#astrophysics

NASA’s balloon-borne PUEO mission has completed a 23-day Antarctic flight using the ice sheet as an enormous detector in the search for ultrahigh-energy neutrinos and cosmic-ray signals.

New research proposes an explanation for the unexpectedly massive black holes that the James Webb Space Telescope has found in the universe’s first billion years.

Researchers say traces of iron-60 in Antarctic ice preserve a record of the Solar System’s movement through the Local Interstellar Cloud and its possible connection to ancient supernova activity.

A study led by UC Riverside physicist Hai-Bo Yu proposes that dense clumps of self-interacting dark matter could explain anomalies seen in gravitational lenses, stellar streams, and satellite galaxies.

A new analysis of black hole mergers in the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA catalog points to a separate population of very massive, rapidly spinning black holes formed through hierarchical mergers.

NASA’s Pandora mission has released its first engineering images from space, marking an early milestone for the small exoplanet observatory launched in January.

Using 18 years of radio observations, researchers studying Cygnus X-1 have measured the immense power of its black hole jets and estimated their speed at roughly half the speed of light.

Researchers say a new AI approach called GAME could improve how astronomers reconstruct the universe’s evolution, potentially giving scientists a stronger way to test the standard model of cosmology.

A set of preprints described by New Scientist suggests the universe may be less homogeneous on the largest scales than standard cosmology assumes, potentially opening a path toward resolving some long-running puzzles.

New research argues that pair-instability supernovae may explain why stellar black holes in a wide mass range appear to be unexpectedly rare.

The IceCube Observatory’s more than 5,000 light sensors buried in Antarctic ice help detect high-energy neutrinos, offering clues about the universe’s most extreme events.

A new synthesis of decades of cosmological data strengthens the case that current theory still cannot fully explain why different methods produce different expansion rates for the universe.

A new Physical Review Letters study led by UC Riverside physicist Hai-Bo Yu argues that self-interacting dark matter could account for three long-running astrophysical puzzles across very different environments.

Observations from the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope captured unusually strong calcium and hydrogen signatures in the fading stage of a solar flare, giving researchers a rare high-resolution look at behavior current fl

A new analysis of gravitational-wave detections suggests a missing band of black hole masses, supporting the idea that some massive stars explode so completely they leave nothing behind.

A new preprint proposes that evaporating low-mass primordial black holes may have generated violent shockwaves in the early universe’s plasma, not just diffuse heat.

Scientists believe quark-gluon plasma — the extreme state of matter that existed microseconds after the Big Bang — may persist inside neutron star cores, and new detection methods could prove it.

A new generation of deep underground neutrino detectors could soon capture the diffuse supernova background radiation — the accumulated neutrino glow of every stellar death that occurred before our solar system formed.

Astronomers have pinpointed the origin of the most powerful fast radio burst ever recorded to a massive star-forming galaxy 3.6 billion light-years away, shedding new light on the physics of these extreme cosmic events.

Astronomers detected gravitational waves from a massive black hole merger in November 2024, followed seconds later by a short gamma-ray burst—potentially the second confirmed multi-messenger cosmic event in history.