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ScienceDaily (Dec. 3, 2010) - Researchers from the Institute for Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) and other European groups have studied the effects of the presence of dark matter in the Sun. According to their calculations, low mass dark matter particles could be transferring energy from the core to the external parts of the Sun, which would affect the quantity of neutrinos that reach Earth.

ScienceDaily (Dec. 2, 2010) - A team of physicists from the University of Toronto and Rutgers University has mimicked a supernova -- an explosion of a star -- in miniature.

"LONDON, Sep. 2, 2010 (Reuters) - God did not create the universe and the "Big Bang" was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, the eminent British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a new book."

The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world's most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and updated by astrophysicists at the American Museum of Natural History. The new film, created by the Museum,  is part of an exhibition, Visions of the Cosmos: From the Milky Ocean to an Evolving Universe, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan through May 2010.     Data: Digital Universe, American Museum of Natural History  http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/universe/    Visualization Software:  Uniview by SCISS    Director: Carter Emmart  Curator: Ben R. Oppenheimer  Producer: Michael Hoffman  Executive Producer: Ro Kinzler  Co-Executive Producer: Martin Brauen  Manager, Digital Universe Atlas: Brian Abbott    Music: Suke Cerulo    For more information visit http://www.amnh.org

It looks like physics works differently in different places. If so, everything we think we know about the cosmos may be wrong

On October 11, 2010, Laura Mersini-Houghton appeared in a BBC programme What Happened Before the Big Bang (along with Michio Kaku, Neil Turok, Andrei Linde, Roger Penrose, Lee Smolin and other notable cosmologists and physicists) where she propounded her theory of the universe as a wave function on the landscape multiverse.[11] The programme referred to three observational tests of her theory's predictions, which makes it the only theory on the origins of our universe ever to offer predictions and have them successfully tested. Mersini-Houghton's work on multiverse theory is discussed in the epilogue of a recently published biography of Hugh Everett III.[12

(PhysOrg.com) -- Through precise cosmological measurements, scientists know that about 4.6% of the energy of the Universe is made of baryonic matter (normal atoms), about 23% is made of dark matter, and the remaining 72% or so is dark energy. Scientists also know that almost all the baryonic matter in the observable Universe is matter (with a positive baryon charge) rather than antimatter (with a negative baryon charge). But exactly why this matter and energy came to be this way is still an open question. In a recent study, physicists have proposed a new mechanism that can generate both the baryon asymmetry and the dark matter density of the Universe simultaneously.

newscientist.com - A shape-shifting fifth fundamental force could neatly explain the mystery of dark energy and some other puzzling astronomical observations

Claims that there is something wrong with our standard model of the universe rest on flawed logic, say Andrew Pontzen and Hiranya Peiris

Physicists struggling to reconcile gravity with quantum mechanics have hailed a theory - inspired by pencil lead - that could make it all very simple

Astronomers' new observations have spotted the most distant galaxy ever seen. The galaxy's light comes from about 13.1 billion light-years away, making it one of the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.

Researchers at Fermilab are building a "holometer" so they can disprove everything you thought you knew about the universe. More specifically, they are trying to either prove or disprove the somewhat mind-bending notion that the third dimension doesn't exist at all, and that the 3-D universe we think we live in is nothing more than a hologram. To do so, they are building the most precise clock ever created.

Ptolemy's view that the stars are fixed points in the sky and our earth lay at the center of the known universe seemed to verify Aristotle's notion of the universe. We sure thought a lot of ourselves, but it stood to reason at the time.  We couldn't really see too far out from our home.  But the view was so appealing that even the gathering anomalies would not dissuade believers for nearly 1500 years.  On one level, it's comical to consider that humans thought of things in this way, but it is clearly scientifically stout compared to the Genesis account of the firmament.