Group items tagged

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

Though an experiment hunting for gravitational waves has yet to find any, its null result helps constrain models of how the universe began.

A new study found that the earliest black holes lacked nearby matter to gobble up, and so lay relatively stagnant in pockets of emptiness.

Ten years ago today, NASA launched the Chandra X-Ray Observatory aboard the space shuttle Columbia. And it has provided stunning images from the high-energy

It was supposed to be the first great scientific discovery of the 21st Century - or so many researchers thought when they rushed down to the bookmakers to place bets at what were deemed at the time to be ludicrously generous odds. The physicists believed that they were close to making the first direct detection of gravitational waves, the ripples in space-time generated by supernovas and coalescing neutron stars.

See colourful images from deep space captured by Nasa's x-ray observatory since 1999.

The most distant known galaxy to host a supermassive black hole has been discovered in a galaxy that formed in the early history of the universe. The galaxy, as large as the Milky Way, is about 12.8 billion light-years away and harbors a supermassive black hole that contains at least a billion times as much matter as our sun.

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2011) - Certain molecules do exist in two forms which are symmetrical mirror images of each other: they are known as chiral molecules. On Earth, the chiral molecules of life, especially amino acids and sugars, exist in only one form, either left-handed or right-handed. Why is it that life has initially chosen one form over the other?

For several decades, astronomers and cosmologists have been piling up data that indicates most of the matter in the Universe is dark, interacting only via gravity. As modified theories of gravity failed to account for observation, candidates for dark mater were winnowed down until one remained in favor: the weakly interactive massive particle, or WIMP. Over the past several years, potential signals of WIMPs have appeared in space and on Earth; that, combined with the startup of the LHC, has given the research community the sense that it's close to pinning down the identity of the WIMPs. But a review in this week's Nature considers what might happen if we fail.

Quantum dots are man-made atoms that confine electrons to a small space. They have atomic-like behavior that results in unusual electronic properties on a nanoscale. These unique properties may be particularly valuable in tailoring the way light interacts with matter.

From the machinery of life to the fate of the cosmos, what can't science explain?

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2011) - Observations from NASA's Voyager spacecraft, humanity's farthest deep space sentinels, suggest the edge of our solar system may not be smooth, but filled with a turbulent sea of magnetic bubbles.

It's now official that water has been found on the moon, and scientists have long seen it on Mars as well. In fact, water is all over the solar system and the rest of the galaxy - and since water is key to life as we know it, these discoveries raise the hope that we are not in fact alone.

A new project to create a 3D map of space so large that scientists can find a 500 million-light-year-size remnant from the early universe inside it began operation last month. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey opened its eyes to the universe, taking in data from hundreds of galaxies and quasars in the constellation Aquarius, from its perch on the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. Eventually, it will image two million galaxies and quasars.