At roughly 13.8 billion years old, the universe has never exactly been short on mysteries. Countless generations had little means of understanding what lay beyond our world, relying instead on myths to explain the origins of everything. But over the centuries, mathematics, observation, and increasingly sophisticated scientific tools transformed our understanding of the cosmos. Yet for all the breakthroughs that followed, NASA notes that “most of the universe that can be known remains unknown” and “in a cosmic sense, we just got here.”
A researcher analyzing observations from the James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered a puzzling pattern in how distant galaxies rotate—one that puts a new spin on the longstanding question of whether our universe could be inside a black hole.
