news 2025

Of the many open questions that baffle physicists today, there is one - the most relevant for cosmologists - that crystallises into a single number: the Hubble constant H0, which represents the ratio between the distance of a cosmic object from us and the speed at which it moves away from us due to the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

An international team led by ICREA researcher Mark Gieles, from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), has developed a groundbreaking model that reveals how extremely massive stars (EMS) - with more than 1,000 times the mass of the Sun - have governed the birth and early evolution of the oldest star clusters in the universe.

A team of scientists led by expert Raúl Jiménez, ICREA researcher at the University of Barcelona's Institute of Cosmos Sciences (ICCUB), in collaboration with the University of Padua (Italy), has presented a revolutionary theory about the origins of the Universe. The study, published in the journal Physical Review Research , introduces a radical change in the understanding of the first moments after the Big Bang, without relying on the speculative assumptions that physicists have traditionally assumed.

An international team of scientists has published a new report that moves towards a better understanding of the behaviour of some of the heaviest particles in the universe under extreme conditions, which are similar to those just after the big bang. The paper, published in the journal Physics Reports , is signed by physicists Juan M. Torres-Rincón, from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences at the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), Santosh K. Das, from the Indian Institute of Technology Goa (India), and Ralf Rapp, from Texas A&M University (United States).

A study led by Paolo Padoan, ICREA research professor at the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB), is challenging the understanding of planetary disk formation around young stars. The paper, published in Nature Astronomy, reveals that the environment plays a crucial role in determining the size and lifetime of these planetary disks, which are the sites of planet formation.

The fate of the Universe depends on the balance between matter and dark energy, the fundamental ingredient that drives its accelerating expansion.

Physical Review Letters magazine has published a paper by Nicolás Sanchis Gual (UV), Juan Calderón Bustillo (IGFAE), and Adrián del Río (UC3M-UV) which analyses the possible asymmetry of black hole fusions. A paper led by researchers from the Universitat de València (UV), the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE), and Charles III University of Madrid (UC3M) researches the possible existence of asymmetries in the universe through the analysis of the direction of rotation in black hole fusions.

Traditional black holes, as predicted by Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity, contain what are known as singularities , i.e. points where the laws of physics break down. Identifying how singularities are resolved in the context of quantum gravity is one of the fundamental problems in theoretical physics.