Armed with hypersensitive satellites, astronomers look back in time to the very moment of creation, when all the matter in the Universe exploded into existence. It is here that we uncover an unsolved mystery as old as time itself - if the Universe was born, where did it come from? Meet the leading scientists who have now discovered what they believe to be the origin of our Universe, and a window into the time before time.
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
Through the Wormhole: What Happened Before the Beginning?
Armed with hypersensitive satellites, astronomers look back in time to the very moment of creation, when all the matter in the Universe exploded into existence. It is here that we uncover an unsolved mystery as old as time itself - if the Universe was born, where did it come from? Meet the leading scientists who have now discovered what they believe to be the origin of our Universe, and a window into the time before time.
Through the Wormhole: Is Time Travel Possible?
Through the Wormhole: Is Time Travel Possible?
Einstein's Theory of Relativity says that time travel is perfectly possible — if you're going forward. Finding a way to travel backwards requires breaking the speed of light, which so far seems impossible. But now, strange-but-true phenomena such as quantum nonlocality, where particles instantly teleport across vast distances, may give us a way to make the dream of traveling back and forth through time a reality. Step into a time machine and rewrite history, bring loved ones back to life, control our destinies.
http://science.discovery.com
Through the Wormhole: The Riddle of Black Holes
http://science.discovery.com
Through the Wormhole: Is There a Creator?
Through the Wormhole: Is There a Creator?
It's perhaps the biggest, most controversial mystery in the cosmos. Did our Universe just come into being by random chance, or was it created by a God who nurtures and sustains all life?
The latest science is showing that the four forces governing our universe are phenomenally finely tuned. So finely that it had led many to the conclusion that someone, or something, must have calibrated them; a belief further backed up by evidence that everything in our universe may emanate from one extraordinarily elegant and beautiful design known as the E8 Lie Group.
While skeptics hold that these findings are neither conclusive nor evidence of a divine creator, some cutting edge physicists are already positing who this God is: an alien gamester who's created our world as the ultimate SIM game for his own amusement. It's an answer as compelling as it is disconcerting.
http://science.discovery.com
Monday, November 11, 2013
Bigger, faster, stronger: stepping up the hunt for cosmic building blocks
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| Professor Rolf Heuer, director general of Cern, will attend the opening of Collider at London's Science Museum this week. Photograph: Laurent Gillieron/AP |
Building it cost £5bn; it took 20 years to construct, and is still to operate at full strength. Yet scientists have already turned their attention to designing a replacement for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator which last year revealed the existence of the Higgs boson, a subatomic entity which plays a key role in giving mass to the building blocks of the universe.
Proposals for a new machine include building a giant underground circular tunnel. This would be similar to the LHC – which is based at the Geneva HQ of Cern, the European particle physics laboratory – but would be more than 100km in diameter: four times the size of the current collider. An alternative device would hurtle particles in straight lines along a tunnel that would be more than 50km long.
In either case, the bursts of intense energy that would be released by colliding particles in these machines would help scientists probe matter to new levels. In particular, it would help them pinpoint material known as dark matter which is believed to account for most of the mass of the universe today.
Continue Learning: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/nov/10/particle-physics-universe-building-blocks-large-hadron-collider
Dartmouth researchers shed new light on dark energy, cosmic speed-up
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| The detailed, all-sky picture of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the infant universe reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team. |
In a new study, Dartmouth researchers rule out a controversial theory that the accelerating expansion of the universe is an illusion.
While the findings don't explain the cosmic speed-up, they eliminate one provocative possibility that our planet, solar system and galaxy are at the center of the universe and that there is no dark energy. The findings appear in the journal Physical Review D. A PDF of the study is available on request.
While the findings don't explain the cosmic speed-up, they eliminate one provocative possibility that our planet, solar system and galaxy are at the center of the universe and that there is no dark energy. The findings appear in the journal Physical Review D. A PDF of the study is available on request.
The 2011 Nobel Prize was awarded for the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. One leading idea to explain the acceleration is a new, mysterious substance called dark energy, which is thought to make up nearly three-fourths of the energy of the universe.
Continue Learning: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Dartmouth_researchers_shed_new_light_on_dark_energy_cosmic_speed_up_999.html
Continue Learning: http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Dartmouth_researchers_shed_new_light_on_dark_energy_cosmic_speed_up_999.html
Physicists monitoring huge solar event
Physicists monitoring huge solar event
Every 11 years, the Sun’s magnetic field —its magnetic north and south — flips, and the effects ripple throughout the solar system.By Stanford University, Palo Alto, California | Published: Monday, November 11, 2013
Although the exact internal mechanism that drives the shift is not entirely understood, researchers at Stanford’s Wilcox Solar Observatory have monitored the Sun’s magnetic field on a daily basis since 1975 and can identify the process as it occurs on the Sun’s surface. This will be the fourth shift the observatory has monitored.
Continue Learning: http://www.astronomy.com/news/2013/11/physicists-monitoring-huge-solar-event
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