{"id":476090,"date":"2026-03-15T00:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-15T00:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/476090\/"},"modified":"2026-03-15T00:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-15T00:36:08","slug":"astronomers-spent-100-years-hunting-the-cosmic-concrete-shaping-the-universe-now-the-mystery-deepens-as-it-may-exist-in-cold-and-warm-fo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/476090\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers spent 100 years hunting the \u2018cosmic concrete\u2019 shaping the universe \u2014 Now the mystery deepens as it may exist in \u2018cold\u2019 and \u2018warm\u2019 forms"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Astronomers have spent the best part of the last century hunting for a \u201ccosmic concrete\u201d that holds our universe together.<\/p>\n<p>The sheer vastness of space will take us a lifetime to understand, if we\u2019re lucky. The inconceivable distances in the cosmos have confounded the best minds in history, and the mysteries are only now beginning to reveal themselves as our technology advances.<\/p>\n<p>What invisible matter is shaping our universe, and how can we study it?<\/p>\n<p>How technology has opened the secrets of the universe<\/p>\n<p>The remarkable advancements in technology have acted as our cosmic eyes.<\/p>\n<p>NASA has developed a method to \u201clisten\u201d to the black holes in the universe. As we know, space is a vacuum, with no sound. As such, scientists developed \u201csonification,\u201d which turned data from black holes into eerie soundtracks straight out of a horror film.<\/p>\n<p>Time travel belevie it or not, has become a possibility too, in a way.<\/p>\n<p>The game-changing telescopes, such as the Webb and Hubble ones, act like time-travelling machines that capture images from the earliest galaxies and star clusters to reveal how the universe behaved right after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n<p>Space: The final frontier of human knowledge that needs to be understood<\/p>\n<p>It has become abundantly clear that our knowledge of the cosmos is far from complete; in fact, we have barely scratched the surface.<\/p>\n<p>The world is becoming increasingly dangerous to live in. New geopolitical issues have raised alarm bells as to how we can come together to save our planet. As such, the eggheads of the world are turning their attention to space to search for our <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/nasa-earth-frozen-twin-hd137010b\/17657\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">next possible home away from home.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>But the universe is so vast that we could spend the rest of our time gazing into it and never discover what makes it tick, or indeed what holds it together.<\/p>\n<p>Recent discoveries of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/a-rare-sungrazing-comet-is-approaching\/18653\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">comets heading exceedingly close to our planet<\/a> have raised our collective alert levels. The reality is that we need to study the unknown parts of our universe if we stand a chance at saving ourselves from ourselves.<\/p>\n<p>A new mission to unravel the most iconic mystery in space has been developed by <a href=\"https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/dark-matter\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">NASA<\/a>, and it could have life-changing implications for the world and the universe, to be fair.<\/p>\n<p>Cold and warm matter exist that keep the universe tightly held together<\/p>\n<p>Scientists have found that the universe is mostly made up of what is referred to as \u201cdark matter\u201d or \u201cdark energy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The reason it\u2019s called dark matter is that it is an invisible force that makes up roughly 95% of the matter in the universe. Due to the fact that we can\u2019t see it, even with the astonishing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/nasa-checking-hubbles-images\/18543\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">telescopes we have developed over the past few decades<\/a>, NASA and others have named it dark matter.<\/p>\n<p>The mysterious and unexplained cosmic concrete that makes up the majority of the cosmos uses gravity to pull stars and bend the very fabric of light.<\/p>\n<p>A new study finds that dark matter can come in different temperature variants<\/p>\n<p>A recent study, \u201cA possible challenge for cold and warm dark matter\u201d, published in\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41550-025-02746-w\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">Nature<\/a>, has revealed that dark matter can come in different \u201ctemperatures\u201d and speeds. This means that cold dark matter moves slowly, allowing for the matter to clump together in a bottom-up formation.<\/p>\n<p>Warm dark matter acts much faster, where rapidly-moving particles smooth out small-scale cosmic structures in the universe.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>As we now know, dark matter makes up 95% of the cosmic concrete holding the cosmos together. We are far from reaching a level of understanding as to what exactly dark matter is and where it comes from, but science has proven it does exist.<\/p>\n<p>While our immediate attention has<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/nasa-speeds-up-moon-return-plan\/18732\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> returned to the lunar missions we have planned,<\/a> dark matter and all its mysteries still boggle the minds of us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astronomers have spent the best part of the last century hunting for a \u201ccosmic concrete\u201d that holds our&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":476091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-476090","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/476091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}