Dark matter’s stubborn resistance to discovery has forced us to reevaluate what it may look like. If it is much lighter than we’ve assumed, there must be more of it around to make up the total mass required to hold galaxies together. Our challenge: the signals these lighter particles would leave in terrestrial detectors are smaller than any we’ve ever set out to measure. To answer that challenge, DM physicists are constructing the coldest, quietest, most sensitive particle detectors ever made.

An enormous vat of pure liquid xenon will help scientists at SLAC and around the globe learn more about the universe.

A cosmologist, cultural historian, and neurosurgeon discuss how outer space and otherworldly phenomena can inspire discovery across disciplines and bring people together.

New imaging technology will help enable future large X-ray telescopes to trace the origin and growth of black holes and the ways they’ve shaped the cosmos.

A spinning neutron star periodically swings its radio (green) and gamma-ray (magenta) beams past Earth in this artist’s concept of a black widow pulsar. The neutron star/pulsar heats the facing side of its stellar partner (right) to temperatures twice as hot as the sun’s surface and slowly evaporates it.

For more than a decade, scientists and engineers from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) have been leading the development of the world’s largest digital camera for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) Simonyi Survey Telescope. They’ve broken Guinness World Records for highest resolution digital camera and largest lens, but the heart of the camera—a table-sized focal plane made up of nearly two hundred charge-coupled devices (CCDs)—has been a scientific study in its own right, filling thousands of research papers and countless PhD dissertations. 

Our Universe is believed to be filled with a chaotic sea of low-frequency gravitational waves, perturbations in space-time caused by orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes at the centers of merging galaxies. These waves can be light-years long and astronomers have been chasing them for decades using large radio telescopes around the globe. Now a powerful new tool—one with a long association to KIPAC—has been developed, and the hunt has moved to space using gamma rays, the highest-energy form of light.