New results from the world’s most sensitive dark matter detector put the best-ever limits on particles called WIMPs, a leading candidate for what makes up our universe’s invisible mass.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory will capture the faint light of distant brown dwarfs to help scientists understand the Milky Way’s formation and evolution.

Magnetic fields that permeate the interstellar medium (ISM) play an important role in various astrophysical processes, such as star formation. Unfortunately, magnetic fields are difficult to detect directly, as they have no effect on neutral photons—the light by which we view the Universe. Magnetic fields do affect the vast clouds of dust in our Galaxy by aligning the dust grains, resulting in the light they emit also being aligned, or polarized. By measuring the polarization of the dust’s emission, we can infer the structure of the interstellar magnetic field over the sky.

Susan Clark is helping to unravel the mysterious workings of the Milky Way’s magnetic field, a critical missing piece of the galactic puzzle.

Researchers have released 10 terabytes of data from the OpenUniverse project, which has created a detailed simulation of the universe astrophysicists can use to help calibrate expectations from two major new telescopes.

The largest camera ever built for astrophysics has completed the journey to Cerro Pachón in Chile, where it will soon help unlock the universe’s mysteries.

Three flights and about 26 hours from Stanford’s campus, on a cold, dry, and remote mountain high in the Atacama Desert, sits the Simons Observatory, a cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment which will soon begin to map this ancient light with exquisite precision. Since it is the furthest light source in our Universe, however, studying the CMB is particularly difficult. Ground-based telescopes such as the Simons Observatory must be constructed in some of the most remote corners of the globe. Water vapor in our atmosphere perturbs astronomical measurements, so scientists build telescopes in the dry, thin air of high-altitude deserts. The Atacama Desert in Chile is one such location, where some areas among the Andes Mountains are nearly 50 times drier than California’s Death Valley.

Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s stunningly detailed images will illuminate distant stellar streams and their past encounters with dark matter.

Researchers have used the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to make the largest 3D map of our universe and world-leading measurements of dark energy, the mysterious force behind its accelerating expansion.