Primordial black holes (PBHs) are fascinating cosmic bodies that have been widely investigated by astrophysicists worldwide. As suggested by their name, these are black holes believed to have appeared in the universe's early days, less than a second after the Big Bang.
Black holes are astronomical objects with extremely strong gravitational pulls from which not even light can escape. While the idea of bodies that would trap light has been around since the 18th century, the first direct observation of black holes took place in 2015.
Past physics theories introduced several fundamental constants, including Newton's constant G, which quantifies the strength of the gravitational interaction between two massive objects. Combined, these fundamental constants allow physicists to describe the universe...
An open question among the physics community is whether black holes can be tidally deformed by an external gravitational field. If this were confirmed to be true, it could have important implications for many areas of physics, including fundamental physics,...
Planet Earth is surrounded by a system of magnetic fields known as the magnetosphere. This vast, comet-shaped system deflects charged particles coming from the sun, shielding our planet from harmful particle radiation and preventing solar wind (i.e., a stream of...
Over the past decade or so, a number of astrophysics studies have detected an excess of gamma-ray radiation at the center of our galaxy. Despite the many attempts to understand this unexpected surplus of radiation, now known as the galactic center excess (GCE), its...
Black holes, regions in space with such an intense gravitational field that no matter or radiation can escape from them, are among the most mysterious and fascinating cosmological phenomena. Over the past five years or so, astrophysicists collected the first...
Past cosmological and astrophysical observations suggest that over one quarter of the universe's energy density is made up of a non-conventional type of matter known as dark matter. This type of matter is believed to be composed of particles that do not absorb, emit...
The ADMX collaboration, a group of researchers working at universities across the U.S. and Europe, has recently performed a new search for invisible axion dark matter using a cavity haloscope and a low-noise Josephson parametric amplifier. Cavity haloscopes are...
Physics theory suggests that the universe is made up in great part by a type of matter that does not emit, absorb or reflect light, and hence cannot be observed using conventional detection methods. This type of matter, referred to as dark matter, has so far never...