying glass.

Inside a giant spectrometer in Karlsruhe, shaped like a huge metal barrel, scientists are catching particles that are nearly impossible to catch. Neutrinos are the ghosts of the microcosm: every second, trillions of these particles fly through your body, and you don't even notice. But they do have mass, and scientists want to measure it.

Without the invisible framework of dark matter, galaxies would fly apart. Astronomer Vera Rubin proved back in the 1970s that stars rotate as if held by an unseen mass. But new research shows it's not just passive ballast.

Mass curves spacetime like a heavy stone pressing into an asphalt road. Light passing by skirts around this dent, its path lengthens, and it arrives late. Astronomers have observed this Shapiro effect many times near the Sun and planets. A new plan proposes to recreate this delay on a lab bench.

The Sun’s gravity creates an invisible goblet, in which dark matter of a special kind — ultralight — doesn’t splash around chaotically, but occupies strict energy steps, like transparent layers of liquid. So around the Sun, a natural spectroscope emerges, sorting the invisible substance into levels, just like electrons in an atom.

A black hole merger gives birth to a gravitational wave. Sometimes the wave’s path is blocked by a galaxy or a clump of dark matter, predicted by Zwicky and discovered by Rubin.

The bladder wall is not a rubber balloon. When the organ empties, its surface wrinkles like crumpled paper, and tension varies from place to place. Previously, to measure this, researchers dotted the tissue with marker spots. But the paint itself changes how living tissue behaves, like an extra layer of tape on a balloon. The new method skips the paint.

The enigma of dark matter was already studied by Fritz Zwicky and Vera Rubin. For decades, it was depicted as a cold, listless skeleton that only draws galaxies together.

At the center of many galaxies lurks a black hole — an object predicted by solutions to the equations of Karl Schwarzschild. Around it stretches a scorching corona — a region of tenuous plasma heated to billions of degrees.

By analyzing color indices — the ratio of brightness in different spectral bands in images from the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have identified galaxies whose light cuts off sharply in the ultraviolet.

In tiny satellite galaxies, stars on the outskirts rotate faster than visible matter allows. It’s as if a pattern appears on the fabric of space for which there aren’t enough threads.