Webb has assembled the first real catalogue of planet-shattering collisions: 21 dust-filled systems that between them show the last violent act of rocky planet building. Elsewhere this week, CHIME mapped the early Universe's hydrogen entirely on its own for the first time, the Einstein Probe caught a ten-minute X-ray flash that may mark a magnetar's birth, and Haumea turned out to have a dense rocky core.

Cosmologists have merged the two largest Type Ia supernova collections into a single 2,884 strong sample, and the combined data once again hint that dark energy may be changing over cosmic time rather than holding steady. Elsewhere this week, Hubble and Webb teamed up to catch 27 of the smallest icy bodies ever seen beyond Neptune, spectroscopy of the plasma tail of 3I/ATLAS pointed to an extraordinarily cold birthplace around another star, and JWST set the tightest limit yet on moons orbiting an exoplanet. Four quiet results, four small corrections to the picture.

Our standard model of cosmology, known as ΛCDM, is predicated on the existence of dark matter (DM), introduced to explain a variety of observational discrepancies, such as the unexpectedly fast rotation of galaxies, gravi

Shortly after the Big Bang, the early universe was an ultra-hot and dense soup of fundamental particles, including charged electrons and photons. In this environment, photons constantly bounced off the free electrons.

The Friedmann equation, derived from general relativity, governs the expansion of spacetime. However, it was found incompatible with observations, notably the universe’s accelerating expansion.

Our most successful cosmological model, Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM), relies on the tenets set forth in the Cosmological Principle which states that at large scales, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic.

The cosmic web is among the largest structures in the universe, spanning a network of nodes interconnected by filaments.

Superclusters are among the largest known structures in the universe, consisting of groups of galaxy clusters.

One of the key questions in modern cosmology is determining the precise value of the Hubble parameter (H₀), which describes the linear relationship between an object's recession velocity and its distance.

It is not quite understood why we are able to observe supermassive black holes (SMBHs) early in our universe’s history. Leading theories can be separated into two camps.

Following the formation of baryonic matter just after the Big Bang, the universe entered a period known as the dark ages, where this matter drifted aimlessly through an otherwise empty cosmos.

In cosmology, the prevailing model that describes the universe is the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model.