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The recent discovery that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate has led many astronomers to forecast a dark and lonely future for our galaxy. According to some predictions, the rapidly accelerating universe will cause all galaxies to run away from each other until they are no longer visible. In this widely accepted scenario, our own Milky Way will become an isolated island adrift in a sea of totally black space 150 billion years from now. But two new studies by Stanford University cosmologists suggest that it may be time to rethink this popular view of a "runaway universe."...

In the decades that astronomers have debated the fate of the expanding universe — whether it will all end one day in a big crunch, or whether the galaxies will sail apart forever — aficionados of eternal expansion have always been braced by its seemingly endless possibilities for development and evolution. As the Yale cosmologist Dr. Beatrice Tinsley once wrote, "I think I am tied to the idea of expanding forever." Life and intelligence could sustain themselves indefinitely in such a universe, even as the stars winked out and the galaxies were all swallowed by black holes, Dr. Freeman Dyson, ...

Scientists name new ‘object’ SDSS J0100+2802 and say it is 12.8bn light years from Earth and was formed just 900m years after the Big Bang *************************************************************A monster black hole powering “the brightest lighthouse in the distant universe” has been discovered that is 12bn times more massive than the sun, scientists have revealed.The extraordinary object is at the centre of a quasar - an intensely powerful galactic radiation source - with a million billion times the sun’s energy output.For years the nature of quasars, discovered in 1963, remained a mystery. Today scientists believe they are generated by matter heating up as...

Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with. "The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt. In collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Ali has created a series of equations that describe a universe much like Hoyle's; one without a...

Secular Study: No Big Bang? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Christians who believe the universe began billions of years ago often point to the Big Bang model to try and verify a creation-like beginning.1 But a new origin of the universe model offers an "everlasting universe" and dismisses the whole idea of a Big Bang.2 Genesis does not describe a Big Bang. Instead of a hot explosion, it presents a rather cold, watery origin. Instead of stars first, followed by Earth's emergence billions of years later, God made Earth first, then stars four days later. If the Big Bang really...

(Phys.org) —The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once. The widely accepted age of the universe, as estimated by general relativity, is 13.8 billion years. In the beginning, everything in existence is thought to have occupied a single infinitely dense point, or singularity. Only after this point began to expand in a "Big Bang" did the universe officially begin. Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from...

Scientists who made headlines last March by announcing that they'd found long-sought evidence about the early universe are now abandoning that claim. New data show that their cosmic observations no longer back up that conclusion, they say. The original announcement caused a sensation because it appeared to show evidence that the universe ballooned rapidly a split-second after its birth, in what scientist call cosmic inflation. That idea had been widely believed, but researchers had hoped to bolster it by finding a particular trait in light left over from the very early universe. That signal is what the researchers claimed they...

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang? The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may...

Throughout the de-Christianized West and America neo-pagan and mystical pantheist evolutionary reasoning is taken for granted throughout the college curriculum, just as it is in all aspects of modern thought and experience. It not only undergirds biological and earth sciences, but also Freudian and Jungian psychology, anthropology, law, sociology, politics, economics, the media, arts, medicine, and all other academic---and increasingly seminarian---disciplines as well. The West's amoral transnational elite Gnostics, the "chosen" ones, are particularly enamored of evolutionary reasoning: "Western cultural elites have disregarded God for more than two centuries, but for a while the effects were mostly confined to their...

The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not “a magician with a magic wand”, Pope Francis has declared. Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI. Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they “require it”. “When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with...

A Fuss Over Dust: Planck Satellite Fails to Confirm Big Bang 'Proof' by Jake Hebert, Ph.D. * During a high profile news conference in March 2014, the BICEP2 radio astronomy team announced purported direct evidence for inflation— an important part of the modern Big Bang model.1 In Big Bang cosmology, inflation is a hypothesized "growth spurt" in which the universe enormously increased in size. Inflation was an ad hoc addition to the Big Bang model intended to solve some very serious theoretical difficulties, including the Big Bang's own version of the seeing-distant-starlight-in-a-young- universe problem.2 Inflation was originally thought to have...

Stephen Hawking has shocked physicists by admitting “there are no black holes”. In a paper published online, Professor Hawking instead argues there are “grey holes”. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes—in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity,” he says in the paper, called Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting For Black Holes.He says that the idea of an event horizon, from which light cannot escape, is flawed. He suggests that instead light rays attempting to rush away from the black hole’s core will be held as though stuck on a...

An Indian theoretical physicist who questioned the existence of black holes and thereby challenged Stephen Hawking of Britain at last feels vindicated. But he is sad. Abhas Mitra, at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, was perhaps the first and the only scientist who had the guts to openly challenge Hawking of Cambridge University who is regarded by many as the modern-day Einstein. For over 30 years Hawking and his followers were perpetuating the theory that black holes -- resulting from gravitational collapse of massive stars -- destroy everything that falls into them preventing even light or information...

... Well, even 90 years isn't enough, it seems, so right now, we are entering new waters – the denial of some basic results of general relativity, our modern theory of gravity that has been around and available to everyone since 1916. So in the last week, hundreds of publications informed their readers that it's been "mathematically proven" that the big bang theory is wrong and the black holes don't exist. These nutty claims boil down to some papers by a crackpot named Ms Laura Mersini-Houghton (no, I really, really won't accept her doctorate) who had previously claimed that she...

Stardust got in their eyes. In the spring a group of astronomers who go by the name of BICEP announced they had detected ripples in the sky, gravitational waves that were the opening notes of the Big Bang. The finding was heralded as potentially the greatest discovery of the admittedly young century, but some outside astronomers said the group had underestimated the extent to which interstellar dust could have contaminated the results - a possibility that the group conceded in its official report in June. Now a long-awaited report by astronomers using data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite...

Inflation is dead, long live inflation! The very results hailed this year as demonstrating a consequence of inflationary models of the universe – and therefore pointing to the existence of multiverses – now seem to do the exact opposite. If the results can be trusted at all, they now suggest inflation is wrong, raising the possibility of cyclic universes that existed before the big bang. In March experimentalists announced that primordial gravitational waves had been discovered. The team behind the BICEP2 Telescope in Antarctica had observed telltale twists and turns in the polarisation of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB)...

Big Bang Fizzles under Lithium Test by Brian Thomas, M.S. * Secular astrophysicists often talk about “primordial nucleosynthesis” as though it were a historical event like Washington crossing the Delaware. In theory, it describes how certain conditions—not God’s handiwork—during an early Big Bang universe somehow cobbled together the first elements. However, unlike Washington’s crossing, no historical evidence corroborates this primordial nucleosynthesis, an idea beset by a theoretical barrier called the “lithium problem.” Secular scientists recently put this problem to a practical test. In theory, the Big Bang’s natural processes would have produced a certain ratio of stable lithium isotopes—lithium-6 and...

LONDON: Stephen Hawking has recently warned that the God particle or Higgs boson has the potential to obliterate the universe. The 72-year-old cosmologist said Higgs boson could become unstable at very high energy levels, which would lead to a "catastrophic vacuum decay" causing space and time to collapse and that there would not be any warning to the danger, the Daily Express reported. Speaking in the preface to a new book called Starmus, the Cambridge-educated scientist said that the Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become mega-stable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV). However, Hawking did also...

Is there definitive evidence for an expanding universe? by John Hartnett The spectral lines for this element still show the same distinctive pattern, but all have been shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. Expansion of the universe is fundamental to the big bang cosmology. No expansion means no big bang. By projecting cosmological expansion backwards in time, they assert, one will, hypothetically, come to a time where all points are the same. Since these points are all there is, then it logically follows that there is no space or time ‘before’ this moment. It is the singularity, and...

The universe shouldn't exist — at least according to a new theory. Modeling of conditions soon after the Big Bang suggests the universe should have collapsed just microseconds after its explosive birth, the new study suggests. "During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation — this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang," said study co-author Robert Hogan, a doctoral candidate in physics at King's College in London. "This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around, and if we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause...