New research is revealing possible links between one of the most enduring cosmic mysteries—dark matter—and the existence of a “hidden” fifth dimension.

Dark matter is widely believed to exist according to several leading cosmological theories, although this nonluminous material remains invisible through direct detection. However, its presence can be inferred through the gravitational influence this mysterious form of matter has on the surrounding universe.

Now, according to researchers at the University of Sheffield, one reason dark matter may have remained so elusive involves the possibility that it exists within a “hidden” dimension—a concept that has gained traction in past research.

The Sheffield team’s recent look at this possibility, detailed in a study published in Physical Review D, takes the concept one step further by introducing a new potential framework that could help reveal clues to the behavior of dark matter, as well as why astronomers have had such a hard time detecting it.

A Dark Secret Lurking in a Hidden Dimension?

In their new research, the Sheffield team says that dark matter may be lurking within a hidden dimension accompanied by dark photons, a variety of particles among those which physicists call “hidden sector particles,” and which are believed to represent potential force carriers for dark matter.

Due to the specific geometry present within this hidden dimension, a phenomenon known as dark matter resonance may occur, where dark photons align in specific arrangements.

“Dark matter resonance is already known to be a powerful idea,” according to Yu-Dai Tsai, Ph.D., a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Senior Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield and one of the new paper’s coauthors.

Tsai adds that the concept has “the potential to change our understanding of how dark matter was produced in the early universe and how we search for it today,” although reconciling it with our current understanding of dark matter has presented issues for researchers in the past, which include questions about its specific origins.

“Many previous resonant dark matter models have treated the resonance as an assumption,” Tsai recently said in a statement. “[Our team’s] work gives a possible deeper origin for it: The resonance may come directly from the geometry of hidden dimensions.”

Unlocking Dark Matter Resonance

According to Tsai and his co-author, Taegyu Lee, understanding dark matter resonance more fully could hold significant implications for unlocking new clues about how matter behaved at early stages in our universe, and why that may differ significantly from what astrophysicists see occurring right now.

“This resonance can make dark matter interactions much stronger at crucial epochs in cosmic history,” Tsai says. “Crucially, the model allows for these strong interactions in the past while still explaining why dark matter appears so inert and hard to detect today.”

Although Tsai concedes that the concept of dark matter resonance has been explored in the past, unlike previous studies, the Sheffield duo’s new work suggests that dark matter may essentially be “in tune” with conditions in a hidden fifth dimension already, arising naturally from its innate mathematical structure.

Tsai says this approach toward understanding dark matter, if correct, “would represent a profound advance in humanity’s knowledge of the cosmos and what it is made of.”

A New Approach Toward Unraveling Dark Matter’s Mysteries 

Fundamentally, the team’s findings point to promising new ways physicists may be able to explore the underlying mysteries of both dark matter and the possibility of additional dimensions in which it may operate.

“Our research gives physicists clear new targets in the search for dark matter,” Tsai says, “while connecting two of the biggest ideas in fundamental physics: the mystery of dark matter and the existence of hidden dimensions.”

The recent study, “Naturally resonant dark matter from extra dimensions,” by Yu-Dai Tsai and Taegyu Lee, appeared in Physical Review D on July 8, 2026.

Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.

The discovery hints that life’s ingredients may form before planets exist.

About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. To account for this observation, physicists came up with a new type of energy – called dark energy – which supposedly makes up more than 75% of the universe, and also has negative pressure. In a new paper, mathematicians claim that dark energy isn’t needed to explain that accelerating expansion, and

WD 1856 b is the only confirmed case of a planet that survived the death of a Sun-like star. It’s a Jupiter-size world orbiting a white dwarf—the burned-out remnant of a Sun-like star. Now, a team of astronomers has used the James Webb Space Telescope to take a closer look at this planet for the first time, and what they found makes an already strange system even stranger.

A feeding frenzy

WD 1856 b was an accidental discovery. Astronomers pointed the TESS observatory at a sample of roughly 2,000 white dwarfs in 2020. These stars are the remains of a Sun-like star that have already gone through a red-giant phase, leaving behind an Earth-size body that’s primarily composed of elements like carbon and oxygen. The TESS team was searching for small objects like comets or asteroids that might transit across the face of these dead stars.

What they found in the WD 1856 system was a gas giant. “As soon as they looked at it, they said, okay, that’s weird,” said Christopher O’Connor, a theoretical astrophysicist at Cornell University and co-author of the recent Nature study on WD 1856 b.

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Satellites perform a delicate dance to maintain their orbit, by locking themselves to a speed just fast enough to counteract the downward pull of gravity.

To stop their orbit from decaying too much, satellites use small in-space thrusters, which broadly speaking, fall into two categories: chemical or electric. The former uses a combustible fuel source that gets accelerated through a nozzle, while the latter uses electrical energy to convert propellant into kinetic energy.

Now, New Zealand space startup Zenno Astronautics says it’s tested an entirely new type of thruster that, unlike either of those conventional technologies, uses superconducting magnets to maintain a satellite’s orbit and orientation. As Space.com reports, the magnets convert solar energy directly into momentum, effectively harnessing the Earth’s magnetic field itself.

“Energy is the one thing that is abundant in space, and you can use it to energize the magnet to create a magnetic acceleration device,” Zenno Astronautics CEO and founder Max Arshavsky told the site. “It gives you acceleration without fuel.”

The company’s “Supertorquer” system, attached to a Mira satellite developed by Impulse Space, was launched into space as part of a SpaceX rideshare mission in November.

“It’s a technology that allows a spacecraft to not tumble violently in space and point in the right direction,” Arshavsky told Space.com.

When the spacecraft needs to move, superconducting coils draw energy from a solar powered battery.

“The unit has multiple superconducting magnets that are positioned in different axes,” Arshavsky added. “When we power up the magnets, they generate a magnetic field, which interacts with Earth’s magnetic field, and because we can control the magnetic field on the satellite, we can control the way in which it turns with respect to Earth.”

During its test last fall, the Supertorquer successfully altered the Mira satellite’s orientation on command, just as designed.

For superconducting magnets to work, they have to be cooled to extremely low temperatures. On Earth, that requires cryogenic liquids, which are ill-suited for a satellite. Even in space, the satellite is warmed up to around 68 degrees Fahrenheit by the Sun’s rays, which meant that Zenno had to get creative.

Using a heat pump, the extensively insulated magnet system expels heat to allow the coils to power up at temperatures as low as 77 kelvin, or -321 degrees Fahrenheit. Zenno claims its cooling system is highly efficient, drawing only up to 48 watts at peak.

The startup has some ambitious plans and is hoping to scale up the system to enable future spacecraft to perform docking maneuvers or even help propel them to the Moon or Mars by exclusively relying on solar power. How feasible those lofty plans will turn out to be remains to be seen, but the startup is optimistic.

Arshavsky even suggested that superconducting magnets could create “umbrellas of magnetic fields” that could “shield people in space” from harmful levels of radiation.

More on satellite thrusters: NASA Fires Up Futuristic Plasma Thruster Designed to Take Us to Mars

The post Scientists Test New Spacecraft Thruster That Uses No Fuel, Just Earth’s Magnetic Field, in Orbit appeared first on Futurism.

A new, computer-based calculation shows that our solar system used to have 5 or 6, rather than 4 gas giants. It seems that, billions of years ago, we lost two planets due to an instability that probably also tilted Uranus’s axis and scrambled up its moons. Let’s have a look.

When you think of an asteroid impact, you’re probably imagining something like the cataclysmic event that nearly wiped out the dinosaurs. In an astonishingly rare event, a rock the size of the island of Manhattan could come hurtling from deep space towards Earth and destroy the world.

On the contrary, asteroids are generally leftover debris from the primordial solar system that didn’t become part of a larger body, like a planet or moon, and they’re not particularly rare. Scientists estimate that there are about 1 billion asteroids and comets classified as near-Earth objects, or NEOs. NEOs are generally much smaller than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. They range from weakly held-together piles of rubble 200 meters (700 feet) across, to the minuscule 2024 BX1, approximately 44 centimeters (17 inches) across. 

For several decades, astronomical surveys of the sky have looked for these asteroids. NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) Fireball and Bolide Database has records of over 1,000 incidents of objects colliding with our planet since the mid-1990s. Among these is a set of 11 objects that scientists detected before they hit Earth, known as imminent impactors. Finding imminent impactors allows scientists unique opportunities to study the smallest building blocks of the solar system, enabling them to learn more about asteroid composition, structure, and history.

A team of scientists recently conducted a study on how the newly built Vera Rubin Observatory could detect more imminent impactors before they strike Earth. They examined the CNEOS Fireball and Bolide Database impact records spanning February 1, 1994, to January 1, 2026, for records of the asteroids’ coordinates, velocities, and the energy they released at the time of collision. 

They found that 343 NEOs met this criterion, including 5 known imminent impactors. Using these recorded data, they reconstructed the objects’ pre-impact characteristics. The team predicted the asteroids’ orbital paths from the recorded coordinates and velocity. Assuming the objects were spherical, they estimated the size from velocity and impact energy. From this information about the asteroids’ state before impact, the team could then simulate whether the Rubin Observatory would have detected them. 

When small asteroids hit Earth, they mostly burn up in the atmosphere, producing a bright flash that is relatively easy to spot compared to when they are in space. The Rubin Observatory can see objects up to 10 billion times dimmer than the brightest star in the night sky, Sirius. To predict if the Rubin Observatory can detect dim NEOs, the team used the solar system simulator SORCHA. SORCHA takes an observatory’s specifications and the physical properties of the NEOs and uses these to determine whether the observatory could detect them. It also estimates the measured sizes and speeds of the NEOs, and predicts when the observatory would have seen them. 

At the Rubin Observatory, an imminent impactor is considered discovered if it’s observed at least 3 separate times over 15 days before hitting Earth. So this team applied this same criterion to their simulation. They found that of their 343 impactors, SORCHA estimated that the Rubin Observatory would have discovered 14 of them before impact. 

They also found that SORCHA predicted 4 additional impactors that could have been observed at least once, potentially allowing scientists to search other telescope data for evidence of their existence in pre-collision images. Based on these results, the team estimated that the Rubin Observatory could find 4% of all objects longer than 1 meter (3 feet) before they hit Earth. This percentage of discovery translates to 1 to 2 imminent impactors detected every year, at least double their current discovery rate.

The ability to more consistently find imminent impactors would allow researchers to study the smallest pieces of the solar system in detail and to draw general conclusions about the properties of objects that could potentially collide with Earth. This would also allow scientists to more accurately calculate the orbits of imminent impactors, determine where more meteorites land to recover them, and keep tabs on the extremely rare but more hazardous large impactors for planetary defense initiatives. So, humanity can learn more about the ancient solar system, and hopefully avoid going the way of the dinosaurs while doing so!

The post How many asteroids can we detect before they hit Earth? appeared first on Sciworthy.

Physicists have been arguing about dark matter for almost a century, and now, after all this time, their most favourite evidence for dark matter – the Bullet Cluster – disappeared. This isn’t just an interesting development from a scientific perspective, it is also a good illustration for what is going wrong in this research area. I have a brief summary.