Homer, packed into a mummy’s belly
The headline on this one writes itself, so let me get it out of the way: a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy, excavated from a Roman-era tomb at Oxyrhynchus, was found to have a fragment of Homer’s Iliad packed inside its wrappings \u2014 specifically into the...
Galaxies that died early, and the scars they don’t show
Two years ago, a paper in Nature announced a single strange object: a galaxy at redshift 4.65, already as massive as a respectable present-day disk, and already done forming stars. The universe was about 1.4 billion years old. The galaxy had no business being retired....
An anchor field that shouldn’t exist, and the corridor that always did
There is a stretch of water between two small Dodecanese islands, Karpathos and Kasos, that every ship moving between the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean has had to think about for as long as there have been ships to think with. A joint survey by the Greek...
The Early Universe Was Already Building Architecture
The early universe was not supposed to have this much architecture. JWST has identified a barred spiral galaxy, M1149-BSG-z5, at a photometric redshift of 5.102. That places the light we see from it in a cosmos roughly 1.2 billion years old. The galaxy’s effective...