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universe

SPACE: Are There Cracks in the Universe?

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cracks - pixabay

There might be cracks in space-time, but humanity’s telescopes can’t see them. The cracks, if they exist, are old — remnants of a time shortly after the Big Bang when the universe had just shifted from a hotter, more alien state to the cooler, more familiar one we see today. That great cool-down, what physicists call a “phase transition,” started earlier in some places than others, the theory goes. Bubbles of cooler universe formed and spread, blooming across space until they met other bubbles. Eventually, all of space transitioned, and the old universe disappeared. But that old, high-energy state might … Read more

Is the Universe a Loop?

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andromeda - pixabay

Everything we think we know about the shape of the universe could be wrong. Instead of being flat like a bedsheet, our universe may be curved, like a massive, inflated balloon, according to a new study. That’s the upshot of a new paper published today (Nov. 4) in the journal Nature Astronomy, which looks at data from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the faint echo of the Big Bang. But not everyone is convinced; the new findings, based on data released in 2018, contradict both years of conventional wisdom and another recent study based on that same CMB data set. … Read more

SPACE: The Gassy Highway That Connects Everything

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nebula - pixabay

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 … Read more

SCIENCE: Meet the Chameleon Particle

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chameleon - pixabay

Can a chameleon build a galaxy? According to new computer models, yes. This isn’t a surrealist joke but rather the implication of recent simulations that aim to explain the inner workings of dark energy, a mysterious force that is driving apart everything in the universe. The findings, published July 8 in the journal Nature Astronomy, lend support to a model of dark energy known as Chameleon Theory. Hints of dark energy were first discovered in the late 1990s, when cosmologists measured the light from distant supernovas and realized that the stars were dimmer than expected, suggesting that the fabric of … Read more

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: An AI Created a Model of Our Universe. We Have No Idea How it Works (But it Does)

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universe - pixabay

The first-ever artificial intelligence simulation of the universe seems to work like the real thing — and is almost as mysterious. Researchers reported the new simulation June 24 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The goal was to create a virtual version of the cosmos in order to simulate different conditions for the universe’s beginning, but the scientists also hope to study their own simulation to understand why it works so well. “It’s like teaching image-recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants,” study co-author Shirley Ho, … Read more

SPACE: How It All Began

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Milky Way - pixabay

About 13.8 billion years ago, the universe as we know it began. This moment, known as the Big Bang, is when space itself rapidly began expanding. At the time of the Big Bang, the observable universe (including the materials for at least 2 trillion galaxies), fit into a space less than a centimeter across. Now, the observable universe is 93 billion light-years across and still expanding. There are many questions about the Big Bang, particularly about what came before it (if anything). But scientists do know some things. Read on for some of the most mind-bending discoveries about the beginning … Read more

SPACE: Why Is the Universe Moving Too Fast?

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The universe is moving too fast and nobody knows why. Back in the early years of the universe, right after the Big Bang, everything blasted away from everything else. We can still see the light from that blast, by observing very faraway parts of the universe where light takes billions of years to reach our telescopes. And we can measure how fast things were moving in those faraway spotsBased on that speed, we can calculate how fast the universe should be expanding today. But when astronomers have tried to directly measure how fast the universe is expanding today — a … Read more

SCIENCE: Are We Living in a Hologram?

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Hologram - Pixabay

In the late 1990s, theoretical physicists uncovered a remarkable connection between two seemingly unrelated concepts in theoretical physics. That connection is almost inscrutably technical, but it might have far-reaching consequences for our understanding of gravity and even the universe. To illustrate this connection, we’re going to start at — of all places — a black hole. Researchers have found that when a single bit of information enters a black hole, its surface area increases by a very precise amount: the square of the Planck length (equal to an incredibly small 1.6 x 10^-35 meters on a side). At first blush, … Read more

News: Are We the Only Living Things in the Universe?

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Alone in the Universe?

With billions and billions of stars in our universe and up to 400 billion in our Milky Way Galaxy alone, you’d think we’d have already seen signs of other life on at least one of the other habitable planets that are sure to be spread throughout the cosmos. So where are all the aliens? This colorfully animated video has a few theories. See the full story at Towleroad.com