Physicists have proposed an experiment that could force us to make a choice between extremes to describe the behavior of the Universe. The proposal comes from an international team of researchers from Switzerland, Belgium, Spain and Singapore, and is published in Nature Physics. It is based on what the researchers call a ‘hidden influence inequality.’…
NASA astronomers have discovered a stunning trend in galaxy evolution, according to a report from the space agency. The stunning trend in galaxy evolution goes back 8 billion years, say astronomers who looked at numerous galaxies through the Keck telescopes and NASA’s Space Telescope. “Astronomers thought disk galaxies in the nearby universe had settled into…
Cosmologists are uncovering relics from the dawn of time, letting them look back almost all the way to the Big Bang.
In a laboratory in Scotland, a revolutionary kind of laser is taking shape – the first one to be made out of an artificial black hole. Once complete, the device could help confirm mounting evidence that real black holes, despite their name, emit light. A black-hole laser could also find practical uses in devices that…
Scientists at the University of Cambridge have used cutting-edge infrared surveys of the sky to discover a new population of enormous, rapidly growing supermassive black holes in the early Universe. The black holes were previously undetected because they sit cocooned within thick layers of dust. The new study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of…
One of the unsolved mysteries of contemporary science is how highly organized structures can emerge from the random motion of particles. This applies to many situations ranging from astrophysical objects that extend over millions of light years to the birth of life on Earth. The surprising discovery of self-organized electromagnetic fields in counter-streaming ionized gases…
The most precise measurement ever made of the speed of the universe’s expansion is in, thanks to NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, and it’s a doozy. Space itself is pulling apart at the seams, expanding at a rate of 46.2 plus or minus 1.3 miles per second per megaparsec (a megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years)….
Around the cosmos, black holes aren’t known for being the nicest neighbors. They tend to make their presence felt in unpleasant ways, pulling nearby matter inward even as they belch out violent blasts of plasma and radiation. Put two of them in the same neighborhood and the resulting tug-of-war can quickly turn ugly. But in…
A peek at swirling matter around a giant black hole verifies that it is the source of a monstrous blast of energy thousands of light-years long, researchers say. Bursts of energy known as relativistic jets spew out matter at close to the speed of light. These jets can travel across an entire galaxy, suggesting they…
Astronomers have found a way to measure the size of a black hole. Supermassive black holes reside at the center of galaxies and have gravitational forces so strong that nothing, including light, can escape from being pulled into them. By combining the power of radio dishes in three different states into a super-telescope 2,000 times…