Keyword: cosmology
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Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our activities may be shortening the life of the universe too. The startling claim is made by a pair of American cosmologists investigating the consequences for the cosmos of quantum theory, the most successful theory we have. Over the past few years, cosmologists have taken this powerful theory of what happens at the level of subatomic particles and tried to extend it to understand the universe, since it began in the subatomic realm during the Big Bang. The Boomerang Nebula, mankind ‘shortening the universe’s life’ Cosmologists claim by observing dark...
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Predictions Part I astronomy and climatology http://home.earthlink.net/~gravitics/LaViolette/Predict.html Superwave Theory Predictions and their Subsequent Verification Galactic Core Explosions - prevailing concept (1980): At the time of this prediction, astronomers believed that the cores of galaxies, including our own, become active ("explode") about every 10 to 100 million years and stay active for about a million years. Since our own Galactic core presently appears quiescent, they believed it would likely remain inactive for many tens of millions of years. Although, in 1977, astronomer Jan Oort cited evidence that our Galactic core has been active within the past 10,000 years. Prediction No. 1...
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Freeman Dyson: My optimism about the long-term survival of life comes mainly from imagining what will happen when life escapes from this planet and becomes adapted to living in vacuum. There is then no real barrier to stop life from spreading through the universe. Hopping from one world to another will be about as easy as hopping from one island in the Pacific to another. And then life will diversify to fill the infinite variety of ecological niches in the universe, as it has done already on this planet. ... Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details...
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Take one part unidentified goop. Add three parts mysterious energy. Throw in a dash of ordinary atoms. Mix. Compress. Explode. Let expand for 13.7 billion years. It's an absurd recipe, but it's one that makes cosmologists drool. Ten years ago, no one could agree on what the universe is made of, how it is shaped, or what its ultimate fate will be. But less than five years later, long-awaited measurements and one stunning discovery forever transformed our picture of the universe. The resulting model, often called the concordance model, holds that 22 percent of the universe is composed of dark...
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It's official, Elvis lives Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/01/2007 It might sound a little crazy, but our standard theories of cosmology and physics suggest that an infinite number of Presleys still exist, says Marcus Chown. And if that's not scary enough, it also means that you, and these words, are repeated ad infinitum across the universeElvis is alive. No, really! He didn't die of a cardiac arrest in his bathroom at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Instead, he slipped out of the back door under cover of darkness dressed as a nun, had a sex change and worked for several years...
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ON ANGELS IN GENERAL AND IN PARTICULAR I. Angels are substances merely spiritual, created after the image of God, not only that they might acknowledge, love and worship their Creator, and might live in a state of happiness with him, but that they might likewise perform certain duties concerning the rest of the creatures according to the command of God. II. We call them "substances," against the Sadducees and others, who contend that angels are nothing more than the good or the evil motions of spirits, or else exercises of power to aid or to injure. But this is completely...
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Home About Edge Features Edge Editions Press Edge Search A striking consequence of the new picture of the world is that there should be an infinity of regions with histories absolutely identical to ours. That's right, scores of your duplicates are now reading copies of this article. They live on planets exactly like Earth, with all its mountains, cities, trees, and butterflies. There should also be regions where histories are somewhat different from ours, with all possible variations. For example, some readers will be pleased to know that there are infinitely many O-regions where Al Gore is the President...
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An international research team led by Prof. Michael Kramer of the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK, has used three years of observations of the "double pulsar", a unique pair of natural stellar clocks which they discovered in 2003, to prove that Einstein's theory of general relativity - the theory of gravity that displaced Newton's - is correct to within a staggering 0.05%. Their results are published on the14th September in the journal Science and are based on measurements of an effect called the Shapiro Delay. The double pulsar system, PSR J0737-3039A and B, is 2000 light-years away in...
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The apparent absence of shadows where shadows were expected to be is raising new questions about the faint glow of microwave radiation once hailed as proof that the universe was created by a "Big Bang." In a finding sure to cause controversy, scientists at UAH found a lack of evidence of shadows from "nearby" clusters of galaxies using new, highly accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background. A team of UAH scientists led by Dr. Richard Lieu, a professor of physics, used data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) to scan the cosmic microwave background for shadows caused by...
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TIME BEFORE TIME An event like the Big Bang is about as likely as billions of coin tosses all coming up heads. Explaining why that is might take us from empty space to other universes--and through the mirror of time. by Sean Carroll • Posted August 28, 2006 11:53 AM From the SEPTEMBER issue of Seed:   The nature of time is such that the influence of the very beginning of the universe stretches all the way into your kitchen—you can make an omelet out of an egg, but you can't make an egg out of an omelet. Time, unlike...
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The theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is to receive the Royal Society's most prestigious prize for scientific achievement. The Copley medal is the oldest scientific award in the world and has been won by such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Captain James Cook. The Cambridge don, most famous for his book A Brief History of Time, will be honoured in a ceremony on November 30 for his contribution to theoretical physics and theoretical cosmology. "This is a very distinguished medal," Professor Hawking said. "It was awarded to Darwin, Einstein and [Francis] Crick. I am honoured to be...
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That's the Extremely Large Telescope, not just the Very Large one. ACCORDING to The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it is the answer to life, the Universe and everything. Now scientists have turned to Douglas Adams’s magic number — 42 — to help them to answer that question for real. Not satisfied with the spectacular views afforded by the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which is kept at Paranal Observatory in Chile, astronomers plan to build a bigger version, the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), with a mirror measuring 42m in diameter. The project, to be undertaken by the European Southern Observatory...
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The question of what happened before the Big Bang long has frustrated cosmologists, both amateur and professional. Though Einstein's theory of general relativity does an excellent job of describing the universe almost back to its beginning, near the Big Bang matter becomes so dense that relativity breaks down, says Penn State physicist Abhay Ashtekar. "Beyond that point, we need to apply quantum tools that were not available to Einstein." Now Ashtekar and two of his post-doctoral researchers, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parmpreet Singh, have done just that. Using a theory called loop quantum gravity, they have developed a mathematical model that...
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That intergalactic road trip to Triangulum is going to take a little longer than you had planned. An Ohio State University astronomer and his colleagues have determined that the Triangulum Galaxy, otherwise known as M33, is actually about 15 percent farther away from our galaxy than previously measured.This finding implies that the Hubble constant, a number that astronomers rely on to calculate a host of factors -- including the size and age of the universe -- could be significantly off the mark as well.That means that the universe could be 15 percent bigger and 15 percent older than any previous...
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Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking and his CERN colleague Thomas Hertog have proposed a radical new approach to understanding the universe that studies it from the "top down" rather than the "bottom up" as in traditional models. The approach acknowledges that the universe did not have just one unique beginning and history but a multitude of different beginnings and histories, and that it has experienced them all. But because most of these other alternative histories disappeared very early after the Big Bang to leave behind the universe we observe today, the best way to understand the past, they say, is to...
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University of California, Berkeley, physicist Saul Perlmutter has been awarded the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy for his role in discovering that the universe is expanding faster than previously thought. Perlmutter is a UC Berkeley physics professor, an astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project. He shares the $1 million prize with Adam Riess of NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute and Brian Schmidt of Australia's Mount Stromlo Observatory, all recognized for their leadership of two teams, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-z Supernova Search. In 1998, the teams reported the acceleration...
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David Thomson and Jim Bourassa of the Quantum AetherDynamics Institute (QADI) released a new theory which mathematically predicts and explains the measured values of physics with striking precision. Their Aether Physics Model includes the "Holy Grail" of physics sought by Albert Einstein; the Unified Force Theory. "Our model shows the forces are unified by a simple set of general laws explainable as the fabric of space-time itself, which is a dynamic, quantum-scale Aether," said Bourassa. In February 2002, Thomson was observing a peculiar setup of a Tesla coil and noticed what appeared to be two distinctly different manifestations of charges....
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Scientists at Duke and Rutgers universities have developed a mathematical framework they say will enable astronomers to test a new five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Charles R. Keeton of Rutgers and Arlie O. Petters of Duke base their work on a recent theory called the type II Randall-Sundrum braneworld gravity model. The theory holds that the visible universe is a membrane (hence "braneworld") embedded within a larger universe, much like a strand of filmy seaweed floating in the ocean. The "braneworld universe" has five dimensions -- four spatial dimensions plus time -- compared...
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Scientists use quantum gravity to describe the universe before the Big Bang.Scientists may finally have an answer to a "big" question: If the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, what could have caused it to happen? Using a theory called "loop quantum gravity," a group led by Penn State professor Abhay Ashtekar has shown that just before the Big Bang occurred, another universe very similar to ours may have been contracting. According to the group's findings, this previous universe eventually became so dense that a normally negligible repulsive component of the gravitational force overpowered the attractive component, causing...
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Using a quasar located 12.3 billion light-years away as a beacon, a team of astronomers detected the presence of molecular hydrogen in the farthest system ever, an otherwise invisible galaxy that we observe when the Universe was less than 1.5 billion years old, that is, about 10% of its present age. The astronomers find that there is about one hydrogen molecule for 250 hydrogen atoms. A similar set of observations for two other quasars, together with the most precise laboratory measurements, allows scientists to infer that the ratio of the proton to electron masses may have changed with time. If...
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A cyclic universe, which bounces through a series of big bangs and "big crunches", could solve the puzzle of our cosmological constant, physicists suggest. The cosmological constant represents the energy of empty space, and is thought to be the most likely explanation for the observed speeding up of the expansion of the universe. But its measured value is a googol (1 followed by 100 zeroes) times smaller than that predicted by particle physics theories. It is a discrepancy that gives cosmologists a real headache. In the 1980s, physicists considered the possibility that an initially large cosmological constant could decay down...
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Big bounces may make the Universe able to support stars and life. A bouncing universe that expands and then shrinks every trillion years or so could explain one of the most puzzling problems in cosmology: how we can exist at all. If this explanation, proposed in Science1 by Paul Steinhardt at Princeton University, New Jersey, and Neil Turok at the University of Cambridge, UK, seems slightly preposterous, that can't really be held against it. Astronomical observations over the past decade have shown that "we live in a preposterous universe", says cosmologist Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago. "It's our...
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In a lively lecture on big questions about science, faith and the evolution of the cosmos, the director of the Vatican Observatory told a packed auditorium at the AAAS [the American Association for the Advancement of Science] on 27 March that science is quite capable of explaining the remarkable complexity of the natural world without reference to an intelligent designer. The Rev. George V. Coyne said modern science has revealed a cosmos shaped by the interplay of randomness and necessity over the nearly 14 billion years since the Big Bang, a world of such fertile chemical variety that the emergence...
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Indications of a change in the proton-to-electron mass ratio have shown up in comparisons of the spectra of hydrogen gas as recorded in a lab with spectra of light coming from hydrogen clouds at the distance of quasars. This is another of those tests of so-called physical constants that might not be absolutely constant. For example, the steadiness of the fine structure constant (denoted by the letter alpha), defined as the square of the electron's charge divided by the speed of light times Planck's constant, has been in dispute (see PNU 410). Some tests say alpha is changing, others say...
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One universe or many? Panel holds unusual debate March 30, 2006 Special to World Science Scientific debates are as old as science. But in science, “debate” usually means a battle of ideas in general, not an actual, politician-style duel in front of an audience. Occasionally, though, the latter also happens. And when the topic is as esoteric as the existence of multiple universes, sparks can fly. According to one proposal, new universes could sprout like bubbles off a spacetime "foam" that's not unlike soap bubbles. (Courtesy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Such was the scene Wednesday evening at the American Museum...
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String theory — the concept that all particles can be represented as strings or string-loops of incredibly minute length, oscillating at various frequencies — was initially developed to help explain why quarks, the tiny fundamental particles that make up protons and neutrons, are always confined within larger composite particles. However, string theory has evolved to allow scientists to deal with some wider issues. For example, they can use string theory to devise explanations for some grand problems in cosmology, such as the state of the universe — its shape, size, etc. — just after the Big Bang, when quarks roamed...
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SEARCH RESULTS Evidence for Universe Expansion FoundEvidence for Universe Expansion FoundScientists: Find explains how universe formedCold War gamma-ray mystery solved in a flashU.S. spacecraft set to study cosmic bursts Front page March 17, 2006, 12:51AMOldest light shows universe grew fast, researchers sayFirst stars arose 400 million years after big bang, not 200 million years, as once thought By DENNIS O'BRIEN Baltimore Sun Scientists examining the oldest light in the universe say they've found clear evidence that matter expanded at an almost inconceivable rate after the big bang, creating conditions that led to the formation of the first stars.Light from...
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Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second. The discovery — which involves an analysis of variations in the brightness of microwave radiation — is the first direct evidence to support the two-decade-old theory that the universe went through what is called inflation.It also helps explain how matter eventually clumped together into planets, stars and galaxies in a...
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Dark matter could be "sterile" neutrinos, whose decay led to the formation of stars in the early universe Dark matter may have played a major role in creating stars at the very beginnings of the universe. If that is the case, however, the dark matter must consist of particles called "sterile neutrinos". Peter Biermann of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, and Alexander Kusenko, of the University of California, Los Angeles, have shown that when sterile neutrinos decay, it speeds up the creation of molecular hydrogen. This process could have helped light up the first stars only...
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A team of astronomers from France, the USA, Japan, and Korea, led by Denis Burgarella has recently discovered new galaxies in the Early Universe. They have been detected for the first time both in the near-UV and in the far-infrared wavelengths. Their findings will be reported in a coming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics. This discovery leads to the first thorough investigation of early galaxies. Figure 1 shows some of these new galaxies. The knowledge of early galaxies has made major progress in the past ten years. From the end of 1995, astronomers have been using a new technique, known...
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Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer 09 March 2006 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Zeeya Merali DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology. The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara,...
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The world's largest particle detector is nearing completion following the construction of its 'endcap' at the University of Liverpool. Its assembly of advanced apparatus, at the University’s Semiconductor Detector Centre, has been a joint effort by physicists, engineers and technicians from the Universities of Liverpool, Glasgow, Lancaster, Manchester and Sheffield as well as CCLRC Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton Laboratories. The endcap is part of a semiconductor tracker (SCT) based at the heart of ATLAS - a giant particle detector the size of a five-storey building. The SCT will become part of the world’s largest particle accelerator – the Large Hadron...
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Newswise — Researchers at Northeastern University and the University of California, Irvine say that scientists might soon have evidence for extra dimensions and other exotic predictions of string theory. Early results from a neutrino detector at the South Pole, called AMANDA, show that ghostlike particles from space could serve as probes to a world beyond our familiar three dimensions, the research team says. No more than a dozen high-energy neutrinos have been detected so far. However, the current detection rate and energy range indicate that AMANDA's larger successor, called IceCube, now under construction, could provide the first evidence for string...
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Chinese astronomer from the University of St Andrews has fine-tuned Einstein’s groundbreaking theory of gravity, creating a ‘simple’ theory which could solve a dark mystery that has baffled astrophysicists for three-quarters of a century. A new law for gravity, developed by Dr. Hong Sheng Zhao and his Belgian collaborator Dr. Benoit Famaey of the Free University of Brussels (ULB), aims to prove whether Einstein’s theory was in fact correct and whether the astronomical mystery of Dark Matter actually exists. Their research was published on February 10th in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Their formula suggests that gravity drops less sharply with...
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On Tuesday, Feb. 14, noted physicist Dr. Franklin Felber will present his new exact solution of Einstein's 90-year-old gravitational field equation to the Space Technology and Applications International Forum (STAIF) in Albuquerque. The solution is the first that accounts for masses moving near the speed of light. New antigravity solution will enable space travel near speed of light by the end of this century, he predicts. Felber's antigravity discovery solves the two greatest engineering challenges to space travel near the speed of light: identifying an energy source capable of producing the acceleration; and limiting stresses on humans and equipment during...
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Astronomers have measured the temperature of dark matter for the first time. The discovery should help particle hunters to identify exactly what this mysterious substance is made of. Although dark matter cannot be seen, its existence can be inferred from its gravitational interaction with stars around it, which stops rapidly rotating galaxies from flying apart. Astronomers estimate that, on average, dark matter must be about six times more abundant than normal, visible matter in our Universe. But very little else is known about dark matter. "Even knowing it was dark was pretty profound," says Gerry Gilmore of Cambridge University, UK,...
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Supersymmetry and Parallel Dimensions Harvard Physicst Randall among world’s leading string theorists Published On Friday, January 06, 2006 1:00 AM By ADRIAN J. SMITH Crimson Staff Writer Professor of Physics Lisa Randall ’83, recently named one of Newsweek’s most influential people of 2006, rose to the top with her theories on gravity. (Photo credit: CRIMSON/GLORIA B. HO) Professor of Physics Lisa Randall ’83 saw how strong gravity could be during a climbing fall in New Hampshire two years ago. She was performing a “challenging” move when she took a surprising fall, she says. Instead of stopping the fall, her support...
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Contrary to all expectations, the mysterious dark energy that is pushing the Universe apart may be changing with time. By observing distant, powerful bursts of gamma rays (gamma-rays), Brad Schaefer says he has preliminary evidence that the strength of dark energy is different today from when the Universe was very young. Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, presented his results at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington DC. Just minutes after the data were presented in a late afternoon session, some astronomers were already calling the bold claim into question. An idea that arose in...
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Neanderthals At It Again H.L. Mencken’s final report from the famous Scopes trial in Dayton Tennessee comes roaring down to us after 80 years as sharply edged as ever: "Let no one mistake [the trial] for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock...
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Clues revealed by the recently sharpened view of the Hubble Space Telescope have allowed astronomers to map the location of invisible "dark matter" in unprecedented detail in two very young galaxy clusters. A Johns Hopkins University-Space Telescope Science Institute team reports its findings in the December issue of Astrophysical Journal. (Other, less-detailed observations appeared in the January 2005 issue of that publication.) The team's results lend credence to the theory that the galaxies we can see form at the densest regions of "cosmic webs" of invisible dark matter, just as froth gathers on top of ocean waves, said study co-author...
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Lisa Randall has become a star in the rarefied world of high-energy physics, and her theory about a “fifth dimension” has caught the imagination of the general public too. That doesn’t mean she still isn’t shy and a little nervous about all the hoopla. “I really like that my work is getting more people interested in science,” says the 43-year old Harvard physicist. “And while it can get a little nerve-wracking dealing with all the attention, I really enjoy speaking to the public and answering questions.” Randall seems constantly in motion. She seldom sits still, and says her mind brims...
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The genius of Albert Einstein, who added a "cosmological constant" to his equation for the expansion of the universe but later retracted it, may be vindicated by new research published today in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The enigmatic "dark energy" that drives the acceleration of the Universe behaves just like Einstein's famed cosmological constant, according to the Supernova Legacy Survey (SNLS), an international team of researchers in France and Toronto and Victoria in Canada, collaborating with large telescope observers in Oxford, Caltech and Berkeley. Their observations reveal that the dark energy behaves like Einstein's cosmological constant to a precision...
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Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have detected light that may be from the earliest objects in the universe. If confirmed, the observation provides a glimpse of an era more than 13 billion years ago when, after the fading embers of the theorized Big Bang gave way to millions of years of pervasive darkness, the universe came alive. This light could be from the very first stars or perhaps from hot gas falling into the first black holes. The science team, based at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., describes the observation as seeing the...
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Bishop James Ussher Sets the Date for Creation: October 23, 4004 BC When Clarence Darrow prepared his famous examination of William Jennings Bryan in the Scopes trial, he chose to focus primarily on a chronology of Biblical events prepared by a seventeenth-century Irish bishop, James Ussher. American fundamentalists in 1925 found—and generally accepted as accurate—Ussher’s careful calculation of dates, going all the way back to Creation, in the margins of their family Bibles. (In fact, until the 1970s, the Bibles placed in nearly every hotel room by the Gideon Society carried his chronology.) The King James Version of the Bible...
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Crisis in the Cosmos?Galaxy-formation theory is in peril Ron Cowen Imagine peering into a nursery and seeing, among the cooing babies, a few that look like grown men. That's the startling situation that astronomers have stumbled upon as they've looked deep into space and thus back to a time when newborn galaxies filled the cosmos. Some of these babies have turned out to be nearly as massive as the Milky Way and other galactic geezers that have taken billions of years to form. Despite being only about 800 million years old, some of the infants are chock-full of old stars....
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Dark Matter: Invisible, Mysterious and Perhaps Nonexistent - By Robert Roy Britt Senior Science Writer 10 October 2005 Galaxies don't have enough regular matter to keep them from flying apart, scientists have been telling us for years. So there must be a bunch of unseen "dark matter" lurking in every galaxy. But dark matter has never been directly detected, and nobody knows what it might be made of. A few scientists remeain skeptical. To a lay person, it might sound downright crazy. Now a new study suggests there may be no such thing as dark matter. Fred Cooperstock of Northeastern...
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It was the summer of 1998, recalls Harvard University physicist Lisa Randall, when extra dimensions finally pulled her in. Extra dimensions -- beyond the four we encounter every day (three of space plus one of time) -- have been an ingredient of theoretical physics for decades: mathematician Theodor Kaluza proposed a fifth in 1919, string theory requires 10 of them, M-theory needs 11. But Randall hadn't much use for them, she says, until that summer when she decided they might be helpful to supersymmetry, one of the conundrums she was pondering. Randall contacted Raman Sundrum, a Boston University postdoctoral student...
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The brilliant cosmologist and mathematician Sir Hermann Bondi has died at the age of 85. He was best known for developing the "steady-state" theory of the universe together with Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle. Bondi also led a successful career as a science administrator, running the European Space Research Organisation for four years and spending six years as chief scientist to the UK Ministry of Defence. Bondi died on 10 September. Bondi was born in Vienna, Austria, on 1 November 1919 into a Jewish family. Alarmed by the rise of the Nazis in neighbouring Germany and encouraged by the cosmologist...
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Welcome to the fourth dimension. And the fifth, and the sixth. A team of astrophysicists claims to have identified evidence that space is six-dimensional. Joseph Silk of the University of Oxford, UK, and his co-workers say that these extra spatial dimensions can be inferred from the perplexing behaviour of dark matter. This mysterious stuff cannot be seen, but its presence in galaxies is betrayed by the gravitational tug that it exerts on visible stars. Silk and his colleagues looked at how dark matter behaves differently in small galaxies and large clusters of galaxies. In the smaller ones, dark matter seems...
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In what is widely regarded as the most important scientific discovery of 1998, researchers turned their telescopes to measure the rate at which cosmic expansion was decelerating and instead saw that it was accelerating. They have been gripping the steering wheel very tightly ever since. As deeply mysterious as acceleration is, if you just accept it without trying to fathom its cause, it solves all kinds of problems. Before 1998, cosmologists had been troubled by discrepancies in the age, density and clumpiness of the universe. Acceleration made everything click together. It is one of the conceptual keys, along with other...
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