Only a handful of observations truly constrain the nature of dark matter, which is why dozens of different physical models are still viable. Several of the most popular alternatives predict that dark matter halos slowly “thermalize” over time, gradually changing shape and expanding until they form a central region of nearly constant density -- a core. This transformation would not occur if the dark matter particles were completely collision-less, as assumed in the standard model. Therefore, the presence or absence of such a core provides a powerful way to distinguish between the standard

The Universe is not distributed uniformly. Galaxies are arranged in a gigantic cosmic web made of voids, filaments, and galaxy clusters. These filaments act as enormous “cosmic highways” through which matter and galaxies flow toward the densest regions of the Universe. Understanding how these structures influence galaxy evolution is one of the major goals of modern astrophysics. In this work, we analyzed hundreds of thousands of galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to study how galaxy density changes around cosmic filaments in the nearby Universe. Our main goal was to determine

An international team of researchers led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the Universidad de La Laguna (ULL), has unveiled a breakthrough explanation for the origin of tiny, jet-like plasma ejections in the solar atmosphere, known as “nanojets.” These elusive events which are recently discovered by the NASA’s solar telescopes are thought to play an important role in heating and sustaining the solar corona at temperatures above one million Kelvin. Why Study Nanojets? For decades, solar physicists have been puzzled by the so-called “coronal heating problem.” While the Sun