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Michael RamirezRamirez, who studied premed at the University of California, Irvine, originally considered journalism a hobby. But he was hooked when his first cartoon for the college newspaper, lampooning

HomeCommentaryThe Second Amendment Protects All Weapons, Not Just Those In Common Use Guns In The News 2026-07-06 Here at defenseofournation.com, I have been quite critical of the Supreme Courts

By Anietie anii-basseyChinas military conducted a long-range ballistic missile test on Monday by launching the weapon from one of its nuclear-powered submarines in the South Pacific, a move that drew

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By Anietie anii-basseyDeep beneath the streets of Ukraines Kharkiv region, inside an unremarkable basement command center, Ukrainian drone operators sit before glowing computer monitors, watching live

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President Donald Trump pardoned several people convicted of violating the Clean Air Act, saying they were unfairly prosecuted by the Biden administration for simply fixing their vehicles. In a post

Astronomers have reconstructed the "skeleton" of the cosmos in unprecedented detail, thanks to the largest-ever survey conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The resulting map reveals how galaxies have evolved since the universe's infancy around 13 billion years ago and how they fall together in a vast structure called the cosmic web. The cosmic web is the largest known structure in existence, home to countless galaxy clusters and clusters of clusters. It is the framework of the universe, a scaffolding of gas filaments, stars, voids and sheets of dark matter that trace the entire large-scale organization of the cosmos. In a paper published May 6 in The Astrophysical Journal, an international team of astronomers, led by researchers from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), utilized a treasure trove of JWST data to reveal how the universe has evolved.How to sculpt a universe from scratch The new research shows how intrinsic and extrinsic factors influence the formation and death of stars and, therefore, galaxies and galactic clusters throughout vast swathes of cosmic time. Yet in what may seem like a wistful twist, the peak era of star formation is many billions of years behind us. The new research offers additional evidence of how the universe's structural framework facilitated this transition. "We show how the cosmic web helped shape galaxy growth before, during, and after that peak era," study co-author and UCR astronomer Hossein Hatamnia told Live Science via email. "At earlier times, dense regions appear to be sites of rapid galaxy growth, while at later times dense environments are associated with the shutdown of star formation."Such revelations come courtesy of COSMOS-Web, the grandest JWST survey yet: a 255-hour program spanning a contiguous area of the sky about the size of three full moons.Compared with the previous COSMOS2020 survey, shared in 2021 and conducted by the Hubble Space Telescope and other facilities, the JWST-derived COSMOS-Web boasts better redshift precision and includes more galaxies including fainter, lower-mass and more-distant objects. (Redshift is a measure of cosmic distance and time based on how light shifts to redder wavelengths as it crosses the universe.) Compared with the JWST-derived image below, which shows a slice of the cosmos as it appeared 11.5 billion years ago, previous cosmic maps were sparser, more diffuse, and lacking in cosmic structures.Data from the new COSMOS-Web survey (left) compared to the previous iteration (right). JWST's sensitivity and depth has allowed scientists to map the cosmic web in unprecedented detail. (Image credit: Hatamnia et al., The Astrophysical Journal, 2026)Additionally, the older COSMOS2020 survey tended to overestimate the depth in especially dense cosmic regions, where galaxies grow earlier and larger, and underestimate the depth of the least-dense spatial regions, the researchers said.Revealing celestial birth and death Yet JWST's cosmic map preserves the relative contrast across cosmic regions. It also shows that "massive galaxies in dense environments are more likely to be quiescent" dying and quenched of their star-forming potential. This may be because those galaxies are too massive, the team theorized. Once the dark matter halos that anchor galaxies grow to 1 trillion solar masses, they energize gas and prevent it from forming new stars. Additionally, active supermassive black holes quench star formation by energizing gas with their lethal, near-light-speed jets. Such "mass-related" star-killing mechanisms dominated up to around 7 billion years ago around half the age of the universe, the team found. related storiesMysterious 'little red dots' discovered by James Webb telescope may be the first stars in the universe on the verge of collapseJames Webb telescope spots 'stingray' galaxy system that could solve the mystery of 'little red dots'Black hole butterflies? James Webb telescope spots dozens of black hole 'cocoons' in early universe.In the more recent universe, star formation is dominantly quenched by the environment around galaxies, which may strip them of material or prevent cold gas from accumulating and coalescing into stars. Thanks to JWST's capabilities, the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe have been made clearer than ever, resolving blurry blobs into dim, ancient galaxies. "The jump in depth and resolution is truly significant, and we can now see the cosmic web at a time when the universe was only a few hundred million years old, an era that was essentially out of reach before JWST," co-author Bahram Mobasher, a distinguished professor of physics and astronomy at UCR, concluded in a statement. The catalog of 164,000 galaxies used to build the map of the cosmic web is publicly available.This article was first published May 18, 2026.

The Stargazer figurine was carved from marble around 5,000 years ago. (Image credit: Cleveland Museum of Art / Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; John L. Severance Fund 1993.165 (Public Domain))QUICK FACTSName: The StargazerWhat it is: A marble figurineWhere it is from: Krehir, TurkeyWhen it was made: Circa 3000 B.C.This small, abstract sculpture of a woman, carved from milky-white marble, is known as The Stargazer because her head is tilted back and her eyes appear to stare skyward. Only about 30 figurines of this type have ever been found; all of them date to about 3000 B.C. and were crafted by a culture that left no written records of the figurines' meaning, according to art historian Amanda Mikolic.This particular stargazer figurine was once owned by philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller, a member of the wealthy industrial family and vice president of the United States under Gerald Ford. It is now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA). The marble figurine is roughly 6.8 inches (17.2 centimeters) tall and weighs about 1 pound (454 grams). Clearly carved into human form but lacking a mouth, the statuette likely represents a woman, with the incised lines below the waist representing her pubic triangle. Her large, oval head is tilted back, and her tiny, dot-like eyes look upward.Most stargazer figurines that have been discovered in western Anatolia (present-day Turkey) were broken at the neck before being buried in the ground millennia ago, making the CMA example one of the finest and most complete stargazer statuettes ever found. But the meaning of the woman portrayed in The Stargazer figurine is unclear, since the culture that created it did not leave any written language explaining their art. The figurine cannot stand on its own, suggesting that it was meant to be held or placed flat, according to Mikolic. "Deliberately rendered as female, she may be associated with fertility and abundance," she wrote. The statuette may be part of a trend of simplistic female figurines in the Mediterranean area linked to female fertility and the life cycle, such as the Cycladic figurines, according to The Getty, which has a stargazer figurine in its collection. Regardless of the woman's specific meaning, "she must have been an important devotional object to some long-lost culture," Arielle Kozloff, former curator of ancient art at the CMA, wrote in the CMA Members Magazine.Abstract female figurines like The Stargazer and other Neolithic examples are known to have inspired early-20th-century cubist masters, Kozloff wrote. This gives her "a sense of timelessness," according to Mikolic, "encouraging the viewer to think of humankinds place and role in a larger cosmos."For more stunning archaeological discoveries, check out our Astonishing Artifacts archives. Byzantine Foot Lamp Mask of Mictlantecuhtli Roman Bath Clog Can you put together last week's Astonishing Artifact?