The early Universe was a dramatically different environment than what we have today. The first stars formed from the primordial hydrogen and helium left over from the Big Bang and could have grown to immense sizes, living short lives and detonating as supernovae. In a new paper, researchers looked at what could have happened when stars with more than 1,000 times the mass of the Sun could form, and the impact they’d have had on their surroundings.

Our current models of the Universe assume that large galaxy clusters were built up slowly over time, piece by piece from individual galaxies bound together by gravity. They should take billions of years to come together, but a new observation from JWST and Chandra found a galaxy cluster that was already assembled just a billion years after the Big Bang. At this relatively young age it had already assembled 20 trillion times the mass of the Sun.

I always say that one of the things that separates real science from pseudoscience is that while in both you’re allowed to say whatever crazy idea pops into your mind, in real science, you’re obligated to take that idea seriously.

You can imagine a late evening. You’re hanging out with friends. Spitballing some wild ideas. Maybe there are some illicit substances involved. Maybe all you need is a good wine and cheese pairing. And then you get a wild idea, and you feel bold enough to share it with the group: “Hey, everybody, listen. What if the universe had more dimensions?”

I always say that one of the things that separates real science from pseudoscience is that while in both you’re allowed to say whatever crazy idea pops into your mind, in real science, you’re obligated to take that idea seriously.

You can imagine a late evening. You’re hanging out with friends. Spitballing some wild ideas. Maybe there are some illicit substances involved. Maybe all you need is a good wine and cheese pairing. And then you get a wild idea, and you feel bold enough to share it with the group: “Hey, everybody, listen. What if the universe had more dimensions?”

• The Milky Way’s center might contain a dense core of dark matter and not a supermassive black hole, as astronomers have long believed. That’s the new result of a study released on February 5, 2026.
• The new model links the orbits of stars near the galaxy’s center with that of stars at the outer edges of the galaxy.
• The results of the new study are based on the latest data from the European Space Agency’s GAIA DR3 mission. Future studies with the Very Large Telescope will help test this new theory.

• An “impossible” ultra-high-energy neutrino – detected in 2023 – might have come from the explosion of a tiny primordial black hole.
• This led astronomers to a new dark-charge model. This model of primordial black holes could explain why one detector saw the high-energy event while another didn’t.
• If confirmed, such explosions could reveal new particles, help verify Hawking radiation and potentially explain the nature of dark matter.

Three billion years after the Big Bang, a massive galaxy already looked like it had run out of time. It spun in a calm, orderly disc, yet it had largely stopped making new stars. With the help of the James Webb Space Telescope and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, astronomers now say they have one of the clearest early-universe examples of a “dead” galaxy, and a new clue about how galaxies can fade without a violent crash.