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Mysterious high-energy particles known as cosmic rays zip through space at a wide range of energies, some millions of times greater than those produced in the world’s most powerful atom smasher. Scientists have long thought cosmic rays from inside our galaxy come from supernova explosions, but a new study has fingered a second source: the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. With this new result, the search for cosmic ray origins, which has frustrated scientists for more than 100 years, has taken an unexpected new twist. “It’s very exciting,” says astrophysicist Andrew Taylor of the Dublin...

he English language has a few limitations. One such problem is describing size—words like big, humongous and immense don’t come close to describing the objects astronomers are discovering in deep space. There are definitely no words to describe their latest find, dubbed the BOSS Great Wall, which is a supercluster of galaxies over 1 billion light years across, making it the largest structure observed in the universe so far. The BOSS is named after the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey—an international effort to map galaxies and quasars in the early universe—and is like cosmic webbing. This wall is made up of...

In the 1910s, Vesto Slipher noticed that the spiral nebulae in the sky were redshifted, consistent with the interpretation that they were moving away from us. In the 1920s, Hubble discovered that these nebulae were in fact galaxies, and determined their distance from us. If you combined these two facts - that there were distant galaxies that rapidly moved away from us - you noticed an interesting trend: the farther away a galaxy was from us, the faster it appeared to be moving away!..... "But if it's expanding," almost everyone asks upon first learning about this, "then what is it...

How did the universe begin? And what came before the Big Bang? Cosmologists have asked these questions ever since discovering that our universe is expanding. The answers aren't easy to determine. The beginning of the cosmos is cloaked and hidden from the view of our most powerful telescopes. Yet observations we make today can give clues to the universe's origin. New research suggests a novel way of probing the beginning of space and time to determine which of the competing theories is correct.

Another year passes. Another 365 planetary spins completed (14.6 million kilometers of combined distance traveled if you live at the Earth's equator), and another journey of 940 million kilometers around the Sun. Time is marked off for us by a largely predictable, if not tedious, set of cycles. Except, this is by no means all the cosmic traveling we've done in the last 31.5 million seconds. For one thing, the solar system is not at rest with respect to its host galaxy. The Sun and its planetary entourage are moving in an orbital path within the Milky Way. The generally...

A common misconnection that exists today rests on the notion that there are no racial hierarchies in Latin American countries or within the Latino communities in the United States. (SNIP) The shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin by a half-Peruvian and half-White man named George Zimmerman, the rise of so-called Hispanic conservatives like Ted Cruz, Al Cardenas and Marco Rubio, and the examples of racist comments by Latinos in the media like Rodner Figueroa, have made it impossible to have a conversation of Latinos and race. (SNIP) This Saturday, the Miss Puerto Rico winner for the Miss America pageant...

Steve Harvey may have the chance to redeem himself for Sunday's Miss Universe fumble. According to Entertainment Tonight, the comedian reportedly signed on to host the pageant for some years to come. The deal would instate Harvey as host for at least three, but possibly even six or seven, years, ET's source said, and it was struck in advance of his crowning the wrong contestant in 2015's Miss Universe broadcast. The Miss Universe Organization owner, WME/IMG, "really loves Harvey," according to ET's source, which perhaps explains why they've agreed to pay him "more than they've ever paid before for a...

How the Universe Is Organized.... for all you physicists out there...

They're big, they're bright, they're beautiful—and they shouldn't even exist, at least to our current astronomical knowledge: gargantuan spiral galaxies that make our giant Milky Way seem downright modest. Spirals are supposed to be small fry compared to the greatest giant ellipticals, which are football-shaped swarms of stars thought to be the universe’s biggest and brightest galaxies. But now a search across billions of light-years has snared a rare breed of "super spiral" galaxies that rival their giant elliptical peers in size and luminosity, raising questions over how such behemoths are born. "I was really surprised," says Patrick Ogle, an...

THE curtain at the edge of the universe may be rippling, hinting that there's more backstage. Data from the European Space Agency's Planck telescope could be giving us our first glimpse of another universe, with different physics, bumping up against our own. That's the tentative conclusion of an analysis by Ranga-Ram Chary, a researcher at Planck's US data centre in California. Armed with Planck's painstaking map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) - light lingering from the hot, soupy state of the early universe – Chary revealed an eerie glow that could be due to matter from a neighbouring universe...

The Universe Never Expands Faster Than the Speed of Light Breaking my radio silence here to get a little nitpick off my chest: the claim that during inflation, the universe “expanded faster than the speed of light.” It’s extraordinarily common, if utterly and hopelessly incorrect. (I just noticed it in this otherwise generally excellent post by Fraser Cain.) A Google search for “inflation superluminal expansion” reveals over 100,000 hits, although happily a few of the first ones are brave attempts to squelch the misconception. I can recommend this nice article by Tamara Davis and Charlie Lineweaver, which tries to address...

It's the second most abundant substance in the universe. It dissolves more materials than any other solvent. It stores incredible amounts of energy. Life as we know it would not be possible without it. And although it covers more than 70% of the Earth's surface, many parts of the world are in dire straits for lack of it. What is it? The answer, of course, is water. In some ways, water is one of the substances we know best, in part because it makes up 75% of our bodies. Every day we drink it, bathe in it, clean with it...

Could the famed “Big Bang” theory need a revision? A group of theoretical physicists suppose the birth of the universe could have happened after a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole and ejected debris. Before getting into their findings, let’s just preface this by saying nobody knows anything for sure. Humans obviously weren’t around at the time the universe began. The standard theory is that the universe grew from an infinitely dense point or singularity, but who knows what was there before? “For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” stated Niayesh Afshordi, an...

Are We Living In A Black Hole? // / Here’s an idea, what if the universe and everything we see around us is actually inside a black hole?Whenever I’m asked this question, what folks typically have in mind is that the universe began as an infinitely dense point, just like the singularity of a black hole, and because of cosmic expansion there’s a limit to how far we can observe, so maybe that’s like the event horizon. While it’s an interesting idea, things aren’t quite so simple.To begin with, the universe did not begin with an explosion from a...

Jeff Schweitzer heralded the discovery of an apparent Earth-like planet as a nail in the coffin for religion in a Thursday item on Huffington Post. Schweitzer, a scientist, "rationalist," and former Clinton administration senior policy analyst contended that "with this discovery, we come ever closer to the idea that life is common in the universe," and added that religions would "all will come out and say such a discovery is completely consistent with religious teachings. My goal here is to declare this as nonsense before it happens."The Huffington Post contributor led his article, "Earth 2.0: Bad News for God," by...

Cosmic Inflation’s Five Great Predictions A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. Image credit: Max Tegmark / Scientific American, by Alfred T. Kamajian. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those properties.” -Paul Steinhardt, 2014 When we think about the Big Bang, we typically think about the origin of the Universe: the hot, dense, expanding state where everything came from. By noticing and measuring the fact that the Universe is expanding today — that the galaxies are getting farther apart from one another in all directions — we...

Sir Isaac Newton...came to the realization that the math that had been used thus far to describe physical motion of massive bodies, simply would not suffice... Newton developed the Calculus in which this way of approaching moving bodies, he was able to accurately model the motion of not only Halley’s comet, but also any other heavenly body that moved across the sky. ... Newton recognized that Kepler’s mathematical equation for planetary motion, Kepler’s 3rd Law ( P2=A3 ), was purely based on empirical observation, and was only meant to measure what we observed within our solar system. Newton’s mathematical brilliance...

Freshman astronomy books typically include a timeline outlining the major events of the universe over the past 13.7 billion years, from the appearance of our universe to the present. Most timelines put a question mark at the very beginning to reflect the incomplete state of our knowledge about how the universe got started. We don’t know what lit the spark that launched the grand adventure of our universe, despite millennia of wondering and decades of intriguing progress. Remarkably, we know a lot about what happened a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. We have robust theories that have...

The nature of dark energy is one of the most important unsolved problems in all of science. But what, exactly, is dark energy, and why do we even believe that it exists? Step back a minute and consider a more familiar experience: what happens when you toss a ball straight up into the air? It gradually slows down as gravity tugs on it, finally stopping in mid-air and falling back to the ground. Of course, if you threw the ball hard enough (about 25,000 miles per hour) it would actually escape from the Earth entirely and shoot into space, never...

Order! Order in the Universe! – A Meditation on the Wisdom That Creation Reflects By: Msgr. Charles PopeIn a courtroom, the judge can bring an unruly outburst to an end by shouting, “Order! Order in the court!” I often feel the same urge in the debates of our time about God’s existence and His role in the created universe. It is not so much that the debates can get unruly, but that I, with the  insistence of a town crier, want to shout, “Order! Order, there IS order the universe!” And I want to ask everyone to be quiet and listen to the universe herself...