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Inside Science Minds presents an ongoing series of guest columnists and personal perspectives presented by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others in the science community showcasing some of the most interesting ideas in science today.(ISM) -- Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself. Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory,...

A re-analysis of radio telescope observations from three countries has yielded a surprising result: nearby galaxies harbour one-third more hydrogen than had previously been estimated. While nothing like enough matter to solve physics’ “dark matter” problem, the work by CSIRO astronomer Dr Robert Braun (chief scientist at the agency’s Astronomy and Space Science division in Sydney) also helps explain why the rate of star formation has slowed down. While there’s more hydrogen than astronomers had thought, its distribution makes star formation more difficult. Andromeda – the galaxy headed for a catastrophic collision with our own in about four billion years...

University of Warwick astrophysicists have pinpointed four white dwarf stars surrounded by dust from shattered planetary bodies which once bore striking similarities to the composition of the Earth. The scientists publish their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. White dwarfs are the final stage of life of stars like our Sun, the residual cores of material left behind after their available fuel for nuclear reactions has been exhausted. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to carry out the biggest survey to date of the chemical composition of the atmospheres of white dwarf stars,...

Cosmologists use the mathematical properties of eternity to show that although universe may last forever, it must have had a beginning kfc 04/24/2012 38 Comments The Big Bang has become part of popular culture since the phrase was coined by the maverick physicist Fred Hoyle in the 1940s. That's hardly surprising for an event that represents the ultimate birth of everything.However, Hoyle much preferred a different model of the cosmos: a steady state universe with no beginning or end, that stretches infinitely into the past and the future. That idea never really took off.In recent years, however, cosmologists have begun...

ORLANDO, Fla., March 28, 2012 /Christian Newswire/ -- The Dead Sea Scrolls have long been considered words from God recorded by men under inspiration. Since their discovery they have been a source of great wonder and revelation for the faithful, and now an author is arguing in his new book that the Hubble telescope validates a passage from the scroll of Isaiah confirming God to be the energy source behind the Universe. The book retraces the history of the telescope, and is based on Hubble's discoveries made over the past two decades. It chronicles how Hubble has photographed the greatest cinematic...

Analysis of data from the National Science Foundation-(NSF) funded 10-m South Pole Telescope (SPT) in Antarctica provides new support for the most widely accepted explanation of dark energy, the source of the mysterious force that is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The results begin to hone in on the tiny mass of the neutrinos, the most abundant particles in the universe, which until recently were thought to be without mass. The SPT data strongly support Albert Einstein's cosmological constant—the leading model for dark energy—even though researchers base the analysis on only a fraction of the SPT data...

Einstein is still the boss, say researchers with the BOSS project for measuring key properties of the universe. BOSS, for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, has measured the distance to faraway galaxies more precisely than ever before, mapping the universe as it existed roughly 6 billion years ago, when it was only 63 percent of its current size. The findings suggest that the mysterious “dark energy” causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate was foreseen by Einstein, the researchers reported April 1 at the American Physical Society meeting. To keep the universe in a static state, Einstein added a...

Pulsars, superdense neutron stars, are perhaps the most extraordinary physics laboratories in the universe. Research on these extreme and exotic objects already has produced two Nobel Prizes. Pulsar researchers now are poised to learn otherwise-unavailable details of nuclear physics to test general relativity in conditions of extremely strong gravity, and to directly detect gravitational waves with a “telescope” nearly the size of our galaxy. Neutron stars are the remnants of massive stars that exploded as supernovae. They pack more than the mass of the Sun into a sphere no larger than a medium-sized city, making them the densest objects in...

[BIG snip] Santorum's ad and his Op-Ed, meant to mock Gingrich, in reality can only distinctly not help Santorum's struggling campaign. Gingrich will surely make the inevitable -- and correct -- connection between Santorum's ad and a serious attack on the Reagan space legacy -- and the dreams of America itself. "We'll continue our quest in space…. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue," said President Reagan that tragic January night. Well, no they won't. Not if Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have anything to say about it. "I promise," says Santorum. Worse, whether Santorum's staff understands it...

Are there any other fans of FABRIC OF THE COSMOS out there? I found it to be perhaps the most fascinating science show ever produced. The information in the show is nothing less than stunning and definitely changed my view of the universe. Some of the information is so stunning that it is hard to comprehend. But guess what? Even physicists have a hard time getting their minds around it. And an oatmeal cookie to the first person who can post who the major backer of this series is.

In the fifth century B.C., the philosopher Democritus proposed that all matter was made of tiny and indivisible atoms, which came in various sizes and textures—some hard and some soft, some smooth and some thorny. The atoms themselves were taken as givens. In the nineteenth century, scientists discovered that the chemical properties of atoms repeat periodically (and created the periodic table to reflect this fact), but the origins of such patterns remained mysterious. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that scientists learned that the properties of an atom are determined by the number and placement of its electrons, the subatomic...

There is extensive evidence from physics for a beginning and fine-tuning of the universe. When the complementary nature of these insights is seen, it provides compelling evidence for a transcendent, intelligent Creator. Cosmic Origins features eight world-class physicists talking about modern physics and God. They include Nobel Laureate Arno Penzias (who discovered the background radiation from the Big Bang); Templeton Prize winners John Polkinghorne (Cambridge) and Michael Heller (Vatican Observatory); Owen Gingerich (Harvard); Lisa Randall (Harvard); Jennifer Wiseman (NASA); and narrated by Stephen Barr (University of Delaware).

I hope that it's okay to post this in the Religion forum!? I have been thinking about this for quite some time now and have come to my own conclusion and that is .. GOD HAS TO EXIST and not only does he exist .. He is the main argument Against the now popular 'Multi-verse' scenario! Scientists from many different areas are pondering an infinite number of universes to explain our existence. They talk about 'string theories' and 'infinite universes' where anything and everything can and does exist! An example may be that in one universe, I am alive but...

Three researchers behind the discovery that our Universe's expansion is accelerating have been awarded this year's Nobel prize for physics. Saul Perlmutter and Adam Riess of the US and Brian Schmidt of Australia will divide the prize. The trio studied what are called Type 1a supernovae, determining that more distant objects seem to move faster. Their observations suggest that not only is the Universe expanding, its expansion is relentlessly speeding up. Prof Perlmutter of the University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded half the 10m Swedish krona (£940,000) prize, with Prof Schmidt of the Australian National University and Prof Riess...

Dartmouth College theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser has an interesting essay this week which deals with the possibility of life around the universe and, more to the point, what such life might be like. It was spurred by the recent discovery of one of the most promising possible Earth-like worlds yet, orbiting in the “Goldilocks zone” of its parent star, where water could exist in liquid form. As more and more of these planets are identified, scientists will be focusing their search for possible forms of intelligent life in those regions of the galaxy.But if life exists, Gleiser wonders, would it...

Big as it is, our universe may be just one of many, all floating in a nearly unfathomable "multiverse," scientists say. Problem is, there's been no way to test the idea. Now, though, physicists say they've devised a way to detect "bruises" from our cosmos's purported collisions with other universes. The international team has created a new computer algorithm to hunt for such irregularities in our universe, which they say would be disk-shaped—think of the temporary, circular flattening that happens when one beach ball bumps into another. Because the multiverse would likely have expanded so fast that its universes would...

This is a video of two deep space experiments using the Hubble space telescope. First, Hubble was pointed to a "dark" spot in space and left to collect data for 10 days to see if anything was there. The second is to use this data and the Red Shift to create a 3D image. The result is presented here. To me, pretty amazing stuff. http://www.flixxy.com/hubble-ultra-deep-field-3d.htm

Brilliant, But Distant: Most Far-Flung Known Quasar Offers Glimpse into Early UniverseA gargantuan black hole has been spotted voraciously devouring material just 770 million years after the big bangBy John Matson June 29, 2011 GLOWING GOBBLER: An artist's conception of a quasar ionizing the hydrogen gas surrounding it.Image: Gemini Observatory Peering far across space and time, astronomers have located a luminous beacon aglow when the universe was still in its infancy. That beacon, a bright astrophysical object known as a quasar, shines with the luminosity of 63 trillion suns as gas falling into a supermassive black holes compresses, heats up...

Scientists hoping to puzzle out how the Universe began will find a long-sought theoretical particle — or rule out that it exists — by the end of 2012, the director of the world's largest atom smasher predicted Monday. Rolf Heuer, director of the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, said his confidence was based on the latest findings from the $10 billion proton collider under the Swiss-French border. "I would say we can settle the question, the Shakespearean question — 'to be or not to be' — end of next year," he told reporters at a major physics conference in...

Astronomers have discovered the largest and oldest mass of water ever detected in the universe — a gigantic, 12-billion-year-old cloud harboring 140 trillion times more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. The cloud of water vapor surrounds a supermassive black hole called a quasar located 12 billion light-years from Earth. The discovery shows that water has been prevalent in the universe for nearly its entire existence, researchers said. "Because the light we are seeing left this quasar more than 12 billion years ago, we are seeing water that was present only some 1.6 billion years after the beginning of...