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Is belief in God rational? Can it be proved beyond reasonable doubt? The Bible seems to say yes. 'What can be known about God is plain to people,' writes St Paul in Romans 1.19-20, 'because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.'In this the ancient philosophers agreed, with both Plato and Aristotle holding that the existence of a transcendent God is a matter of solid logical reasoning.Modern thinkers since...

Dark Matter Still Missing After Many Decades ... "Big Bang theory in trouble". November 22, 2019 | Jerry Bergman All the proposed candidates for mysterious, unknown stuff have failed to materialize, putting Big Bang theory in trouble. by Jerry Bergman, PhD The cover story of the November 16-22 New Scientist announced prominently on the cover: “DARK MATTER: We still haven’t found it. Our theories are falling apart. Is it time to rethink the universe?” [1] Dan Hooper, author of the cover story, is worried, because Dark Matter theory is a necessary support for the Big Bang. Thus, the Big Bang...

Travel far enough in the universe and you could end up back where you began. Measurements from the Planck space observatory have shown that the universe might be shaped like a sphere rather than a flat sheet, which would change nearly everything we think we know about the cosmos. The Planck observatory, which operated from 2009 to 2013, mapped the cosmic microwave background, a sea of light left over from the big bang. One set of observations showed that there was more gravitational lensing – stretching of the light due to the shape of space-time, which can be distorted by...

All across the Universe, trillions of galaxies can be seen, with each one typically containing billions and billions of stars. Here on Earth, life not only arose, thrived, and became complex and differentiated, but intelligent, technologically advanced, and even spacefaring, to a degree. But these last advances — taking us into the space and information ages — are extremely recent, and space is enormous. If an alien civilization saw us, would we even appear interesting from their perspective? Tayte Taliaferro wants to know, asking: "I was thinking about the projection of light through space. My curtain was open and I...

In the cold wilderness of space, galaxies huddle together around the campfires of stars and the assuring pull of supermassive black holes. Between these cozy clusters of galaxies, where empty space stretches on for millions of light-years all around, a faint highway of gas bridges the darkness. This gassy, intergalactic network is known in cosmological models as the cosmic web. Made of long filaments of hydrogen left over from the Big Bang, the web is thought to contain most (more than 60%) of the gas in the universe and to directly feed all of the star-producing regions in space. At...

The existence of both cosmos and consciousness, each in its own way, constitute deep problems, perhaps grand mysteries beyond human knowing. Some claim that the two mysteries can only be solved in parallel, together, not in series, alone. Some base their claim on religion, a few on science, others on the belief that consciousness is the ultimate reality.

There are trillions upon trillions of stars and worlds in our Universe. Faced with such large numbers, it's tempting to conclude that there must surely be other life out there, somewhere. But is this right? Could the probability of life beginning be a number so small that we are alone? A video essay by Professor David Kipping. LINK TO VIDEO

BLACK holes could be a portal to another universe and our cosmos could have been born from one, a scientist has sensationally claimed. While the accepted theory on the universe began is the big bang, there are other equally baffling theories. One such is that our universe was born from a black hole opening in another parallel universe and that each black hole in our cosmos could be a gateway to another universe. At the beginning of time, 13.8 billion years ago, there was a dense and super-hot energetic point where the laws of physics did not apply – what...

In a possible first, a giant, faraway planet may have been caught in the act of growing moons. Seen in an image from the ALMA Observatory in Chile, the young planet orbits a small star roughly 370 light-years away, and it appears to be swaddled in a dusty, gassy disk—the exact type of structure scientists think produced Jupiter’s many moons billions of years ago.

If you havenÂ’t taken a science course since high school or college decades ago, hereÂ’s some news: We know a lot less now about the basic makeup of the universe than we thought we did then. Several decades ago scientists knew the universe was expanding. They believed the expansion had to slow down. No astronomer had observed such slowing but it had to happen because the universe is full of matter, matter has gravity, and gravity pulls things together. In 1998, though, the Hubble Space Telescope let us look at very distant stars. It became apparent that the universe was...

By 2013, the European Planck space telescope's detailed measurements of cosmic radiation seemed to have yielded the final answer: 13.8 billion years old. All that was left to do was to verify that number using independent observations of bright stars in other galaxies. Then came an unexpected turn of events. A few teams, including one led by Nobel laureate Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, set out to make those observations. Instead of confirming Planck's measurements, they started getting a distinctly different result. At first, the common assumption was that Riess and the other galaxy-watchers had...

Explaining a discrepancy between what was happening 13 billion years ago and now may require new physics. It's become clear that something in the cosmos just doesn't add up. The universe is getting bigger every second. In fact, it's expanding at a much faster rate than it should. For some time now there's been a mismatch in observations of the early universe done with the European Space Agency's Planck Telescope and what astronomers see when they measure the more nearby, modern parts of space with NASA's Hubble Telescope. (Keep in mind that looking at distant parts of the universe with...

The Universe is so enormous we can't really comprehend it all. I try my best to visualize it in this video. This video had without a doubt the most complicated math I've ever done in a video before. If I made errors or miscalculations please let me know in the comments or message me! I want to know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy7NzjCmUf0&feature=youtu.be

Physicists who have been roaming the “landscape” of string theory—the space of zillions and zillions of mathematical solutions of the theory, where each solution provides the kinds of equations physicists need to describe reality—have stumbled upon a subset of such equations that have the same set of matter particles as exists in our universe. But this is no small subset: there are at least a quadrillion such solutions, making it the largest such set ever found in string theory.

There’s a crisis brewing in the cosmos. Measurements over the past few years of the distances and velocities of faraway galaxies don’t agree with the increasingly controversial “standard model” of the cosmos that has prevailed for the past two decades. Astronomers think that a 9 percent discrepancy in the value of a long-sought number called the Hubble Constant, which describes how fast the universe is expanding, might be revealing something new and astounding about the universe. The cosmos has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and its present rate of expansion, known as the Hubble constant, gives the time elapsed...

An invisible force is having an effect on our Universe. We can't see it, and we can't detect it - but we can observe how it interacts gravitationally with the things we can see and detect, such as light. Now an international team of astronomers has used one of the world's most powerful telescopes to analyse that effect across 10 million galaxies in the context of Einstein's general relativity. The result? The most comprehensive map of dark matter across the history of the Universe to date. ... "If further data shows we're definitely right, then it suggests something is missing...

Something isn't quite right in the universe. At least based on everything physicists know so far. Stars, galaxies, black holes and all the other celestial objects are hurtling away from each other ever faster over time. Past measurements in our local neighborhood of the universe find that the universe is exploding outward faster than it was in the beginning. That shouldn't be the case, based on scientists' best descriptor of the universe. If their measurements of a value known as the Hubble Constant are correct, it means that the current model is missing crucial new physics, such as unaccounted-for fundamental...

Have you ever stopped to wonder exactly how much light has been produced by all the stars in the Universe, over all the time that has passed? Well, now you can wonder no more. An international team of astronomers has actually calculated the amount of starlight in the cosmos. And it's teaching us new things about the early years of our Universe. In the time since the Big Bang - roughly 13.7 billion years - our Universe has produced many, many galaxies, and many more stars. Perhaps around two trillion galaxies, containing around a trillion-trillion stars. For decades, scientists have...

A mysterious reddish cigar-shaped object spotted tumbling through our solar system last year may have been an alien spacecraft sent to investigate Earth, astronomers from Harvard University have suggested.

The larger planets such as Saturn, Jupiter and Uranus remarkably put off more energy than they absorb from our sun. If they were actually in the billions of years of age, should they not have become frozen and expired an incalculable length of time ago. Scientists in this field have come up with many reasons as to the how that these celestial entities kept their heat as far as their theories; however, their noses are firmly planted in a major wall that repels everything they've come up with. Volcanism observed on Jupiter's Io and the geyers with Saturn's Enceladus command...