Physicists around the world remain deeply divided on key mysteries of the universe, from dark matter to quantum gravity. The standard cosmological model failed to gain majority support, and no leading theory dominated the survey results. The largest survey ever conducted among physicists worldwide reveals surprisingly little agreement on some of the field’s biggest mysteries, [...]
In a promising advancement in the search for dark matter, scientists have transformed a tiny magnet into a detector that can sense some of nature’s faintest forces—with a little help from levitation.
The research could help researchers detect some of the heaviest particles that are believed to have ever inhabited the universe, according to physicists.
Led by Rice University physicist Christopher Tunnell, the achievement was made using a tiny permanent magnet—one around the size of a grain of sand—which they levitated over a superconductor that was chilled to freezing cold temperatures just above absolute zero.
Since the magnet floats without encountering any surfaces, this dramatically reduces friction, allowing the Rice team to carefully monitor its movements, some of which are as small as around one-hundredth of a single atom. Such subtleties of its motion offer a novel possibility: that the magnet’s faint movements could serve as an effective signal if a massive dark matter particle passed through the detector.
“Dark matter could be hiding at masses that our traditional experiments were never built to reach,” Tunnell said in a recent statement, noting that by leveraging the team’s novel detector, “we can begin searching a part of the dark matter landscape that has largely been out of experimental reach despite being the focus of extensive theoretical study by my Rice cosmology colleague Andrew Long.”
Among the most mysterious phenomena in the universe, dark matter is believed to comprise most of the matter that populates the cosmos and exerts gravitational effects that influence the formation and behavior of galaxies. Despite this, scientists have remained unsuccessful in detecting it or even determining what it is comprised of.
There are several experiments that hunt for hypothetical dark matter particles, which scientists believe have masses that are similar to those of atoms or subatomic particles. Still, there are some theoretical models which suggest much heavier particles could also qualify—some approaching sizes as large as a human cell.
Detecting something so large would require a very different kind of dark matter detector. To search for the kinds of interactions that smaller particles would be expected to generate, the Rice researchers instead looked for an impulse—one more likely to result from such an “ultraheavy” dark matter particle as it interacted with the detector.
“Instead of looking for a steady signal, we are waiting for very small knocks,” explained Rice postdoctoral researcher Juehang Qin.
Over the course of one month, the team collected observations that focused mainly on quiet overnight periods when vibrations and other environmental disturbances were minimized. Unfortunately, no promising detections were made during this time.
Still, important results can also be derived from a lack of any definitive discoveries, especially when it comes to a field like particle physics. In this case, that’s because the absence of a signal allowed the researchers to place a few constraints on the combinations of dark matter masses and interaction strengths that should have been expected to produce detectable effects.
Altogether, the team’s experiment looked at nine orders of magnitude in its search for possible dark matter particle passes, which included searches for particles as much as 10 million times heavier than those investigated in past similar experiments.
Going forward, the next step would be to increase the experiment’s sensitivity by cooling the magnet even further, observing for longer periods, and eventually successfully levitating several magnets simultaneously. Multiple detectors could also help scientists determine whether real interactions involving dark matter are occurring, as opposed to false positives that might arise from vibrations or other kinds of interference.
Although the Rice team’s work is only a first step, their experiments with a tiny levitating magnet mark a promising pathway toward future potential detections, which may finally unlock new clues to the universe’s mysterious dark matter landscape.
The team’s research was detailed at the 2026 International Conference on Particle Physics and Cosmology, and additional details can be found here.
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.
Dark matter, the invisible substance thought to make up around 85 percent of all mass in the universe, forms an essential part of the standard cosmological model, providing the gravitational glue that holds together entire galaxies. What it actually is, though — and even if it truly exists — remains one of the great mysteries of science.
Now, a bizarre event that occurred nearly a mile underground at the world’s largest dark matter detector in South Dakota, the LZ detector, could be the first direct evidence of the substance. Or it could be something else entirely. Either way, it has scientists mystified and excited.
In a new paper published Tuesday and has been submitted to the journal Physical Review Letters, physicists running the LZ Dark Matter Experiment say that their detector recorded a stunning subatomic interaction that doesn’t fit anything else ever documented in physics.
Again, it’s not necessarily a dark matter discovery — but it’s so unusual that it warranted sharing.
“How do you even make sense of one event?” Tom Shutt, a particle astrophysicist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and cofounder of the LZ project, told Science magazine. “We just decided we should publish and think really, really, really hard about what that event could be.”
Dark matter is a sort of ghost haunting the cosmos. We can’t see it because it doesn’t emit, absorb, or reflect light, or otherwise interact with any ordinary matter — except through gravity.
We see the fingerprints of its gravitational pull all around the universe, in fact. Galaxies aren’t massive enough to hold themselves together with their own gravity, so without the invisible presence of something with incredible mass, the very realms that define the universe, and which we call home, would fly apart.
There are countless candidates for what dark matter is, but the prevailing theory is that it’s made up of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. As their feeble acronym suggests, WIMPs are thought to be a hundred times as massive as a proton, but have such a weak nuclear force that they don’t interact with ordinary particles.
Because of their mass, they move much slower than ordinary particles, too, allowing them to clump together and form giant “halos” that provide the gravitational pull for galaxies to form in. There is no single agreed-upon definition of a WIMP, though, and it’s possible that WIMPs could be a whole family of particles, rather than just one.
If these theories are correct, then every once in a while, errant WIMPs can bump into the nucleus of an unsuspecting atom and create a trace amount of energy.
This is what the LZ detector is built to find. It’s essentially a tank filled with seven tons of liquid xenon, placed 1,480 meters underground in a former gold mine. At such a depth, the preponderance of xenon is shielded from the space radiation that our planet is routinely bombarded with (though there is a still a background level of other interactions that scientists can’t control, but can account for.) Anything that causes a a big enough stir in this controlled, quiet environment would be significant.
After spending years poring over the data the detector has collected so far, the physicists found a striking interaction that took place in 2023. Something, we don’t know what, smashed into a xenon particle, and produced a flash of light. If it was dark matter, it produced more energy than traditional WIMP models predict.
The scientists say that the detection has about a one in 400 chance of being a fluke. Scientific discoveries, though, need to meet at least a five sigma threshold, meaning that there should be only as roughly one in 3.5 million that it’s a fluke.
Still, physicists are absolutely thrilled. Even if this event isn’t a smoking gun by itself, there are other, larger dark matter detectors coming online, such as China’s PandaX experiment and Italy’s XENONnT, that should be able to hunt for the same high energy type of event.
“We can perform this study independently with a blind analysis to validate or invalidate LZ’s claim,” Elena Aprile, a physicist at Columbia University and spokesperson for the XENON experiment, told Science.
More on dark matter: Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes
The post Something Strange Just Happened With the World’s Largest Dark Matter Detector appeared first on Futurism.
Physicists using the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) dark matter detector deep underground in a former South Dakota gold mine say they’ve recorded a single particle interaction that they can’t easily explain, but they’re a long way from claiming a discovery.
The post Physicists Spot Curious Signal in Hunt for Elusive Dark Matter Particles appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Dark matter may finally be coming into focus thanks to a recent LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment, which detected a particle interaction that is difficult to explain as arising from ordinary matter.
Physicists believe that 85% of the matter in the universe is dark matter rather than ordinary matter, but because it neither emits nor reflects light, the mysterious substance effectively remains invisible.
The new findings, described in a recent paper submitted to Physical Review Letters and in a talk at Japan’s 2026 TeV Particle Astrophysics conference, detail the work of dozens of researchers that may constitute an intriguing hint in advance of a confirmed dark matter detection.
A massive international team of 250 scientists and engineers across 39 institutions makes up the LZ project, which conducts its experiment at a facility in South Dakota, almost a mile below ground. This facility, the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), houses the detector, which is optimized to search for weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), one of the primary candidates for dark matter.
It does so using ten metric tons of ultrapure liquid xenon in a cylindrical detector. Layers surrounding the chamber block or detect background particles during the dark matter search. If WIMPs collide with xenon atoms, they should produce tiny flashes of light and electrons that can be detected within the chamber.
The nearly mile of rock above the facility helps prevent cosmic rays and other surface radiation from interfering with the experiments. A water tank and outer detectors help shield the central detector from background neutrons, while computational tools separate particle interactions to identify events that may mimic a dark matter observation.
“This was a detailed study in a region we hadn’t explored within this dataset, and we spent months of additional effort to understand all the possible causes of background events,” said lead author Sam Eriksen, a senior research associate at the University of Bristol in the UK.
“We understand our detector and the backgrounds so well that even a single outstanding event, like the one we found, is important. We expect dark-matter events to be extremely rare, so only a handful could mark the first detection of WIMP dark matter,” Eriksen added.
Measurements used in the study were collected between March 2023 and April 2024, totaling 220 live days. The new work wasn’t the first pass on this dataset, as researchers had previously searched it for faint signals from the simplest kinds of WIMP interactions. This time, the team expanded its search to a broader range of possible interactions that could deposit more energy in the detector.
“We’re very intrigued to see this event in the data, in the region where we expect dark matter to show up and the competing backgrounds are very low,” said LZ spokesperson Rick Gaitskell, a professor at Brown University. “With only one event, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. We are not claiming to have seen dark matter. But we have seen something interesting that we want to share with the scientific community for their input.”
According to researchers, the event was an outlier from other LZ measurements and is consistent with one of the dark matter models the team explored. However, increasingly sensitive technology can ironically reveal previously unseen background processes alongside potentially interesting new signals. The sensitivity of the detectors used at LZ may therefore be measuring a background that earlier instruments missed rather than dark matter.
This detection is rated at 2.6 sigma, about half of the 5-sigma threshold needed to ensure the signal is not background noise. Further observations will be needed to push certainty toward that 5-sigma goal, but this could be a major step in that direction.
The paper, “Search for Dark Matter Particle Interactions in an Extended Nuclear Recoil Energy Window with the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Experiment,” is currently available on the LUX-ZEPLIN website.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
Welcome to this special edition of The Intelligence Brief… This week, NASA is preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, its next flagship space observatory and a mission poised to transform our understanding of distant worlds and some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. In our analysis, we’ll be looking at 1) how Roman’s powerful Wide Field and Coronagraph instruments will survey the cosmos on an unprecedented scale, 2) how the telescope could discover thousands of new exoplanets—including elusive rogue worlds—and directly image planets around other stars, 3) how Roman will survey more than a billion galaxies in search of new clues about dark matter and dark energy, and 4) why its combination of Hubble-like image quality and an enormously wider field of view could usher in a new era of astronomical discovery.
“We are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery.”
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On Sunday morning, NASA will set a new milestone with the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, setting the course for discoveries that may include new insights into some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.
As NASA’s next flagship space observatory, this powerful new telescope is designed to discover thousands of distant worlds while also probing the lingering mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy and an early advocate for the efforts that led to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, the new space observatory bearing her name is poised to offer one of the most detailed views of our universe ever captured.
Scheduled to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket on August 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT, the Roman telescope’s mission is comparable in ambition to those of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, but also very different in many respects. Here’s a look at what to know about this historic mission, what it may help researchers uncover, and why it could set the pace for a range of important scientific advancements in the coming years.
At the heart of its mission, Roman will offer astronomers a remarkably wide view of the cosmos. Surveying immense portions of the sky, the powerful instruments on board the telescope will capture high-resolution imagery comparable to Hubble at certain optical and infrared wavelengths—imagery that could dramatically reshape scientists’ understanding of both planets and the universe they inhabit.
In terms of the technologies it will carry with it into space, Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will rely on two primary instruments: its Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and Coronagraph Instrument. The WFI is equipped with a 300-megapixel near-infrared camera enabling wide-area imaging and spectroscopy, allowing Roman to conduct large-scale surveys with great precision and sensitivity—all of which make it ideal for use in the hunt for dark energy, exoplanets, and other hard-to-spot cosmic phenomena.
Meanwhile, Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument is designed specifically for imaging and studying exoplanets. Equipped for both imaging and spectroscopy, the coronagraph will suppress the overwhelming glare of distant stars, potentially making much fainter planets orbiting nearby visible. According to NASA, Roman’s powerful Coronagraph will be the first instrument deployed on a space observatory to leverage “numerically optimized, precision-fabricated coronagraph masks.”
By suppressing the overwhelming glare of distant stars so that much fainter planets around them become visible, Roman’s Coronagraph could achieve as much as 100 times the performance of existing facilities, offering a promising chance that some of the faintest planets in the cosmos—some as much as a billion times fainter than their host stars—could become visible.
With a little luck, Roman could also break new ground with the first direct imagery of an exoplanet possessing rings. Going beyond its immediate discoveries, the coronagraph will also demonstrate technologies that could eventually be incorporated into future observatories, including NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory.
Presently, astronomers have confirmed roughly 6,000 planets beyond our Solar System. However, once Roman’s mission gets underway, that number could see a dramatic increase.
One of the ways it will achieve such landmark detections will be with the help of gravitational microlensing, which relies on detecting how the gravity of a foreground object can magnify light from a source much farther away. Using microlensing alone, there is a good chance Roman may discover several hundred—but more likely thousands—of planets, which may include worlds small enough that they have eluded previous detection using existing methods.
Along with the planets it discovers, astronomers anticipate that Roman will also find several new additions to the growing catalog of “rogue planets,” mysterious planetary bodies that wander through the cosmos without orbiting a star.
Additionally, NASA says that anywhere from 60,000 to 200,000 additional candidate planets could be revealed through transit observations, though only a fraction of these are expected to be confirmed through additional observations.
Arguably, one of the most significant components of Roman’s mission involves its study of the unseen side of the cosmos: the mysterious phenomena known as dark energy and dark matter.
In search of answers to such mysteries, Roman will soon begin scanning more than a billion galaxies as it maps the structure and evolution of the universe throughout cosmic history, providing data that will at the very least help researchers narrow down the most promising interpretations among a range of competing explanations for dark energy.
Simultaneously, the telescope will probe dark matter, the unseen material whose gravitational effects are currently needed to explain phenomena in our universe that include the motions of galaxies, as well as the evolution of some of the largest structures in the cosmos.
In many ways, what Roman is expected to achieve will be comparable to its predecessor, the Hubble Space Telescope, although at a far greater scale.
At some wavelengths, Roman will be capable of producing images that approach the clarity of Hubble’s iconic views of our universe, all while capturing as much as 100 times more of the sky with each observation. By capturing more of the sky with each image it produces, Roman’s efforts to map the universe could occur at a remarkable pace—perhaps a thousand times faster than those of its predecessor.
If all goes according to plan, Roman will be launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket at 7:26 a.m. EDT this Sunday, Aug. 30. NASA will begin live coverage of Roman’s launch on Sunday at 6:20 a.m. Eastern Time, and you can follow the updates online with NASA’s free streaming platforms.
Once it lifts off, Roman will be carried 930,000 miles from Earth to the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2 region, which is the same location where the James Webb Space Telescope is currently operating. After it reaches orbit, for the next 90 days, Roman will undergo commissioning, after which science operations are expected to begin sometime in early 2027.
The observatory’s primary mission will last five years, although Roman could potentially remain operational for more than a decade, offering astronomers an unprecedented look at our universe and possibly a few answers to some of the most baffling questions about our universe.
That concludes this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief. You can read past editions of our newsletter at our website, or if you found this installment online, don’t forget to subscribe and get future email editions from us here. Also, if you have a tip or other information you’d like to send along directly to me, you can email me at micah [@] thedebrief [dot] org, or reach me on X: @MicahHanks.
Here are the top stories we’re covering right now…
In the 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin analyzed a series of observations of how quickly different galaxies rotated around their centers. She found that these galaxies rotated much faster than they should have, given the amount of material visible through starlight. She concluded that a large fraction of these galaxies’ masses must therefore consist of some kind of unseen material.
Scientists have since observed galaxies to more precisely measure this unseen material, which they now call dark matter. They’ve shown that dark matter moves much more slowly than the speed of light. Unlike most celestial objects, it can’t emit or block any light, meaning it doesn’t interact with the electromagnetic force. Even though it doesn’t interact with a fundamental force in the universe, dark matter constitutes over 80% of the mass of an average galaxy.
In the prevailing model of cosmology, known as ΛCDM (pronounced “Lambda-CDM”), dark matter determined where galaxies formed. The theory is that gravity pulled dark matter together more quickly than regular matter in the primordial universe. This redistribution led to regions of space with greater mass density, which collected chaotic, regular matter into pools that eventually formed galaxies, stars, and planets.
In the present universe, dark matter and regular matter coexist in galaxies, though generally separated. Regular matter pools in the very center of galaxies, forming the more familiar galactic disks. Dark matter stays towards the edges of galaxies, enveloping the regular matter disks in what are known as dark matter halos. Because these halos make up so much of the mass of the average galaxy, researchers Guangze Sun, Fangzhou Jiang, and Jing Wang conducted a series of simulations to test how dark matter halos affect regular matter in galaxies. Specifically, they examined what characteristics of dark matter halos determine galaxy sizes.
The force of gravity works such that more massive dark matter halos draw in more regular matter and produce larger galaxies. So these researchers fixed the total mass of the galaxies they simulated at 100 billion times that of the Sun to determine which properties of the dark matter halos would produce the widest galaxies. They selected 4 variables to test: the total density of dark matter in the galactic halo, the density of dark matter in the innermost 1% of the halo, how fast the halo spun, and the ratio of regular matter to dark matter in the entire galaxy. For each variable, they tested 3 to 4 inputs representing low, moderate, and high values against a standard reference value and ran 132 total simulations to generate enough data for statistical analyses.
To simulate the complex physics of dark matter halos, the team used the modeling software GIZMO to model gravity, magnetism, and fluid dynamics. They combined this with a second model, called FIRE-3, which modeled how stars explode at the end of their lives, how much metal these explosions produce, and how gases heat up and cool down over time. The researchers ran the dynamic simulations for 3 billion model years, then used a program they developed based on the existing Pynbody to measure the radii of the simulated galaxies.
The team found that the faster a dark matter halo spun around a simulated galaxy, the larger the galaxy became, as shown in scenario 1 in the figure below. By contrast, in scenario 2, increasing the halo’s total dark matter concentration caused the central galaxy to shrink. Increasing only the innermost dark matter density in the halo had a smaller effect but generally reduced the galaxy’s size, as shown in scenario 3. And lastly, increasing the ratio of regular matter to dark matter in galaxies resulted in smaller galaxies that formed stars closer to their centers, as shown by a greater concentration of stars in scenario 4.
This diagram showcases the team’s results across 4 broad scenarios. The left column depicts a default galaxy under the baseline parameters. The right column depicts how the galaxies changed when the team varied a single experimental factor, including 1) increasing how fast the dark matter halo spun, 2) increasing the total density of the dark matter halo, 3) increasing the density of dark matter in the innermost halo, and 4) increasing the ratio of regular matter to dark matter in the entire galaxy. The dark matter haloes are represented as red rings surrounding the galaxies, not to scale. Illustration by Andrew Bizal.
The team’s results suggest a previously unknown connection between the properties of dark matter halos and galactic disks. However, they cautioned that their simulations were all run on galaxies in isolation, unlike in the actual ΛCDM universe, where their interactions are complicated by galaxies tugging on one another or by material moving from one to another. To further test their results for single galaxies, the researchers plan to run follow-up experiments with halos of different sizes, as well as with galaxies with different shapes and features, such as clumps, gaps, and lopsidedness.
The post Dark matter influences the size of galaxies appeared first on Sciworthy.
Earth itself may be one of the world’s largest detectors for ultralight dark matter. Earth may already contain one of the largest dark matter experiments ever built. Instead of relying only on specialized equipment inside a laboratory, scientists have found a way to use the planet’s magnetic field, atmosphere, and surface as parts of a [...]Em seu canal do YouTube, o Apple TV disponibilizou os vídeos de todos os painéis da San Diego Comic-Con International.
Essa, como falamos, foi a primeira vez que o streaming da Maçã marcou presença no evento. Os painéis ocorreram no último sábado, dia 25 de julho.
Vamos conferir cada um deles?
O painel do filme iniciou com os cineastas John Francis Daley e Jonathan Goldstein comentando as suas inspirações para criar a obra estrelada por Ryan Reynolds e Kenneth Branagh.
A dupla abordou ainda seu método de direção, destacando que incentivaram os atores a atuarem como se o título se tratasse de um drama, mesmo sendo uma comédia.
Na sequência, um clipe exclusivo foi exibido para a plateia (e a plataforma brinca com a impossibilidade de exibir o trecho na íntegra, mostrando apenas um retrato da dupla), com Daley e Goldstein comentando o uso de efeitos práticos para as cenas do longa-metragem.
“Mayday” retrata uma dupla composta de um piloto da Marinha dos Estados Unidos e um ex-agente da KGB, que embarcam em uma improvável jornada de fuga que mistura ação, espionagem e humor. O filme chegará no dia 4 de setembro ao Apple TV.
“Silo”, cuja terceira temporada estreou no início do mês, também não ficou de fora da SDCC: quem subiu ao palco foi tanto o criador, produtor executivo e showrunner Graham Yost quanto o elenco principal da temporada, incluindo Rebecca Ferguson, Common, Tim Robbins, Ashley Zukerman, Jessica Henwick e Alexandria Riley.
Os realizadores comentaram a história da nova temporada, incluindo o seu tema central (a manipulação e o controle de memórias como ferramenta de sobrevivência e poder), além da dinâmica dos personagens.
Yost relembrou que a série já foi renovada para uma nova temporada, prevista para chegar ao catálogo do streaming no ano que vem e, com isso, encerrar toda a sua história.
“Matchbox — O Filme” (“Matchbox: The Movie”), longa estrelado por John Cena, também marcou presença na Comic-Con: o ator subiu ao palco junto com Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Teyonah Parris e Arturo Castro.
O elenco discutiu sua experiência no set ao dirigir veículos esportivos reais para gravações de cenas de ação, destacando ainda a dinâmica de amizade dos personagens e as locações ao redor do mundo, que incluíram países como Budapeste, Marrocos e Eslováquia.
A narrativa se centra em um grupo de amigos de infância que têm suas vidas viradas ao avesso quando um agente secreto da CIA, Sean (interpretado por Cena), volta à sua cidade natal e envolve os companheiros em uma aventura mirabolante para salvar o mundo.
O filme será lançado no dia 9 de outubro.
O painel também contou com a apresentação da segunda temporada de “Matéria Escura” (“Dark Matter”). Participaram os atores Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly, Alice Braga, Dayo Okeniyi e o criador, roteirista e produtor Blake Crouch.
O elenco discutiu os desafios de interpretar várias versões dos seus personagens, e Crouch mencionou aquilo que os fãs podem esperar da nova temporada.
Embora uma terceira temporada ainda não tenha sido confirmada, Braga brincou com a possibilidade de futuros episódios se passarem no Brasil.
Vale lembrar que, paralelamente, o Apple TV divulgou o trailer da segunda temporada, que será lançada no dia 28 de agosto.
A maior surpresa ficou por conta do painel de “O Segredo de Widow’s Bay” (“Widow’s Bay”), cujos participantes não tinham sido confirmados até então. Subiram ao palco a showrunner Katie Dippold, o diretor e produtor executivo Hiro Murai e os atores Stephen Root, Dale Dickey, Jeff Hiller, K. Callan, Kevin Carroll e Kingston Rumi Southwick, além da aparição surpresa de Matthew Rhys.
Os realizadores discutiram a evolução da produção, a aclamação dela junto à crítica especializada e os desafios relativos à complexidade da narrativa e da mistura dos gêneros de comédia e horror.
Vale lembrar que a série foi renovada para uma segunda temporada, com filmagens previstas para o início do ano que vem.
O Apple TV está disponível no aplicativo Apple TV em mais de 100 países e regiões, seja em iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, Macs, dispositivos Android, smart TVs ou online — além de também estar em aparelhos como Roku, Amazon Fire TV, Chromecast com Google TV, consoles PlayStation e Xbox. O serviço custa R$29,90 por mês, com um período de teste gratuito de 7 dias. Por tempo limitado, quem comprar e ativar um novo iPhone, iPad, Apple TV ou Mac ganha 3 meses do Apple TV. Ele também faz parte do pacote de assinaturas da empresa, o Apple One.
NOTA DE TRANSPARÊNCIA: O MacMagazine recebe uma pequena comissão sobre vendas concluídas por meio de links deste post, mas você, como consumidor, não paga nada mais pelos produtos/serviços usando os nossos links de afiliado.
On Saturday, in San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H, the stars and creative team behind Apple TV’s critically acclaimed sci-fi thriller “Dark Matter” unveiled the trailer for the upcoming second season. Based on the blockbuster novel by bestselling author Blake Crouch — who also created the series and serves as showrunner — “Dark Matter” stars and is executive produced by Golden Globe nominee Joel Edgerton and Academy Award winner Jennifer Connelly. The 10-episode second season premieres globally on Friday, August 28, 2026 on Apple TV with the first episode, followed by one new episode every Friday through October 30, 2026.
Hailed as one of the best sci-fi novels and celebrating the 10th anniversary of its release this year, “Dark Matter” is a story about the road not taken. In season one, the series followed Jason Dessen (Edgerton), a physicist, professor and family man who — one night while walking home on the streets of Chicago — is abducted into an alternate version of his life. Wonder quickly turns to nightmare when he tries to return to his reality amid the mind-bending landscape of lives he could have lived. Season two picks up with the Dessens as they settle into a quiet life in a world that finally seems safe, until the unimaginable forces them to run once again. As Jason’s obsession with the Box deepens, Daniela’s (Connelly) growing paranoia pushes her to the brink, and their son Charlie (Oakes Fegley) starves for a sense of stability as their family is threatened. Elsewhere, Amanda (Alice Braga) and Ryan (Jimmi Simpson) join forces in a desperate attempt to find their way home. With Blair (Amanda Brugel) determined to stop him, Leighton (Dayo Okeniyi) relentlessly chases his grand vision of creating a perfect world.
In addition to Edgerton and Connelly, the ensemble cast returning for season two includes Braga, Simpson, Okeniyi, Fegley and Brugel.
Alongside the season two premiere, the “Dark Matter” universe expands with the launch of “Dark Matter: The Official Podcast.” Hosted by “Dark Matter” author and showrunner Crouch and executive producer Jacquelyn Ben-Zekry, the podcast takes listeners deeper into the series with a robust roster of cast members, key creatives and industry experts. Together, they explore the show’s biggest moments, the science behind the multiverse, the creative process and how the series expands beyond Crouch’s original novel.
New podcast episodes will be released alongside each episode throughout the season, beginning with a special catch-up episode ahead of the season two premiere that recaps the key moments from season one and invites fans back into the many worlds of “Dark Matter.” Each episode will feature an extensive lineup of cast and creative guests, including Edgerton, Connelly, Braga, Simpson, Brugel, Okeniyi, Margo Martindale, Fegley, Chris Diamantopoulos, Matt Tolmach and some surprise guests, including content creators and authors who are superfans of the show.
“Dark Matter” is produced for Apple TV by Sony Pictures Television. Crouch serves as creator, executive producer, showrunner and writer alongside executive producers Tolmach, Richard Lederer and Ben-Zekry, who co-wrote every episode of season two with Crouch. In addition to starring, Edgerton and Connelly also serve as executive producers.
“Dark Matter: The Official Podcast,” produced by Sony Pictures Television, will be available to watch and listen on Apple Podcasts, the Sony Pictures Television YouTube channel and the Apple TV YouTube channel.
Apple TV offers premium, compelling drama and comedy series, feature films, groundbreaking documentaries, and kids and family entertainment, and is available to watch across all of a user’s favorite screens. After its launch on November 1, 2019, Apple TV became the first all-original streaming service to launch around the world, and has premiered more original hits and received more award recognitions faster than any other streaming service in its debut. To date, Apple Original films, documentaries and series have been honored with 850 wins and 3,800 award nominations and counting including multi-Emmy Award-winning and history-making comedies “The Studio” and “Ted Lasso,” global cultural phenomenon “Severance,” Apple’s most-viewed drama “Pluribus,” Academy Award Best Picture winner “CODA” and Academy Award winner “F1,” the highest-grossing sports feature of all time.
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The post Apple TV unveils trailer for sci-fi thriller ‘Dark Matter’ season two appeared first on MacDailyNews.
A head-on collision with another galaxy billions of years ago may have dramatically reoriented the Milky Way’s disk, according to new supercomputer simulations that reveal how violent mergers can leave spiral galaxies looking surprisingly normal today.
The post Our Milky Way Galaxy Likely Underwent Disk Flip after Ancient Galactic Collision: Study appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
This image, which combines a background view from the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey with two inset images from the Very Large Telescope, shows an unusual pair of galaxies in the Fornax Cluster. The galaxies FCC 224 and FCC 240 are under scrutiny because they may have formed via a high-velocity collision between dwarf galaxies — the so-called “bullet-dwarf” model. Using new spectroscopy from the Very Large Telescope, Maria Luísa Buzzo (Yale University) and collaborators analyzed the ages and kinematics of the galaxies’ stars as well as the unusually bright globular clusters swirling around each galaxy. These data suggest that both galaxies are deficient in dark matter, and their stellar populations and globular clusters are all roughly 10 billion years old. The lack of dark matter and the uniform stellar ages are both consistent with the bullet-dwarf model, in which the collision strips away dark matter and ignites a burst of star formation. Since this type of collision can create more than two remnants, the team suggests searching along the trajectory defined by FCC 224 and FCC 240 for more fragments from the collision, some of which may contain the galaxies’ lost dark matter. To learn more about these galaxies and what they might mean for the bullet-dwarf mechanism, be sure to check out the full research article linked below.
“Dark-Matter-Deficient Twins: FCC 224 and FCC 240 as Possible Analogs of NGC 1052-DF2 and DF4,” Maria Luísa Buzzo et al 2026 ApJ 1005 15. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ae7349
The post Featured Image: A Rare Pair of Galaxies Lacking Dark Matter appeared first on AAS Nova.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
Dark matter interactions may be a hidden “dark force,” unexpectedly constraining our Universe’s expansion and structural development, according to researchers.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, researchers identified unexpected effects arising from dark matter particles interacting with one another and clustering via a hidden dark force.
Typically, scientists can only study the invisible—and still purely theoretical—dark matter through its gravitational effects on ordinary matter. However, the new research explores how dark matter may also influence itself.
As scientific instruments become more precise, researchers continue to uncover mysteries once hidden at the fuzzy edges of our understanding of the cosmos. One such puzzle involves discrepancies in measurements of the Universe’s density over time. Within the widely accepted ΛCDM model of cosmology, observations of cosmic expansion and the growth of large-scale structures have not always aligned with theoretical expectations.
To address these tensions, researchers have proposed a theoretical dark force—a previously unrecognized attractive force that acts only between dark matter particles. Such a force could influence both the expansion of the Universe and the formation of cosmic structures, potentially helping reconcile current models with recent observations.
“What we really know about dark matter has so far been learned only through its gravitational effects,” said co-author Zachary Weiner, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. “That leaves open the possibility that dark matter might have additional interactions that are hidden from ordinary matter.”
The researchers examined models in which dark matter particles interact through a long-range force beyond gravity. By combining cosmological observations with theoretical calculations, they searched for evidence of how such a force might affect both the growth of cosmic structures and the expansion history of the Universe.
At first glance, the prediction seemed straightforward: if an additional attractive force pulls dark matter particles together, it should enhance their ability to cluster, potentially explaining why some observations suggest a denser cosmic landscape than expected.
“The first thing you would expect is that giving dark matter an additional attractive force should make structures grow faster,” Weiner explained. “But another effect comes into play at the same time.”
The researchers’ results revealed a more complicated picture. While a dark force does cause dark matter to cluster more efficiently, it also alters the expansion of the Universe in a way that causes dark matter particles to become effectively lighter over time.
As a result, the additional clustering is not strong enough to significantly increase matter’s gravitational imprint on the cosmic microwave background. Instead, the net effect is to suppress the overall growth of cosmic structure.
According to the researchers, this previously unrecognized interaction could play an important role in new cosmological models developed to explain observations from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Tucson, Arizona. If confirmed, the effects of a dark force may need to be incorporated into future efforts to understand the evolution of the Universe.
As astronomers peer farther into space and deeper into cosmic history with ever-greater precision, studies like this may help explain subtle discrepancies that have long remained hidden.
“The Universe is often more subtle than our intuition,” Weiner concluded. “That’s exactly why we have to keep testing these ideas.”
The paper, “Dark Forces Suppress Structure Growth,” appeared in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics on June 22, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
The Bullet Cluster is one of the most famous objects in astronomy. For years, many scientists have considered it one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter, the mysterious substance thought to make up most of the matter in the universe. However, a new study suggests there may be another […]
The post Iconic cosmic collision challenges long-held ideas about dark matter appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
New research reveals how an unusual celestial object resembling a cosmic “bullseye” could offer clues to one of the most perplexing phenomena in our universe.
The research, undertaken by physicists Pierre Sikivie and Yuxin Zhao at the University of Florida, focuses on an astronomical feature quite unlike any other—the galaxy LEDA 1313424, whose concentric rings have garnered it the apt nickname of the “Bullseye galaxy.”
Based on Sikivie and Zhao’s recent research, detailed in a new paper that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal, quantum behavior related to long-mysterious dark matter may hold the key to the galaxy’s unusual appearance.
In the past, astronomers have attempted to explain LEDA 1313424’s unusual concentric appearance as the likely result of an ancient collision between two galaxies.
Not so, according to Sikivie and Zhao, who now take a vastly different approach by arguing that a better explanation may involve a Bose-Einstein condensate of axions, a variety of extremely light hypothetical particles.
This concept has much deeper roots that go back close to a century ago, when the first galaxy featuring an unusual concentric ring was discovered. This example, dubbed the Cartwheel galaxy, was only the first in a succession of similar astronomical discoveries involving galaxies with “ringed” appearances that incorporate as many as three annular features.
Explaining why these galaxies look this way has remained elusive. One theory proposed by astronomers, as noted earlier, involves impacts between two galaxies, which could create waves of density whose ripples become evident in ring-like structures surrounding the resulting galaxies.
However, a discovery in 2025 by Imad Pasha, a Yale University astronomer, and his colleagues presented an even stranger development in this ongoing concentric saga: the discovery of a galaxy that possesses not three rings, but nine of them. With its discovery, this remarkable celestial object’s unusual appearance garnered the nickname now familiar to us: “The Bullseye galaxy.”
One theory that astronomers believed may account for the galaxy’s nine concentric structures had been a hypothetical impact—and a very energetic one—that occurred about 56 million years ago. However, while investigating this possibility, Sikivie and Zhao say a problem emerged: this would mean that the outermost ring in the galaxy would have had to travel at a speed of 758 miles per second as it blasted outward from the galaxy’s center.
This speed, they say, is impossible to reconcile with what astronomers can already discern about the nature of the supposed collusion, as well as the well-characterized behavior of galactic material observed in other regions of the cosmos.
In an effort to get to the bottom of the mystery behind this unique galaxy, Sikivie and Zhao have put forward an alternative idea: that the rings in the Bullseye galaxy might instead be a byproduct of dark matter’s mysterious properties.
According to astronomers, dark matter is believed to be a nonluminous material that populates our universe, contributing around 85% of its total mass. Despite its ubiquity, direct detections that could confirm its existence have remained elusive.
However, there are some intriguing cosmic phenomena that astronomers are aware of that are very good candidates for being indirect evidence of this mysterious material. These observations include gravitational motion that occurs in galaxies, whereby the accumulation of dark matter is believed to manifest in the appearance of spherical halos encircling them.
In the past, Sikivie has explored this possibility, and whether current prevailing theories about dark matter, such as the idea that hypothetical particles known as axions, may offer the best interpretation of the physical reality behind dark matter.
If dark matter is indeed related to axions, it would also be required to obey what astrophysicists call conservation of angular momentum. According to Sikivie, when axions and galaxies interact, a phenomenon should emerge where portions of dark matter halos closest to the center would become oriented in structural forms known as “caustic rings.”
“We had earlier proposed that disk galaxies have caustic rings of dark matter with a pattern of ring radii, very similar to the pattern of ring radii observed in LEDA 1313424,” Sikivie recently said.
With this idea in mind, Sikivie and Lhao then turned their attention to the mysterious bullseye of LEDA 1313424 and “fitted the observed ring radii to the pattern of ring radii in the caustic ring interpretation,” from which they discerned that “LEDA’s rings are the imprint of caustic rings of dark matter on the baryonic matter in LEDA’s disk.”
A further aspect of the researchers’ theory involves the quantum behavior that axions are expected to engage in.
Under extremely cold conditions, these hypothetical dark matter particles could collectively occupy the same quantum state, forming what is known as a Bose-Einstein condensate—a strange state of matter in which quantum effects become visible on macroscopic scales.
According to the team, such a condensate could interact with ordinary matter in ways that match astronomical observations. If the duo is correct, this could imply that ring-shaped galaxies such as LEDA may not result from galactic collisions at all—instead, these unique cosmic structures might be evidence of dark matter axions that have undergone Bose-Einstein condensation.
Presently, much like dark matter, axions have remained hypothetical and frustratingly difficult to detect. Of course, given their elusiveness, this also makes them a very good candidate in terms of helping scientists close in on the dark matter mystery, and new models are helping to provide potentially compelling new resolutions for such problems.
For now, mysterious ringed galaxies remain mysterious. However, as the work of researchers like Sikivie and Lhao progresses, one of astronomy’s more unusual recent discoveries is gradually coming into focus, while providing fresh insight into the intriguing quantum nature of dark matter.
The team’s recent paper, “The Nine Rings of the Galaxy LEDA 1313424,” appeared in The Astrophysical Journal.
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.
Dark matter remains one of the biggest mysteries in science. Scientists cannot see it directly, yet they believe it makes up most of the matter in the universe. Now, a new study suggests that dark matter may gather around supermassive black holes, forming large invisible clouds that influence their surroundings. Researchers from Virginia Tech have […]
The post Scientists use light echoes to hunt dark matter around giant black holes appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.
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