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Don't get the idea that we've found every kind of astronomical object there is in the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, astronomers working on the Supernova Cosmology Project report finding a new kind of something that they cannot make any sense of. Now you don't see it, now you do. Something in Bootes truly in the middle of nowhere — apparently not even in a galaxy — brightened by at least 120 times during more than three months and then faded away. Its spectrum was like nothing ever seen, write the discoverers, with "five broad...

Six months ago, satellite telescopes spotted an exceptionally bright burst of energy that would have been the most distant object in the universe ever visible to the naked eye, if anyone had noticed it. Even though no humans have reported seeing it directly, the gamma-ray burst, an explosion that signals the violent death of a massive star, is changing theories of how these events look. Gamma-ray bursts are typically accompanied by intense releases of other forms of radiation, from X-rays to visible light. This burst, dubbed GRB 080319B, was first detected by the Swift satellite on March 19, while the...

THREE hundred feet below the outskirts of Geneva lies part of a 17-mile-long tubular track, circling its way across the French border and back again, whose interior is so pristine and whose nearly 10,000 surrounding magnets so frigid, that it’s one of the emptiest and coldest regions of space in the solar system. The track is part of the Large Hadron Collider, a technological marvel built by physicists and engineers, and described alternatively as heralding the next revolution in our understanding of the universe or, less felicitously, as a doomsday machine that may destroy the planet. After more than a...

5 Things You Need to Know About the Large Hadron Collider Now Study up with new mysteries from the celebrity particle collider before it doesn't destroy the world on Wednesday, then talk physics with the interactive chat widget below—and stay tuned for on-the-scene reporting in the morning! A a large dipole magnet is lowered into the tunnel to complete the basic installation of the more than 1700 magnets that make up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which measures 27 km in circumference. The largest particle accelerator in history will take another step on Wednesday toward living up to its own...

A massive gamma-ray burst detected last March, believed to be the brightest ever seen, turns out to have been aimed directly at the Earth. A narrow jet that drove material toward us at 99.99995 of the speed of light is revealed in the data, itself wrapped within a somewhat slower and wider jet. The best estimates are that an alignment like this occurs only once every ten years. Says Paul O’Brien (University of Leicester, and a member of the team working on the Swift satellite): “We normally detect only the wide jet of a GRB as the inner jet is...

Once considered rare and exotic objects, black holes are now known to exist throughout the Universe, with the largest and most massive found at the centres of the largest galaxies. These "ultra-massive" black holes have been shown to have masses upwards of one billion times that of our own Sun. Now, Priyamvada Natarajan, an associate professor of astronomy and physics at Yale University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has shown that even the biggest of these gravitational monsters can't keep growing forever. Instead, they appear to curb their own growth - once they accumulate about...

GENEVA - It has been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday. Whatever the case, the most powerful atom-smasher ever built comes online Wednesday, eagerly anticipated by scientists worldwide who have awaited this moment for two decades.

GENEVA — It's been called an Alice in Wonderland investigation into the makeup of the universe — or dangerous tampering with nature that could spell doomsday.

Batavia, Ill. - Physicists of the DZero experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new particle made of three quarks, the Omega-sub-b (Ωb). The particle contains two strange quarks and a bottom quark (s-s-b). It is an exotic relative of the much more common proton and weighs about six times the proton mass. The discovery of the doubly strange particle brings scientists a step closer to understanding exactly how quarks form matter and to completing the "periodic table of baryons." Baryons (derived from the Greek word "barys," meaning "heavy") are particles that contain...

Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data...

Want to know more? Can't sleep, and are too lazy to get up and turn on George Noory? Let this woman put you to sleep.

The Purdue panel said Rusi Taleyarkhan misled the scientific community by claiming his "bubble fusion" findings had been independently replicated.

<p>Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.</p> <p>As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.</p>

Here’s an interesting conundrum involving nuclear decay rates. We think that the decay rates of elements are constant regardless of the ambient conditions (except in a few special cases where beta decay can be influenced by powerful electric fields). So that makes it hard to explain the curious periodic variations in the decay rates of silicon-32 and radium-226 observed by groups at the Brookhaven National Labs in the US and at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesandstalt in Germany in the 1980s. Today, the story gets even more puzzling. Jere Jenkins and pals at Purdue University in Indiana have re-analysed the raw data...

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...