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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.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour -- a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow. The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger -- a multiverse -- and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland... Dark flow was named in a nod to dark energy and dark matter -- two...

A ‘defect’ in spacetime may be one of the most curious findings of the data collected from the Wilkinson Anisotropy Probe. What WMAP gave us is the earliest image of the cosmos we have in our repertoire, showing temperature changes across the microwave background thought to be the aftereffect of the Big Bang. When Marcos Cruz (Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria) and colleagues found a cold spot in the data, they launched an investigation to determine what in heaven could be causing it. A random fluctuation in the data? Possibly, but the Spanish and British team studying the cold spot...

NEWS ADVISORY, April 7 /Christian Wire Service/-- “It blows my mind that we can now distinguish between different versions of what happened in the first trillionth of a second of the universe,” said Dr. Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins in describing the latest WMAP findings. What happened is called ‘inflation’ and, according to NASA researcher Dr. Gary Hinshaw, “now we can support it [inflation] with real observations.” The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe) recorded three years’ continuous observations of the “afterglow” from the cosmic origin event. That glow indicates the universe grew almost immediately and instantaneously from subatomic size to...

SEARCH RESULTS Evidence for Universe Expansion FoundEvidence for Universe Expansion FoundScientists: Find explains how universe formedCold War gamma-ray mystery solved in a flashU.S. spacecraft set to study cosmic bursts Front page March 17, 2006, 12:51AMOldest light shows universe grew fast, researchers sayFirst stars arose 400 million years after big bang, not 200 million years, as once thought By DENNIS O'BRIEN Baltimore Sun Scientists examining the oldest light in the universe say they've found clear evidence that matter expanded at an almost inconceivable rate after the big bang, creating conditions that led to the formation of the first stars.Light from...

Grey Hautaluoma Headquarters, Washington (202) 358-0668 Susan Hendrix Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. (301) 286-7745 March 16, 2006 RELEASE: 06-097 NASA Satellite Glimpses Universe's First Trillionth of a Second Scientists peering back to the oldest light in the universe have new evidence to support the concept of inflation. The concept poses the universe expanded many trillion times its size in less than a trillionth of a second at the outset of the big bang. This finding, made with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), is based on three years of continuous observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the...

Scientists announced today new evidence supporting the theory that the infant universe expanded from subatomic to astronomical size in a fraction of a second after its birth. The finding is based on new results from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched in 2001 to measure the temperature of radiant heat left over from the Big Bang, which is the theoretical beginning to the universe. This radiation is known as the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), and it is the oldest light in the universe. Using WMAP data, researchers announced in 2003 that they had pieced together a very detailed...