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LONG BEACH, Calif. — Astronomers may have solved a cosmic chicken-and-the-egg problem: Which came first — galaxies or the supermassive black holes in their cores? For several years now, researchers have known that galaxies and black holes must have co-evolved, with budding galaxies feeding material to a growing black hole while the immense gravity of the black hole generated in its vicinity tremendous radiation that in turn powered star formation. But the scientists hadn't pegged the starting point. "It looks like black holes came first. The evidence is piling up," said Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in...

The first stars to light the early universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Michagan, Ann Arbor call these very first stars "Dark Stars," and propose that dark matter heating provided the energy for these stars instead of fusion. The researchers propose that with a high concentration of dark matter in the early Universe, the theoretical particles called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles(WIMPs), collected inside the first stars and annihilated themselves to produce a heat source to power the stars. "We studied the behavior of WIMPs in the first stars,"...

Fish don't know they're living in water, nor do they stop to wonder where the water came from. Humans? Not much better, as we share a world engulfed by television. And the deeper our immersion becomes, the less likely it seems we'll poke our heads above the surface and see there must have been life before someone invented TV. That invisible someone was Philo T. Farnsworth, who was fated to live and work, then die, in sad obscurity. Now, on the centennial of his birth on Aug. 19, 1906, his invention plays an increasingly powerful role in our lives --...

For the past quarter century, dark matter has been a mystery we've just had to live with. But the time may be getting close when science can finally unveil what this befuddling stuff is that makes up most of the matter in the universe. Dark matter can't be seen. Nobody even knows what it is. But it must be there, because without it galaxies would fly apart. Upcoming experiments on Earth such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in Switzerland, and a new spacecraft called Gaia set to launch in 2011, could be the key to closing the...

- And so many Christian ones? The institution of the Nobel Prize is one of the few things that's just as big outside Scandinavia as it is within the old land of the Vikings. (There will probably never be a McLutefisk, I guess..) In similarity with most members of this forum, I don't think people like Al Gore belong in the company of (other Nobel laureates) like Einstein, Fermi, Wałęsa, Hemingway, Marconi, Bohr, and Churchill. The older and wiser I have become, the more I've realized we Europeans often look up to the wrong kind of Americans (- but we...

150 acres of dreams dashed Buyer now sought for super-collider site By JIM HENDERSON Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle WAXAHACHIE -- The historical footnote will record that it was the most expensive dry hole ever drilled: 18 miles, $2 billion. It was a cursed quest not for oil or gold or any other tangible resource, but for a brief glimpse -- through a window measured in billionths of a second -- at the creation of the universe. It touched off a frenzy of land speculation, ignited delusions of quick wealth and long-term prosperity, inspired visions of this placid, North Texas prairie...

How real are you? Mary MidgleyHas science shown that people are, in some sense, an illusion? According to Mary Midgley, that is precisely what some scientists now preach. Focusing particularly on a claim made by Richard Dawkins, she explains why she believes these scientists are making a serious mistake.On being a semi-illusionAre you quite real? Are you (that is) at least as real as the parts that you are composed of - your cells, your genes, your molecules and electrons and quarks and the notions that are passing through your mind? Or are they more real than you? This may...

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening? Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory...

A simulated Black Hole with the Milky Way in the backgroundThere is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed. German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing - including light - can escape them. According to Dr Robert Massy, of the Royal Astronomical Society, the results suggest that galaxies...

Science Fiction has a lousy record of predicting the future. In the 1930s, for example, it was widely held that by 1970, toga-clad descendants of the Depression Generation would be living in giant art deco cities full of speeding Dymaxion Cars and dining on food pills. In the '50s and '60s, it was rocket belts and atomic-powered flying cars we were supposed to be enjoying by 2000. And today? In almost every extrapolation of the future I've read lately, the ultimate fate of mankind is uploading -- the transference of consciousness from biological to digital substrates. Such uploads, it is...

Proton discovery may cast doubt on dark-matter theories. The Milagro detector has seen cosmic-ray hot-spots.Milagro / U. Maryland / LANL Hot on the heels of speculation that cosmic rays may have revealed the signature of elusive dark matter in space, new observations could challenge that idea and reinforce an alternative explanation.A seven-year-long experiment at the Milagro cosmic-ray detector near Los Alamos, New Mexico, has revealed 'bright patches' of high-energy cosmic rays in the sky1 – something incompatible with a dark-matter source.Cosmic rays are charged particles, mostly protons and electrons, that are produced in space and generally have a characteristic energy...

Correct calculation strengthens theory of quark-gluon interactions in nuclear particles When it comes to weighty matters, quarks and gluons rule the universe, a new study confirms. One of the largest computational efforts to calculate the masses of protons and neutrons shows that the standard model of particle physics predicts those masses with an uncertainty of less than 4 percent. Christian Hoelbling, affiliated with the Bergische Universtät Wuppertal in Germany, the Eötvös University in Budapest and the CNRS in Marseille, France, and his colleagues report their findings in the Nov. 21 Science. Nearly all the mass of ordinary matter consists of...

ScienceDaily (Sep. 18, 1997) — A team of 20 physicists from four institutions has literally made something from nothing, creating particles of matter from ordinary light for the first time. The experiment was carried out at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) by scientists and students from the University of Rochester, Princeton University, the University of Tennessee, and Stanford. The team reported the work in the Sept. 1 issue of Physical Review Letters. Scientists have long been able to convert matter to energy; the most spectacular example is a nuclear explosion, where a small amount of matter creates tremendous energy....

« Irradiate a millimeter-thick gold target with the right kind of laser and you might get a surprise in the form of 100 billion positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons. Researchers had been studying the process at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where they used thin targets that produced far fewer positrons. The new laser method came about through simulations that showed a thicker target was more effective.And suddenly lasers and antimatter are again making news. Hui Chen is the Livermore scientist behind this work: “We’ve detected far more anti-matter than anyone else has ever measured in a laser experiment....

The Deadbolt: What are your personal views on fringe science? Are you into UFOs, Bigfoot, and things like that? John Noble: Not UFOs, not that. I don't have anything against it, it's just not something that tantalizes my imagination. I think I'm much more fascinated by what we've discovered through quantum mechanics and so forth. What was started off by Albert Einstein, essentially, has just opened the floodgates into a new world and we suddenly find out that we can bend time. And string theory, it just means that anything is conceivable and I find that fascinating. We don't even...

Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind will discuss his 20-year battle with cosmologist Stephen Hawking over their conflicting interpretations of the behavior of black holes in a lecture at 8 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20, in McCosh 50. He will describe the clash and the resulting discoveries in a talk titled "The Black Hole War." Susskind, the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford, is widely regarded as one of the fathers of string theory. His lecture will be based on events and ideas in his newest book, "The Black Hole War: My Battle With Stephen Hawking to Make the World...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers said on Monday they have detected a cosmic explosion at the very edge of the visible universe, a 13-billion-year-old blast that could help them learn more about the earliest stars. The brilliant blast -- known as a gamma ray burst -- was probably caused by the death of a massive star soon after the Big Bang, but was glimpsed on September 4 by NASA's new Swift satellite and later by ground-based telescopes. The explosion occurred soon after the first stars and galaxies formed, perhaps 500 million to 1 billion years after the Big Bang explosion that...

Plans to trace the Moon's orbit with extraordinary new accuracy could reveal kinks in Einstein's theory of gravity and help explain the mysterious accelerating expansion of the universe, says a US researcher. The acceleration cannot be explained by known forces in the Universe. To account for the behaviour, cosmologists have introduced the concept of a new, as yet unseen, force - dark energy. But Gia Dvali, of New York University, US, believes there could be another explanation. He thinks the accelerating expansion might be caused by unexpected properties of gravity, which are only seen over very large distances. Taking inspiration...

Einstein's relativity theory hits a speed bump August 8 2002 Australian scientists have discovered that light isn't quite as fast as it used to be. But it doesn't mean E=mc2 will be consigned to the dustbin, writes David Wroe. In October, 1971, American physicists took four super-accurate atomic clocks, kept two on the ground and put two on commercial jets flying at 1000 kmh in opposite directions around Earth. When the planes landed, the scientists found what they were hoping for: The clocks on the high-speed journeys were ticking a few billionths of a second behind their stationary friends. Motion,...

NEW YORK - The Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder," appears to have been fueling the expansion of the universe for most of its history. This so-called "dark energy" has been pushing the universe outward for at least 9 billion years, astronomers said Thursday. "This is the first time we have significant, discrete data from back then," said Adam Riess, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University and researcher at NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute. He and several colleagues...