---
title: "Astrophysicist Says Cosmology’s Big Questions Crowd Out Dust, Gas and Stars"
description: "Dylan Jow of Stanford says the field’s multibillion-dollar telescopes put the early universe and dark energy ahead of stars and dust."
author: "rews desk"
published: 2026-11-06T11:00:00Z
modified: 2026-11-06T14:44:11Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/astrophysicist-says-cosmology-s-big-questions-crowd-out-dust-cd4288
language: en
tags: ["cosmology", "astrophysics", "dark-matter", "research", "funding", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Astrophysicist Says Cosmology’s Big Questions Crowd Out Dust, Gas and Stars

*Dylan Jow of Stanford says the field’s multibillion-dollar telescopes put the early universe and dark energy ahead of stars and dust.*

By rews desk · November 6, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/astrophysicist-says-cosmology-s-big-questions-crowd-out-dust-cd4288

## In brief

- Stanford astrophysicist Dylan Jow argues in Aeon that astronomy ranks fundamental-physics questions above studying the cosmos itself
- He says flagship telescopes costing several billion dollars each list the early universe and dark energy ahead of stars and dust
- Cosmologists call dust a nuisance because its polarized light can mimic signals in the cosmic microwave background
- Jow says he once saw astrophysics as a consolation prize after missing out on particle physics
- He calls the hierarchy a historical result of astronomy becoming a branch of physics in the late 20th century

Dylan Jow, a theoretical astrophysicist at Stanford University, argued in an essay published on Friday that astronomy now treats the universe mainly as a laboratory for fundamental physics, ranking a few “Big Questions” above the dust, gas and stars that fill it.

The essay, [published in *Aeon*](https://aeon.co/essays/why-astrophysics-needs-to-abandon-the-big-questions), goes after the priorities written into the field’s most expensive instruments. Dr. Jow named five flagship projects: the Square Kilometre Array Observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna. Each will cost several billion dollars over its lifetime, he wrote.

Their goals line up. The Square Kilometre Array, based at Jodrell Bank in Britain, lists the early universe, gravitational waves, dark energy and cosmology ahead of stars, the interstellar medium and the origins of life, Dr. Jow wrote, and Webb’s official page puts the “cosmic dawn” before stars, planets and dust. Media coverage repeats that order, he wrote, and it shapes what young researchers, politicians, funders and the public think matters.

![A vintage-style telescope extends from an observatory toward concentric circles in a cream sky above swirling coral, teal, and navy cosmic clouds.](https://rews.cc/img/767ba8f642009611014fb7dd55d9f621f727eb7b.webp)

Dr. Jow is a Kavli Fellow at Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and earned his Ph.D. at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, [according to his website](https://dljow.github.io/). His research includes how radio waves from pulsars and fast radio bursts scatter as they cross interstellar gas.

Dust is his lead example. As gas clouds cooled in the early universe, dust grains absorbed and re-emitted radiation and helped stars form. Later they supplied the raw material for planets, and they may have been the surfaces where the first complex organic molecules formed. Most cosmologists still call dust a “nuisance,” the field’s quasi-technical word for anything that gets in the way of what a researcher wants to measure. Dust gives off polarized light that can mimic faint signals in the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the Big Bang that cosmologists have spent decades and billions of dollars trying to detect.

![A hand sweeps colorful cosmic dust, stars, and a ringed planet with a brush against a dark blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/57399b109f0720ff03b354ed8e4ae56fc45c79e3.webp)

“A cosmologist studies dust not to uncover its role in shaping the cosmos, but to subtract it,” Dr. Jow wrote.

He found the same split elsewhere. Astronomers who map dark matter through weak lensing, the slight bending of light by gravity, treat ordinary visible matter as the nuisance. Pulsar timing teams, who use spinning neutron stars as clocks to catch gravitational waves passing through the galaxy, treat ionized interstellar gas that way, because it scatters and disperses the pulsars’ light. For anyone studying the interstellar medium, that gas is the point. “One astronomer’s nuisance is another’s treasure,” he wrote.

The stakes are practical. Hundreds of scientists and engineers build and run each big telescope, researchers compete hard for observing time, and shared priorities decide how that time is handed out.

Even the vocabulary carries the ranking, Dr. Jow wrote. Cosmologists commonly say that on small scales, inside and around galaxies, the physics of dark matter “is obscured by the astrophysics of interstellar gas,” a phrasing he said assumes messy astrophysics is subordinate to clean fundamental physics.

![A glowing orbital sculpture stands on a pedestal behind a coral velvet rope, surrounded by swirling teal and coral cosmic clouds under a spotlight.](https://rews.cc/img/9dc64eec875a628cd5ab96705b77b79a42b5d564.webp)

He described absorbing that view himself. He had an amateur telescope as a child and spent nights learning the winter sky, but by graduate school, like many classmates, he wanted to do theoretical particle physics. With almost everyone competing for a few spots, he turned to astrophysics. “But the truth is, at the time, I viewed astrophysics as something of a consolation prize,” he wrote.

Dr. Jow called the hierarchy “a historical contingency.” Astronomy was long a science of mapping, cataloging and observation, and in the second half of the 20th century it became a branch of physics. General relativity let physicists study the dynamics of the whole universe, mid-century nuclear physics succeeded and dark matter and dark energy turned up late in the century. Neither substance fits the standard model of particle physics, and neither would have been found without astronomers’ observations, he wrote. Along the way, “astronomy” gave ground to the more prestigious “astrophysics.”

He wrote that he still hopes astronomy can point to new fundamental physics, but that the hope no longer drives his interest in the sky, and that he suspects many other astronomers feel the same way.