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To the ancients, exploding stars were bad news. To astronomer Adam Riess, poring over data from a telescope in Chile, it looked like supernovas were still cursed. He and his colleagues were measuring the brightness and distance of supernovas in order to figure out the little matter of whether the universe would end in fire or in ice. Would it halt its expansion and collapse back on itself in a gnab gib (that's the reverse of the big bang, and passes for humor among astronomers) or expand forever, its light and warmth fading into eternal cold and darkness? But when...

WASHINGTON - Astronomers have stumbled upon a tremendous hole in the universe. That's got them scratching their heads about what's just not there. The cosmic blank spot has no stray stars, no galaxies, no sucking black holes, not even mysterious dark matter. It is 1 billion light years across of nothing. That's an expanse of nearly 6 billion trillion miles of emptiness, a University of Minnesota team announced Thursday. Astronomers have known for many years that there are patches in the universe where nobody's home. In fact, one such place is practically a neighbor, a mere 2 million light years...

For a long time, Itzhak Bars has been studying time. More than a decade ago, the USC College physicist began pondering the role time plays in the basic laws of physics — the equations describing matter, gravity and the other forces of nature.Those laws are exquisitely accurate. Einstein mastered gravity with his theory of general relativity, and the equations of quantum theory capture every nuance of matter and other forces, from the attractive power of magnets to the subatomic glue that holds an atom’s nucleus together. But the laws can’t be complete. Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum theory don’t...

Long before our solar system formed and even before the Milky Way assumed its final spiral shape, a star slightly smaller than the Sun blazed into life in our galaxy, formed from the newly scattered remains of the first stars in the universe. Employing techniques similar to those used to date archeological remains here on Earth, scientists have learned that a metal-poor star in our Milky Way called HE 1523 is 13.2 billion years old-just slightly younger than 13.7 billion year age of the universe. Our solar system is estimated to be only about 4.6 billion years old. The findings...

MISS Mexico is redesigning her Miss Universe pageant dress - because it is too violent. The floor-length dress, belted by bullets and including sketches of hangings and firing squads from Mexico's 1920s Catholic uprising, during which tens of thousands died, has outraged Mexicans.

Roger Highfield describes a heroic mathematical enterprise that could lay bare the fundamentals of the cosmosMathematicians have successfully scaled their equivalent of Mount Everest. Today they unveil the answer to a problem that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan. At the most basic level, the calculation is an arcane investigation of symmetry – in this case of an object that is 57 dimensional, rather than the usual three dimensional ones that we are familiar with. Although this object was first discovered in the 19th century. there is evidence that it could contain...

Last night, nearly 3,000 people received a mini lesson on the origin of the universe from perhaps the world’s most famous cosmologist, Stephen Hawking. Hawking spoke to a packed audience in Zellerbach Hall about how Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity and quantum theory explained the creation of the universe. ... His lecture, which touched upon subjects such as black holes and spacetime, was peppered with quips that drew laughs from the audience. “If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was, what happened before the beginning,” Hawking said. “What was God doing before He made...

Germany's Muslim population is becoming more religious and more conservative. Islamic associations are fostering the trend, particularly through their work with the young -- accelerating the drift towards a parallel Muslim society. A member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in Berlin. It's the silence that visitors notice first. No children's laughter, no chatter, no pop music. A Protestant minister familiar with the noise level in children's homes describes the atmosphere as "very spooky." This Friday, at the end of Ramadan, it is especially hushed in the green house on Hochfeldstrasse in Duisburg, a city near Düsseldorf. Quietly, the boys remove...

Our place in the cosmos has been a source of fascination since the first human looked up at the splendor of the night sky.  Every culture has reacted to the spectacle of the heavens with various sorts of religious awe.  Babylonians watched the stars for omens, as did the Chinese.  Petroglyphs in North America record novas.  Greek gods are bound up with the constellations.  Vanished cultures erected immense monuments like Stonehenge with an eye on the movements of the heavens.  Egypt was rocked by a religious reform movement led by Akhenaten, who worshiped one god: the Sun.The sense of wonder...

Astronomers have proposed an improved method of searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life using instruments like one now under construction in Australia. The Low Frequency Demonstrator (LFD) of the Mileura Wide-Field Array (MWA), a facility for radio astronomy, theoretically could detect Earth-like civilizations around any of the 1,000 nearest stars. "Soon, we may be eavesdropping on signals from Galactic civilizations," says theorist Avi Loeb of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). "This is the first time in history that humans will be capable of finding a civilization like ours among the stars." Loeb will present his findings on Wednesday, January 10,...

Is this a joke? No, say a bunch of physicists. One day, it may be possible for a person to create a universe! This is not going to happen tomorrow. Not even close. But according to Columbia University physics professor Brian Greene, it is theoretically not impossible (which is his way of saying the possibilities are not zero) that one day, a person could build a universe. The very idea is so startling it's hard to know what this means. Think about it this way: One day (far off, no doubt), it may be possible to go into a laboratory...

This thread is a continuation of the first thread "Questions For Atheists & Non-Atheists" Some points were brought up that I wish to address here. I look forward to the responses. Taken from one of my dictionaries in my personal library: "Occam's Razor. A principle devised by the English philospher William of Occam, which states that entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary. In a scientific context, Occam's Razor is the choice of the simplest theory from among the theories which fit what we know. In logic, Occam's Razor is the statement of an argument in its essential...

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - The newly discovered collision of two galaxies millions of years ago, which sparked rings of fire that are still expanding, may offer new clues on the origins of the universe, astronomers said on Wednesday. New images of the Andromeda Galaxy were captured by an infrared camera aboard the Spitzer Space Telescope and are described in the science journal 'Nature'. The pictures offer fresh insight into the ever-changing nature of galaxies, said Harvard University astrophysicist Giovanni Fazio. Fazio, the mastermind behind the Spitzer, is considered one of the world's top space pioneers. "We thought it was a plain,...

Early Large Spiral Galaxy Resembles Milky Way    08/18/2006   Astronomers using adaptive optics at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile took spectra of a galaxy at red-shift 2.38 described as an “early young galaxy” that must have, according to current theory, formed very rapidly, because it looks like the Milky Way.  The observations by Genzel et al., published in Nature,1 were described by Robert C. Kennicutt (editor of Astrophysical Journal) in the same issue of Nature2 this way: On page 786 of this issue1, Genzel et al. present remarkable observations of what appears to be a...

A project aiming to create an easier way to measure cosmic distances has instead turned up surprising evidence that our large and ancient universe might be even bigger and older than previously thought. If accurate, the finding would be difficult to mesh with current thinking about how the universe evolved, one scientist said. A research team led by Alceste Bonanos at the Carnegie Institution of Washington has found that the Triangulum Galaxy, also known as M33, is about 15 percent farther away from our own Milky Way than previously calculated. The finding, which will be detailed in an upcoming issue...

A handful of researchers posit an alternative theory of origin — the universe has no beginning Many, if not most, people assume that certain aspects of nature’s workings are absolutely known. Outside of intelligent design circles, no modern biologist doubts the theory of evolution by natural selection; it is too well established by harmonious data across a multiplicity of fields. No credible doctor questions the germ theory of disease. And, one might think, no serious cosmologist disagrees with the standard cosmological model. The SCM is the official designation of what is informally called “the big bang”: that relatively recent but...

LOS ANGELES - Peace reigns at least at the Miss Universe 2006 contest, where beauties Miss Lebanon and Miss Israel are the "best of friends" despite the bloody fighting between the two countries back home, their companions said. Even as Israel has bombarded Lebanon in the wake of a missile barrage by the Hezbollah militia in the country's south, the two women -- Gabrielle Bou Rached of Lebanon and Israel's Anastacia Entin -- have struck up a friendship ahead of Sunday's tough competition to see who is named the world's most beautiful woman. "I think the perpetrators of the current...

An exotic theory, which attempts to unify the laws of physics by proposing the existence of an extra fourth spatial dimension, could be tested using a satellite to be launched in 2007. Such theories are notoriously difficult to test. But a new study suggests that such hidden dimensions could give rise to thousands of mini-black holes within our own solar system – and the theory could be tested within Pluto’s orbit in just a few years. Black holes of various masses are thought to have sprung into existence within 1 second of the big bang, as elementary particles clumped together...

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...

Roman Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître, working off Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, first proposed the “Big Bang” explanation of the universe’s origin in 1927. It took decades for the theory to win general acceptance. Einstein himself opposed it bitterly for years, in what he would later call “the biggest mistake of my life.” The theory was finally proved experimentally only in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson. For their pains, they were awarded the Nobel Prize. Fr. Lemaître, on the other hand, never received the public recognition that was his due. Nevertheless, in the 1970s several apparent problems with the...