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PARIS (AFP) – An orbiting observatory has spotted a massive cluster of galaxies in deep space that can only be explained by the exotic phenomenon known as dark energy, the European Space Agency (ESA) said on Monday. Spotted in a scan by ESA's orbiting X-ray telescope XMM-Newton, the cluster's mass is about 1,000 times that of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, it said. The huge cluster, known by its catalogue number of 2XMM J083026+524133, lies 7.7 billion light years from Earth and helps confirm the existence of dark energy, the agency said. Under this hypothesis, most of the Universe...

This is what needs to happen. The government should sponsor a "americal idol of innovation" contest, that is broadcast nation wide and has a $100,000,000. prize for anyone that can create a energy solution that does the following: (please feel free to add to the list) Creates fuel that runs in existing cars without retro fit. Creates a solution from an overwhelming abundant resource that does not require a company to produce. Or Can be created at home with less than $100.00 of parts Is clean burning, Can be posted on the internet for people to test and report in...

Contrary to the somewhat feverish claims laid out in an recent lawsuit, when our favorite particle-smashing, Force-finding Large Hadron Collider is switched on soon it will not result in the destruction of life as we know it. Such claims are "complete nonsense" say the scientists at CERN (and everywhere else,) in response to the suit. They should know: it's their machine, they designed it and they've been telling everyone for a while that their research shows it's safe. The lawsuit filed by a group of Hawaii residents is alleging that not enough safety checks have been made by CERN to...

The first particles have been injected into the biggest atom smasher on the planet, marking the start of the countdown to probing the secrets of the universe. Scientists are pushing ahead with powering up the machine, shrugging off speculative fears that it could destroy all life on Earth by sucking it into a black hole. Starting up the biggest scientific experiment ever built is not as simple as flipping a switch.

Physicists sent two photons down optical fibers toward different destinations, and found that the photons could instantly sense each other's behavior. After performing multiple tests on two entangled photons, physicists have yet again found that the photons seem to be communicating faster than the speed of light - at least 100,000 times faster. The researchers hope that their results might encourage theorists to come up with new explanations for the strange quantum mechanical effect. The physicists, led by Nicolas Gisin from the University of Geneva, arranged their experiment by sending two photons down fiber optic cables to detectors in two...

If we have free will, so do subatomic particles, mathematicians claim to prove.“If the atoms never swerve so as to originate some new movement that will snap the bonds of fate, the everlasting sequence of cause and effect—what is the source of the free will possessed by living things throughout the earth?”—Titus Lucretius Carus, Roman philosopher and poet, 99–55 BC. Human free will might seem like the squishiest of philosophical subjects, way beyond the realm of mathematical demonstration. But two highly regarded Princeton mathematicians, John Conway and Simon Kochen, claim to have proven that if humans have even the tiniest...

<p>Edward Teller, the man who played a key role in U.S. defense and energy policies for more than half a century and was dubbed the "Father of the H-bomb" for his enthusiastic pursuit of the powerful weapon, died Tuesday, a spokesman for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory confirmed. He was 95.</p>

Sharp guy, that Einstein. Kinda funny looking, what with the big hair and all, but real smart. Relativity, that was his thing. That and E=mc2, right? Interesting stuff. Really nice guy too, or was there something about Mrs. Einstein getting a raw deal? Still, he was a genius, definitely a genius. You don't need to be an Einstein to know that. Nearly 50 years after his death and a century after the then unknown physicist started challenging doctrine and stretching brains with his ideas, Albert Einstein remains not just scientifically relevant but a multipurpose icon as well. If anything, his...

Quantum weirdness even stranger than previously thought.Two photons can be connected in a way that seems to defy the very nature of space and time, yet still obeys the laws of quantum mechanics. Physicists at the University of Geneva achieved the weird result by creating a pair of ‘entangled’ photons, separating them, then sending them down a fibre optic cable to the Swiss villages of Satigny and Jussy, some 18 kilometres apart. The researchers found that when each photon reached its destination, it could instantly sense its twin’s behaviour without any direct communication. The finding does not violate the laws...

Strange events that Einstein himself called "spooky" might happen at least 10,000 times the speed of light, according to the latest attempt to understand them.

Public confidence in the "constants" of nature may be at an all-time low. Recent research has found evidence that the value of certain fundamental parameters, such as the speed of light or the strength of the invisible glue that holds atomic nuclei together, may have been different in the past. "There is absolutely no reason these constants should be constant," says astronomer Michael Murphy of the University of Cambridge. "These are famous numbers in physics, but we have no real reason for why they are what they are." The observed differences are small — roughly a few parts in a...

Berkeley Lab Physicist Challenges Speed of Gravity Claim Berkeley - Jun 22, 2003 Albert Einstein may have been right that gravity travels at the same speed as light but, contrary to a claim made earlier this year, the theory has not yet been proven. A scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) says the announcement by two scientists, widely reported this past January, about the speed of gravity was wrong. Stuart Samuel, a participating scientist with the Theory Group of Berkeley Lab's Physics Division, in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, has demonstrated that an "ill-advised" assumption made...

The science blog Cosmic Variance has a great rundown of what the LHC could find. At the top of this list is the Higgs boson, which is the only particle in the Standard Model (the theory that describes the fundamental interactions between the particles that make up all matter), that hasn't yet been detected. The site thinks there is a 95 percent chance the LHC finds this particle, and that could lead to a much better understanding of how our universe works. Other notable possibilities on Cosmic Variance's list include finding extra dimensions (these could be so-called "warped" hidden dimensions...

Susskind, a professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University, has written a book that's part insider history of science, focused on a period in the 1980s and 1990s when physicists were quarreling over the destructive capacity of black holes, and part primer on the science that explains the argument. As the subtitle makes obvious, the story contains an all-star cast of opinionated physicists: assorted Nobel laureates such as Richard Feynman, brilliant minds of the past such as Sir Isaac Newton, and, of course, Stephen Hawking, arguably the best-known theorist of black hole mechanics. Hawking is partly famous for possessing a...

The video looks a bit like a scene from a low-budget sci-fi horror film. A tiny hole slowly begins sucking in bits of the Earth in Switzerland with mountains, lakes and cities quickly falling into the growing gap. And it just keeps on growing--and growing. By the end of the 38 second movie, the entire planet has been swallowed up -- and all that's left is a shimmering ring in the inky blackness of outer space. Absurd, perhaps. But a brief look around Internet blogs, and especially YouTube, makes it clear that there are a number of people out there...

There is something strange happening in the core of the Milky Way. A space observatory measuring the energy and distribution of gamma-rays in the cosmos has made an unexpected (and perplexing) discovery. It would seem there is a very high proportion of gamma-ray photons emanating from our galactic core with a very distinctive signature; they have a precise energy of 511 keV (8×10-14 Joules), and there’s a lot of them. So what could possibly be producing these 511 keV gamma-rays? It turns out, 511 keV is a magic number; it is the exact rest mass energy of a positron (the...

Enlarge ImageIt's relative. Astronomers have been measuring spin precession in an eclipsing pair of pulsars.Credit: Daniel Cantin/McGill University As if his reputation needed cementing, astronomers have confirmed Albert Einstein's status as a supergenius once more. Studying a unique pair of pulsars--small and extremely dense leftovers from supernova explosions--researchers have measured an effect that was predicted by Einstein's 92-year-old general theory of relativity. The result, they report tomorrow in Science, is almost exactly what the famous physicist had foreseen. In Einstein's relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But...

If all goes according to plan, a massive underground facility in Switzerland will begin smashing particles together later this summer in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the physical universe than has ever before been possible. Known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, the project is composed of a 17-mile circular tunnel beneath Geneva, containing thousands of magnets meant to send beams of subatomic particles hurtling toward each other. The resulting collisions are expected to release matter similar to that present at the "Big Bang" that created the universe.

That black hole that was going to eat the Earth? Forget about it, and keep making the mortgage payments — those of you who still have them. A new particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to go into operation this fall outside Geneva, is no threat to the Earth or the universe, according to a new safety review approved Friday by the governing council of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Cern, which is building the collider. “There is no basis for any concerns about the consequences of new particles or forms of matter that could possibly be...

Lawsuit stirs fear of 'strangelets' destroying the Earth; 100,000 chips deployed SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- If all goes according to plan, a massive underground facility in Switzerland will begin smashing particles together later this summer in an effort to provide a clearer understanding of the physical universe than has ever before been possible.For companies like Oracle Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co., which have helped develop a system to send the resulting data surging through a sprawling network, the project is already providing a chance to test some of their most cutting-edge technologies. Video: Tech giants aid project Some of the biggest...

How did the universe begin, and how will it end? Among cosmologists, the mainstream belief is that the universe began with a bang billions of years ago, and will fizzle out billions of years from now. But two theorists have just fired their latest volley at that belief, saying there could be a timeless cycle of expansion and contraction. It’s an idea as old as Hinduism, updated for the 21st century.THE “CYCLIC MODEL,” developed by Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University’s Neil Turok, made its highest-profile appearance yet Thursday on Science Express, the Web site for the journal Science....

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...

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...

Heads up! Tomorrow night (February 26, 2008 at 9:00 PM), the History Channel will air a new segment of their Universe series that could be very interesting. It will try to address what was before the Big Bang. This is a subject I don't see anyway of discussing without raising religious beliefs.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang.

A team of physicists has claimed that our view of the early Universe may contain the signature of a time before the Big Bang. The discovery comes from studying the cosmic microwave background (CMB), light emitted when the Universe was just 400,000 years old. Their model may help explain why we experience time moving in a straight line from yesterday into tomorrow.

LONDON: Scot physicists have found a way to make objects float in the air without any physical support, something that is known as the levitation effect. Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin of the University of St Andrews say that the "incredible levitation effects" can be achieved by reversing the Casimir force, which normally causes objects to stick together...

ST. LOUIS — Quark stars, exotic objects that have yet to be directly observed, are part of a new theory to explain some of the brightest stellar explosions recorded in the universe. Super-luminous supernovae, which produce more than 100 times more light energy than normal supernovae and occur in about one out of every 1,000 supernovae explosions, have long baffled astrophysicists. The problem has been finding a source for all of that extra energy. University of Calgary astrophysicists Denis Leahy and Rachid Ouyed think they have a possible source — the explosive conversion of a neutron star into a quark...

European particle physics laboratory CERN is set to launch its gigantic experiment which hopes to throw light on the origins of the universe within a month, the laboratory's head said Tuesday. If things go according to plan, the greatest experiment in the history of particle physics could unveil a sub-atomic component, the Higgs Boson, known as "the God Particle." The "Higgs," named after the eminent British physicist, Peter Higgs, who first proposed it in 1964, would fill a gaping hole in the benchmark theory for understanding the physical cosmos. Other work on the so-called Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could explain...

On May 22, researchers at Osaka University presented the first demonstration of cold fusion since an unsuccessful attempt in 1989 that has clouded the field to this day. To many people, cold fusion sounds too good to be true. The idea is that, by creating nuclear fusion at room temperature, researchers can generate a nearly unlimited source of power that uses water as fuel and produces almost zero waste. Essentially, cold fusion would make oil obsolete. However, many experts debate whether money should be spent on cold fusion research or applied to more realistic alternative energy solutions. For decades,...

HOUSTON, Oct. 25, 2001 — The complete workings of quantum mechanics and how it affects the universe is still a mystery, but Rice University-led physicists have made a key advancement in understanding how complex quantum fluctuations play a role in the transformation of metals from one electronic state to another. The findings provide insight into the electronic structure of strongly correlated materials — materials that are potentially significant for far-reaching technological applications in nanotechnology and high-temperature superconductors. Rice University theoretical physicist Qimiao Si and his team of researchers report their discovery of an entirely new class of critical point — ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers have found some matter that had been missing in deep space and say it is strung along web-like filaments that form the backbone of the universe. The ethereal strands of hydrogen and oxygen atoms could account for up to half the matter that scientists knew must be there but simply could not see, the researchers reported on Tuesday. Scientists have long known there is far more matter in the universe than can be accounted for by visible galaxies and stars. Not only is there invisible baryonic matter -- the protons and neutrons that make up atoms...

Observations of the cosmic microwave background might deal blow to theory. The background patterns of space could help us focus on quantum problems.NASA / ESA / Hubble Heritage Team The question of whether quantum mechanics is correct could soon be settled by observing the sky — and there are already tantalizing hints that the theory could be wrong. Antony Valentini, a physicist at Imperial College, London, wanted to devise a test that could separate quantum mechanics from one of its closest rivals — a theory called bohmian mechanics. Despite being one of the most successful theories of physics, quantum mechanics...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers are baffled after finding an exotic type of star called a pulsar apparently locked in an elongated orbit around a star much like the sun -- an arrangement defying what had been known about such objects. The rapidly spinning pulsar -- an extraordinarily dense object created when a massive star exploded as a supernova -- is called J1903+0327 and is located about 21,000 light years from Earth, the astronomers said. A light year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year. "The big question is -- how in the heck did this...

International scientists have used flowing water to simulate a black hole, testing Stephen Hawking's theory that black holes are not black after all. The researchers, led by Professor Ulf Leonhardt at the University of St Andrews and Dr Germain Rousseaux at the University of Nice, used a water channel to create analogues of black holes, simulating event horizons. An event horizon is the place in the channel where the water begins to flow faster than the waves. The scientists sent waves against the current, varied the water speed and the wavelength, and filmed the waves with video cameras. Over several...

Astronomers have found a piece of the universe's puzzle that's been missing for awhile: a type of extremely hot, dense matter that is all but invisible to us. Engaging in something like cosmic accounting, astronomers have tried to balance the scant amount of matter that has been directly observed with the vast amount that remains unobserved directly. The latter constitutes about 90 percent of the universe's matter. Galaxies, the stars within them, the planet we live on and the chairs we sit on are made up of normal matter — the protons, electrons and neutrons that are collectively called baryons....

In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy. Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated. This scenario is no bit of science fiction …quot; a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December....

Garching, Germany (SPX) Apr 30, 2008 By an enormous burst of gravitational waves that accompanies the merger of two black holes the newly formed black hole was ejected from its galaxy. This extreme ejection event, which had been predicted by theorists, has now been observed in nature for the first time. The team led by Stefanie Komossa from the Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) thereby opened a new window into observational astrophysics. The discovery will have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe, and also provides observational confirmation of a key...

Physics of Nuclear Weapon Effects Thermal radiation and blast are inevitable consequences of the near instantaneous release of an immense amount of energy in a very small volume, and are thus characteristic to all nuclear weapons regardless of type or design details. The release of ionizing radiation, both at the instant of explosion and delayed radiation from fallout, is governed by the physics of the nuclear reactions involved and how the weapon is constructed, and is thus very dependent on both weapon type and design. Fireball Physics The fireball is the hot ball of gas created when a nuclear explosion...

A team of Italian and Chinese physicists on Wednesday renewed a controversial claim that they had detected the mysterious dark matter particles that astronomers say swaddle the galaxies in halos and direct the evolution of the universe. The team, called Dama, from “DArk MAtter,” and led by Rita Bernabei of the University of Rome, has maintained since 2000 that a yearly modulation in the rate of flashes in a detector nearly a mile underneath the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy is the result of the Earth’s passage through a “wind” of dark matter particles as it goes around the Sun....

Gravity Wave 'Smoking Gun' Fizzles: Gravitational Radiation Can Be Produced More Than One Way ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2008) — A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University has found that gravitational radiation—widely expected to provide "smoking gun" proof for a theory of the early universe known as "inflation"—can be produced by another mechanism. According to physics scholars, inflation theory proposes that the universe underwent a period of exponential expansion right after the big bang. A key prediction of inflation theory is the presence of a particular spectrum of "gravitational radiation"—ripples in the fabric of space-time that are notoriously difficult...

The scientist who came up with a legendary particle that has haunted physicists for a generation said he was confident that a £4.4 billion quest to find if it really exists will pay off within a year. **Prof Peter Higgs profile **The Big Bang: atom-smashing could uncover truth **'Big Bang' machine could destroy the planet, says lawsuit There is a palpable rise in tension among scientists worldwide as they await the start in July of a vast new atom smasher at CERN, the international nuclear laboratory outside Geneva, which will radically reshape our view of the universe when it goes...

Laser creates brightest light on Earth By Roger Highfield, Science Editor Last Updated: 3:01pm BST 08/04/2008 The brightest light on Earth now shines in a laboratory in Texas, one which will enable scientists to create a tabletop star. The $14m Texas Petawatt laser reached greater than one petawatt - one thousand million million watts - of laser power in the past few days, making it the highest powered laser in the world, says Prof Todd Ditmire, a physicist at The University of Texas at Austin. The laser in action in the lab, the blue glass amplifiers can also be seen...

British scientist Peter Higgs, whose work is the cornerstone of modern physics, said Monday he is putting champagne on ice in the hope a new experiment confirms his theories on how the universe works. Higgs, a veteran professor at Edinburgh University, told journalists in a rare interview that he hopes a vast experiment in the tunnels deep underground the CERN laboratory on the Franco-Swiss border could finally prove the existence of an elusive and unstable particle to which he has lent his name. The so-called "Higgs Boson" has been dubbed the 'God Particle' because so many have searched for it...

Galaxy Cluster CL0024+17 with an overlay showing a supposed dark matter ring. Credit: NASA, ESA, M. J. Jee and H. Ford et al. (Johns Hopkins University)   Mar 25, 2008Dark Understanding of Matter Images from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed a so-called "ring of dark matter" circling a galaxy cluster. Does dark matter exist? Or is electricity a better explanation for the structure of the universe?In a recent announcement, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) reported the discovery of something in deep space that seems to confirm previously inferred observations of "dark matter." Although "dark matter" cannot be...

Cosmologists Probe Mystery Of Dark Energy With South Pole Telescope ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2008) — Something is pulling the universe apart. What is it, and where will it take us from here? Scientists at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, University of Chicago, seek answers to those questions with the newly-commissioned South Pole Telescope. Frigid and bone-dry, with six straight months of night each year, the South Pole is a forbidding place to live or work. But for largely the same reasons, it’s one of the best spots on the planet for surveying the faint cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation...

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice. None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe. Scientists say that...

Physicists hope its incredible energies will form briefly-lived new particles that could shed light on the origins of the universe, among other marvels. The plaintiffs' concerns? That the LHC could accidentally create strange new particles that would instantly transform any matter they touched, engulfing the Earth, or, even worse, make a rapidly expanding black hole that could consume the entire planet. "[T]he compression of the two atoms colliding together at nearly light speed will cause an irreversible implosion, forming a miniature version of a giant black hole," reads the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Honolulu. RelatedStories Photo Suggests...

WASHINGTON - The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye. The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday. The gamma rays were detected by NASA's Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. "We'd never seen one before so bright and at such a distance," NASA's Neil Gehrels said. It was bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. However, NASA...

Everyone knows the score with black holes: even if light strays too close, the immense gravity will drag it inside, never to be seen again. They are thought to be created when large stars finally spend all their fuel and collapse. It might come as a surprise, therefore, to find that physicists in the UK have now managed to create an “artificial” black hole in the lab. Originally, theorists studying black holes focused almost exclusively on applying Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of massive objects arises from the curvature of space–time. Then, in 1974, the...