Research group Cosmology

The Vera Rubin Observatory's new LSST telescope is now operational, marking the start of a new era in astronomical research at the Oskar Klein Centre (OKC). With funding previously granted by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation totaling SEK 30 million, OKC now significantly enhances its capability to explore fundamental questions about the universe.

Dark matter might not need to be made of tiny, lightweight axions after all. This paper shows that much heavier axions, once thought too unstable, could survive to the present day and account for dark matter. Axions, hypothetical particles that barely interact with light, are a primary candidate for dark matter. Scientists believed axions had to be very light, since heavier ones would decay too quickly into photons and disappear. Our new study challenges this view. We propose a new force, similar to the one that forges protons, able to hold together "dark gluons" into stable clumps called glueballs.

The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) collaboration has announced a major milestone in the study of cosmic expansion and supernova physics with the release of over 20 scientific publications in a special issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Ludvig Doeser studied Engineering Physics at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in parallel with hosting exhibitions at Tom Tits in his spare time. During his master programme he was an exchange student in the USA. In 2021, he did his thesis with Jens Jasche and collaborated with Magnus Axelsson at Fysikum. Since January 2022 he is a PhD student at the division of Cosmology, Astroparticle Physics and String Theory - COPS. He teaches and is responsible for the outreach event FysikShow. Ludvig is awarded this year's prize because he intends to introduce FysikShow's experiments into physics teaching.

Why is the vast supergalactic plane teeing with only one type of galaxies? This old cosmic puzzle may now have been solved. Jens Jasche, associate professor at Fysikum, is a member of the research group of these results. Our own Milky Way galaxy is part of a much larger formation, the local Supercluster structure, which contains several massive galaxy clusters and thousands of individual galaxies. Due to its pancake-like shape, which measures almost a billion light years across, it is also referred to as the Supergalactic Plane. Most galaxies in the universe fall into one of two categories: Firstly, elliptical galaxies, made mostly of old stars and containing typically extremely massive central black holes, and secondly actively star-forming disk galaxies, with a spiral-like structure similar to the Milky Way’s. Both types of galaxies are also found in the Local Supercluster, but while the Supergalactic Plane is teeming with bright ellipticals, bright disk galaxies are conspicuously absent.

Scientists have been pondering the existence of dark matter – matter that does not seem to interact with light – for almost a century. Thanks to a 27.5 million SEK grant, Jón Gudmundsson and his colleagues at Stockholm University can construct a new type of detector to find axions, a type of hypothetical particles that could constitute dark matter.