Astronomers have discovered a remarkably tiny group of six young galaxies just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This may be a rare glimpse of how some of the universe’s largest galaxies formed. The paper outlining the findings was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 13.

Chaotic patches
The widely accepted cosmological model of the universe known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model suggests that galaxies primarily form hierarchically through mergers. That means they grow piece by piece, as smaller galaxies merge over billions of years. In this context, dense regions in the early universe serve as natural laboratories to test this idea.

These dense patches, known as protoclusters and proto-groups, are young clusters of galaxies packed into a region just tens of tho...

A new mouse study led by UCLA Health suggests that inflammation during pregnancy can trigger autism-like changes in offspring, but those brain and behavioral effects may be rapidly, though temporarily, reversible in adulthood with a single dose of the immunosuppressive drug rapamycin.

Even mild inflammation during midpregnancy has been shown to result in autism-like symptoms in offspring, abnormal brain growth, seizures and heightened sensitivity to everyday sensory input that persist into adulthood.

In the study published in the journal Nature Communications, UCLA researchers found that a single dose of rapamycin significantly improved brain signaling and behavioral symptoms in these offspring within about two hours, too short a time to correct ...

Quantum computers, devices that process information by leveraging the laws of quantum mechanics, have been found to outperform classical computers in some advanced tasks. Instead of storing information in the form of classical binary bits (i.e., 0 or 1), quantum computers rely on quantum bits (i.e., qubits), which can also exist in combinations of 0 and 1 states.

Despite their potential, quantum computers are known to be highly prone to errors. This is because qubits are very sensitive to heat, magnetic fields and other changes in their surroundings, which can disrupt the delicate quantum states they rely on to store and process data.

Researchers at Princeton University recently introduced a new approach for developing quantum computers that make fewer errors and whose errors ar...

Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have captured one of the clearest views yet of how an early supermassive black hole may grow within a network of young galaxies. The compact active galaxy, seen just a billion years after the Big Bang, lies beside a 12,000-parsec-long filament containing multiple galaxies that are expected to merge within a few hundred million years.

The findings, posted to the arXiv preprint server on July 6, suggest astronomers may be witnessing a short-lived phase in the evolution of rapidly growing black holes while also shedding light on how the first massive galaxies assembled in the early universe.

Too big for its galaxy
Since JWST began operating, astronomers have found a population of compact, actively feeding black holes in galaxies from ...