Over a decade ago, dark-matter experts Daniel Akerib and Thomas Shutt joined the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, continuing their mission to uncover the elusive substance. Writer Ali Sundermier recently caught up with them to discuss the current state of the dark-matter search.

“Marlowe,” named after the fictional detective created by Raymond Chandler, has the potential to transform research across fields, from political science to astrophysics.

The telescope will catalogue billions of new objects and produce a new map of the entire night sky every three days with the largest digital camera ever made.

The Universe has an invisible skeleton made of particles we can’t describe in our current theories, known only as dark matter. Its strong gravity pulled everything else together inside it to form stars, galaxies, and eventually us. Discovering what dark matter is made of would fill an enormous gap in theories of subatomic physics and allow us to better understand how the Universe came to be. The axion, a theoretical particle proposed to solve another unrelated mystery, could be the answer. The search for axion dark matter is well underway with the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment, and our group at Stanford is expanding on that search with Volume Enhanced Resonators for Axions (VERA) by developing new axion detectors.

A new center brings astrophysics, data science, and AI together to answer some of the universe’s biggest questions.

X-ray astronomy unlocks a hidden universe of extreme events: from black holes and exploding stars to heated gas in galaxy clusters, it allows us to uncover the high-energy processes that have shaped the cosmos. As the next-generation X-ray missions search for the first stars and galaxies, the current generation of detectors will need upgrades to support their capabilities. The hardware wing of the X-ray Astronomy and Observational Cosmology group and collaborators are developing a novel technology called Single-electron Sensitive Read Out (SiSeRO). SiSeRO detectors could provide an order-of-magnitude improvement in noise and speed performance over the charge-coupled devices (CCDs) used in major X-ray telescopes.

For decades, scientists have used the Milky Way as a model for understanding how galaxies form. But a trio of new studies raises questions about whether the Milky Way is truly representative of other galaxies in the universe.