Tag Archives: Cosmology

What Came ‘Before’ the Big Bang?

Posted on by
This image is a somewhat fair reconstruction o...

Leading Physicist Presents a Radical Theory: “String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we live in was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes.” (Daily Galaxy)

New Theory Nixes “Dark Energy”

Posted on by
Urbi et Orbi (EP) album cover

Is Time Disappearing from the Universe? “Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.” (Daily Galaxy)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

Physicist Proposes Solution to Arrow-of-Time Paradox

Posted on by

“Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal – but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.” (Phys.Org)

In other words, time flows both ‘forwards’ and ‘backwards’ but we can only remember one of those unfoldings?

Coming soon: First pictures of a black hole

Posted on by
[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/mg20227091.200/mg20227091.200-1_300.jpg' cannot be displayed]

The region of the Sagittarius A supermassive black hole, as seen by Chandra.

Black holes are perhaps the most outrageous prediction of science, and even though we can paint fine theoretical pictures of them and point to evidence for many objects that seem to be black hole-ish, nobody has ever actually seen one.

All that could change in the next few months. Astronomers are working to tie together a network of microwave telescopes across the planet to make a single instrument with the most acute vision yet. They will turn this giant eye towards what they believe is a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, code name Sagittarius A. (New Scientist)

Particles Larger Than Galaxies Fill the Universe?

Posted on by
Observation of a neutrino hitting a proton in ...

‘The oldest of the subatomic particles called neutrinos might each encompass a space larger than thousands of galaxies, new simulations suggest.

Neutrinos as we know them today are created by nuclear reactions or radioactive decay.

According to quantum mechanics, the “size” of a particle such as a neutrino is defined by a fuzzy range of possible locations. We can only detect these particles when they interact with something such as an atom, which collapses that range into a single point in space and time.

For neutrinos created recently, the ranges they can exist in are very, very small.

But over the roughly 13.7-billion-year lifetime of the cosmos, “relic” neutrinos have been stretched out by the expansion of the universe, enlarging the range in which each neutrino can exist.

“We’re talking maybe up to roughly ten billion light-years” for each neutrino, said study co-author George Fuller of the University of California, San Diego.

“That’s nearly on the order of the size of the observable universe.” ‘ (National Geographic)

Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse?

Posted on by
Urbi et Orbi

“In their efforts to solve fundamental problems in cosmology, many researchers have converged on the idea of a multiverse — the theory that a vast number of universes lie beyond the limits of what we can observe.

Because they’re unobservable, multiverse theories are also untestable, blurring the line between science and speculation and making them controversial in the scientific community. Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt has called the multiverse “a dangerous idea that I am simply unwilling to contemplate.” By challenging both humanity’s uniqueness and our central place in the cosmos, multiverse theories have also become embroiled in theological debates  — some fear they will join evolution as another battleground in the culture wars.” (Seed)

You are a hologram

Posted on by
Falling into a black hole
falling into a black hole…

‘According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.

If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.’

via New Scientist.

Mysterious New ‘Dark Flow’ Discovered in Space

Posted on by

The highest quality resolution version of this...

“As if the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy weren’t vexing enough, another baffling cosmic puzzle has been discovered.

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon ‘dark flow.’

The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.” (space.com)