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Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.

The Double Quasar image bodes well for the UK's future in radio astronomy E-Merlin is an array of seven linked UK radio telescopes, updated last year with fibre optic technology that has vastly increased its power. Light from the Double Quasar has been bent by a massive object between it and the Earth, resulting in a double image.This gravitational lensing is a powerful demonstration of one aspect of Einstein's theory of relativity.The quasar - short for quasi-stellar radio source - sprays out tremendous amounts of energy and matter, powered by a super-massive black hole at its heart.The E-Merlin image shows...

Matter/Antimatter from the Vacuum by Paul Gilster on December 10, 2010 New work at the University of Michigan, now written up in Physical Review Letters, discusses the possibility of producing matter and antimatter from the vacuum. The idea is that a high-energy electron beam combined with an intense laser pulse can pull matter and antimatter components out of the vacuum, creating a cascade of additional particles and anti-particles. UM Engineering research scientist Igor Sokolov has this to say about the theoretical study: “We can now calculate how, from a single electron, several hundred particles can be produced. We believe...

A team of physicists from the University of Toronto and Rutgers University have mimicked the explosion of a supernova in miniature. A supernova is an exploding star. In a certain type of supernova, the detonation starts with a flame ball buried deep inside a white dwarf. The flame ball is much lighter than its surroundings, so it rises rapidly making a plume topped with an accelerating smoke ring. “We created a smaller version of this process by triggering a special chemical reaction in a closed container that generates similar plumes and vortex rings,” says Stephen Morris, a University of Toronto...

A startup snags funding to start early work on a low-budget test reactor.By Tyler Hamilton General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, says it can build a prototype fusion power plant within the next decade and do it for less than a billion dollars. So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion's approach doesn't rely on expensive superconducting magnets--called tokamaks--to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers,...

It may look like any average building but behind closed doors could lie the answer to safe renewable energy of the future. Here at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore California, scientists are aiming to build the world's first sustainable fusion reactor by 'creating a miniature star on Earth'. Following a series of key experiments over the last few weeks, the £2.2 billion project has inched a little closer to its goal of igniting a workable fusion reaction by 2012.

(AFP) - After billions of years the Sun finally has an owner -- a woman from Spain's soggy region of Galicia said Friday she had registered the star at a local notary public as being her property. Angeles Duran, 49, told the online edition of daily El Mundo she took the step in September after reading about an American man who had registered himself as the owner of the moon and most planets in our solar system. There is an international agreement which states that no country may claim ownership of a planet or star, but it says nothing about...

Researchers have developed a simple technique that adds evidence to the theory that the Universe is flat. Moreover, the method - developed by revisiting a 30-year-old idea - confirms that "dark energy" makes up nearly three-quarters of the Universe. The research, published in Nature, uses existing data and relies on fewer assumptions than current approaches. Author Christian Marinoni says the idea turns estimating the Universe's shape into "primary school" geometry. While the idea of the Earth being flat preoccupied explorers centuries ago, the question of whether the Universe itself is flat remains a debatable topic. The degree to which the...

Astronomer Brian G. Marsden, a comet and asteroid tracker who stood sentinel to protect the Earth from collisions with interplanetary rocks and other remnants of the solar system's creation, died Thursday of cancer at Lahey Clinic Medical Center in Burlington, Mass. He was 73. Director emeritus of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., Marsden was perhaps best known for his 1998 announcement that an asteroid known as 1997 XF11 might strike the Earth in 2028, causing untold damage. The announcement sparked additional studies which quickly showed that such an impact was unlikely. Marsden,...

<p>Antigravitational devices developed by a computer geek could eventually change the world as we know it.</p> <p>Or they may just blow a few holes into some barn roofs.</p> <p>The devices are known as "lifters." When charged with a small amount of electrical power, they levitate, apparently able to resist Earth's gravitational forces.</p>

Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang? The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. The Big Bang model holds that everything that now comprises the universe was once concentrated in a single point of near-infinite density. Before this singularity exploded and the universe began, there was absolutely nothing - indeed, it's not clear whether one can even use the term "before" in reference to a pre-Big-Bang cosmos, as time itself may...

(Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN research center say their "Big Bang" project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year. In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists. Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions -- besides length, breadth, height...

Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say. Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second. Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter. The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics. The current "standard model" of physics holds that each particle - protons, electrons, neutrons and a zoo of more exotic particles - has its mirror image antiparticle. The...

After 16 years and $1.5 billion of other people’s money, it is almost showtime for NASA and Sam Ting. Sitting and being fussed over by technicians in a clean room at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a February launching — and looking for all the world like a giant corrugated rain barrel — is an eight-ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space. The experiment, if it succeeds, could help NASA take a giant step toward answering the question of...

Allan R. Sandage, who spent his life measuring the universe, becoming the most influential astronomer of his generation, died Saturday at his home in San Gabriel, Calif. He was 84. The cause was pancreatic cancer, according to an announcement by the Carnegie Observatories, where he had spent his whole professional career. Over more than six decades, Dr. Sandage was like one of those giant galaxies that sit at the center of a cluster of galaxies, dominating cosmic weather. He wrote more than 500 papers, ranging across the cosmos, covering the evolution and behavior of stars, the birth of the Milky...

A gamma-ray burst is an immensely powerful blast of high-energy light thought to be generated by a collapsing star in a distant galaxy, but what this collapse leaves behind has been a matter of debate. A new analysis of four extremely bright bursts observed by NASA's Fermi satellite suggests that the remnant from a long-duration gamma-ray burst is most likely a black hole - not a rapidly spinning, highly magnetised neutron star, or magnetar since such a burst emits more energy than is theoretically possible from a magnetar. 'Some of the events we have been finding seem to be pushing...

From the idea that our universe is one among many, to the revelation that mathematician Pythagoras didn't actually invent the Pythagorean theorem, here are eight shocking things we learned from reading physicist Stephen Hawking's new book, "The Grand Design," written with fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech. This book, covering major questions about the nature and origin of the universe, was released Sept. 7 by its publisher, Bantam. 1. The past is possibility According to Hawking and Mlodinow, one consequence of the theory of quantum mechanics is that events in the past that were not directly observed did not happen...

Chinese Lab Creates Artificial Black Hole October 14th, 2009, 12:48 GMT| By Tudor Vieru Far from being the only ones attempting to create an artificial black hole, Chinese researchers recently announced that they were able to produce the first artificial black hole for microwaves. If light in this energy spectrum enters the construct, it can no longer leave it, the team reports. Its accomplishment was made possible through the use of metamaterials, the same components that form the basis for invisibility cloaks and other optoelectronic devices, Technology Review reports. In charge of the Chinese team were scientists Qiang Cheng and...

MEDIA ADVISORY : M10-157 NASA Announces Televised Chandra News Conference WASHINGTON -- NASA will hold a news conference at 12:30 p.m. EST on Monday, Nov. 15, to discuss the Chandra X-ray Observatory's discovery of an exceptional object in our cosmic neighborhood. The news conference will originate from NASA Headquarters' television studio, 300 E St. SW in Washington and carried live on NASA TV. Media representatives may attend the conference, join by phone or ask questions from participating NASA locations. To RSVP or obtain dial-in information, journalists must send their name, affiliation and telephone number to Trent Perrotto at: trent.j.perrotto@nasa.gov by...

The two vast structures, stretching to the north and to the south of the centre of the Milky Way, are so big that a beam of light, travelling at 186,282 miles per second, would take 50,000 years to get from the edge of one to the edge of the other. The previously unseen bubbles were discovered by astronomer Doug Finkbeiner, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, using NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope. He admitted yesterday: "We don't fully understand their nature or origin." They span more than half the visible sky, from the constellation of Virgo to the...