Scientists announced today that they have successfully measured a B-mode polarization signal in the Universe’s cosmic microwave background (CMB). The signal, detected using a telescope at the South Pole, represents an important confirmation of the theory of cosmic inflation and provides insights into how the Universe may have behaved in the first fractions of a […]
Using multiple images from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have assembled a new, improved portrait of our deepest-ever view of the Universe. Called the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the hybrid image contains around 5,000 galaxies – some from a time when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old. Garth Illingworth, principal investigator […]
Electromagnetism, measured by the so-called fine-structure constant, is one of the four fundamental forces of nature and it underpins Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The constant, denoted by the symbol alpha, should be the same across the cosmos, but an Australian physicist’s observations of distant galaxies indicate that it may in fact be variable. The […]
Antimatter remains an enigma, but researchers at CERN may soon be able to ascertain some of its key properties thanks to groundbreaking techniques they’ve developed that trap and store antimatter for more than 15 minutes. Reporting their work in Nature Physics, the ALPHA team (an international group of scientists working at CERN) outlined their plans […]
A British-German team of physicists searching the depths of space for gravitational waves may have stumbled on one of the most important discoveries in physics, according to American physicist Craig Hogan. Hogan, from the Fermilab Centre for Particle Astrophysics in Illinois, is convinced that data from a gravitational wave detector at the Centre for Gravitational […]
Using Loop Quantum Gravity theory, physicists have proposed a new mathematical model of what the universe looked like before the Big Bang. Writing in Nature Physics, Martin Bojowald, assistant professor of physics at Penn State, explains how the work can be used to derive new details about the properties of a quantum state as it […]
Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) have accurately dated a star that formed at the dawn of time – a mere 500 million years after the Big Bang. The “fossil” star, known as HE 1523-0901, was found to be 13.2 billion years old, not very far from the 13.7 billion […]
A team of astronomers have just published the largest three-dimensional map of the universe ever constructed, a wedge-shaped slice of the cosmos that spans a tenth of the northern sky. Team leaders Nikhil Padmanabhan and David Schlegel say the new map encompasses 600,000 uniquely luminous red galaxies, and extends 5.6 billion light-years deep into space, […]
Researchers from the University of Washington and Harvard University have turned up some interesting findings about possible realities based on math modeling the beginnings of the Universe. Andreas Karch (UW) and Lisa Randall from Harvard set out to model how the Universe was arranged right after the big bang, and then watch how the cosmos […]
