cosmology
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Dark energy DOES exist and it's increasingly driving our universe apart, scientists claim | Mail Online
Dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds, according to a five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time. The study offers new support for the favoured theory of how dark energy works - as a constant force, uniformly affecting the universe and propelling its runaway expansion.
Enigma: Black Holes Glow with a Hot Ring of Light
Stephen Hawkings great discovery was that the mysterious regions in space we call black holes radiate heat through quantum effects. Hawking has said that "black holes are not really black after all: they glow like a hot body, and the smaller they are, the more they glow." Hawking's famous theory says that the temperature of a black hole varies inversely to its mass.
NASA scientists say they may have discovered a new force of nature, after research showed two of their deep space probes were being inexplicably pulled off course.
NASA discovers brand new force of nature
Could the Universe Be A Giant Quantum Computer?
MIT scientist Seth Lloyd proposes that information is a quantifiable physical value, as much as mass or motion -that any physical system--a river, you, the universe--is a quantum mechanical computer.
by Jeff Johnson The universe can be a very strange place. While groundbreaking ideas such as quantum theory, relativity and even the Earth going around the Sun might be commonly accepted now, science still continues to show that the universe contains things you might find it difficult to believe, and even more difficult to get your head around.
10 Strange Things About The Universe
Fermi's Large Area Telescope has recently detected two short-duration gamma-ray pulses coming from the Crab Nebula, which was previously believed to emit radiation at very steady rate. The pulses were fueled by the most energetic particles ever traced to a discrete astronomical object.
January 6, 2011 - Fermi's Large Area Telescope Sees Surprising Flares in Crab Nebula
Cambridge University astronomers have discovered the 'missing link' in the evolution of the universe following the Big Bang, it was claimed today. For years scientists have known nothing about the 'dark ages' of space - a period between the Big Bang 13.7billion years ago and the creation of the first stars.
Epic Discovery: Ancient Light from a Massive Black Hole Reveals New, Unknown History of Universe
Observations of cosmic microwaves from 380,000 years after the big bang have been essential to modern cosmology, but cosmic neutrinos should carry information on the state of the universe when it was less than a second old. In the 23 October Physical Review Letters , a team points out a curious and hitherto ignored fact about these relic neutrinos: because of their masses, they travel more slowly than light does and actually originate from a much nearer region of the universe than the cosmic microwaves. Although detecting cosmic neutrinos is still a long way off (if it’s possible at all), the work clarifies the type of information that, in theory at least, could be gleaned from relic neutrinos.
So Close, yet So Far | Physical Review Focus
An Ancient Subatomic Signature Extends Across the Universe: Relic Particles 10 Billion Light-Years in Length Discovered
An ancient subatomic signature extends across the universe. It seems that some subatomic particles, invisible and untouchable effects of the very creation of reality, might exist simultaneously across all of space.
There are already two giant cosmic mysteries, sources of hard-to-account for anti-gravity and gravity, called dark energy and dark matter, respectively, which are ubiquitous in the universe. In honour of this, and because the flow cannot be accounted for by the observed distribution of matter in the universe, the Nasa team that found the cosmic drift calls it "dark flow". The find was made using data from Nasa's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which maps out changes (anisotropy) in the microwave (heat) radiation left over from the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, when the universe was born.