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We spend a lot of time thinking about futurism, but the past is pretty interesting, too. In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we get extra speculative and think about what things may have been like before the beginning of time. What was there before the Big Bang? Did anything exist before our current universe? Here's what we know. More »
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Over at the Atlantic, there's a fascinating interview with Tim Maudlin, one of the founders of a new field, the philosophy of cosmology. He suggests that the mysteries of the universe, including what existed before the Big Bang, may be in part philosophical: More »
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For the first time ever, scientists have witnessed and recorded a comet disintegrating in the Sun's atmosphere. The icy body — dubbed "comet C/2011 N3 (SOHO)" — was originally observed back in July. Today, the team that observed the comet flaming out of existence has published an in-depth analysis of what really happened. More »
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For decades, the world has relied on incredibly accurate atomic clocks to keep time; but atomic clocks are much more consistant than the rotation of the Earth, which varies in speed ever-so-slightly as it spins about its axis. Consequently, every few years, the time based on the Earth's rotation falls out of sync with time kept by atomic clocks. More »
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We used to think our planet was unique, but discoveries by planet-hunting missions like Kepler continue to indicate that the the odds of Earth being one-of-a-kind are incredibly slim. Now, findings published in today's issue of Nature suggest that there are far more planets in our galaxy that we ever imagined: More »
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Have you got a knack for electronics and computers, a penchant for public speaking, and a strong desire to work for one of the most brilliant scientists of our time? If so, have we got some news for you. More »
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Everything comes to an end, and our sun is no exception. A star happily cooking along in its middle age, Sol has many millions of good years ahead of it — but its eventual doom is certain. Here's what that will look like. More »
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Yesterday, NASA announced a milestone in the almost 22-year history of its Hubble Space Telescope: The 10,000th refereed scientific paper based on Hubble data has now been published, reinforcing that Hubble is one of the most successful astronomical experiments in human history. More »
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We all know that time has direction, because we've all experienced it; you will never again be as young, for example, as you are at this very second. Or this second. Or this second. The directionality of time prohibits it. More »
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Billions of years ago, when the universe was still in its infancy, the formation of stars is believed to have occurred at a much faster rate than it does today. Now, a recent discovery by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) suggests that the universe's earliest galaxies may have been pumping out stars even faster than we thought. More »
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Dark matter almost certainly exists - otherwise, galaxy clusters wouldn't have sufficient gravity to hold themselves together. It was hoped dwarf galaxies could confirm the leading dark matter theories. But a new study has drawn a big, frustrating blank. More »
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The 2011 Nobel Prizes have been announced, honoring preeminent achievements in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, the promotion of peace, and economics. Here's what you need to know about the three science-related Nobel Prizes. More »
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A basic fact of the universe is that space is a dark, black expanse that's only broken up by the lights of stars and galaxies. But that wasn't always the case — space was once a dense, opaque fog. More »
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By now you've probably heard today's announcement regarding the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. Three U.S. scientists — Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt (picture left to right up top) — were honored for their 1998 discovery that our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. More »
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The Bolshoi Simulation is a massive, incredibly detailed model of everything, providing a comprehensive simulation of the universe's 14 billion year history. Scientists are now exploring the simulation, and we've got some of the most breathtaking results of their efforts. More »
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Modern physics assumes the universe is the same all over... but that might not be the case. Until recently, physics held that the universe was contracting... now we're stuck with dark energy. But one moderately insane new theory could explain it all. More »
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We still haven't found the Higgs boson, the hypothetical particle that explains why other particles possess mass. But that might not be the only cosmic mystery the Higgs can solve. It could also explain how the universe got its shape. More »
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The cosmological principle holds that the universe has the same structure and basic properties wherever you go. It's been a fundamental part of physics since Copernicus, and all available evidence has supported it...until now. More »
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Dark energy is perhaps the most mysterious thing in the cosmos, and yet it accounts for 73% of the observable universe. What's more, the amount of dark energy seems to be increasing...and that could ultimately rip apart the entire universe. More »
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Most astronomers agree that at the center of every galaxy lies a supermassive black hole. But how did these gravitational monsters form? Now it seems that they may have been here since the beginning of time. More »
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Is the universe flat or spherical or saddle-shaped, and what do any of these things really mean? Do we live in a Pac-Man universe, or an infinite one? In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we'll find out. More »
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Some black holes may be so ancient that they predate the stars themselves, forming instead in the chaotic first moments after the Big Bang. There might even be some black holes out there from the universe before the Big Bang. More »
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Physicists have long studied the nature of the universe. But some go a step further into the unknown (and probably unknowable), contemplating what lies outside the boundaries of our universe. More »
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We first created positrons, electrons' antimatter counterparts, in 1932. But it took decades to create more antiparticles. Now, the newly-discovered antihelium-4 could help us figure out whether there are vast pockets of antimatter in our universe. More »
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This is a map of the entire universe, specifically of the cosmic microwave background radiation that formed as a remnant of the Big Bang. And the circled region is where the CMB is so cold that it defies easy explanation. More »
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The universe is so unimaginably large that parts of it are literally impossible to see, because their light is too distant to reach us even after 14 billion years. Now we might know just how big the cosmos really is. Turns out everything we can see is less than half a percent of the entire universe. More »
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The universe is about 14 billion years old, but the most distant galaxies are much further than 14 billion light years. How can that be? In this week's "Ask a Physicist," we'll find out. More »
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The eternal inflation model says that there's an infinite number of universes, with new universes constantly popping into existence and expanding outwards. Every so often, these new universes might collide. Our universe has four "bruises" possibly caused by these collisions. More »
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The universe hasn't changed much in the past 5,000 years, but our understanding of it has. In historian John Ptak's amazing collection of cosmological maps, you can see how our view of the cosmos has changed radically over time. More »
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The current cosmological consensus is that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago with the Big Bang. But a legendary physicist says he's found the first evidence of an eternal, cyclic cosmos. More »
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The search continues for dark matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up the vast majority of all matter in the cosmos. Although nowadays they're most likely undetectable subatomic particles, in the universe's beginnings they could have formed super-explosive dark stars. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5661561&view=rss&microfeed=true A hypothetical "inflaton" particle fueled the universe's initial expansion out of a single atom - all in the fraction of a nanosecond. And we might soon find the particle responsible. Get the scoop via New Scientist. More »
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A new theory explains the accelerating universe without invoking mysterious, unseen dark energy to account for the expansion. But it also gets rid of singularities, an unchanging speed of light...and the most famous astrophysical phenomenon of all, the Big Bang. More »
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We could be living inside a black hole. This head-spinning idea is one cosmologist's conclusion based on a modification of Einstein's equations of general relativity that changes our picture of what happens at the core of a black hole. More »
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Three-fourths of the universe's matter and energy is thought to be dark energy, the mysterious thing that is causing universal expansion to accelerate. A new way of mapping huge cosmic structures might finally shed some light on this dark energy. More »
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Designer Michæl Paukner created this gorgeous, simple depiction of what ancient Hebrews believed the cosmos looked like, based on what they recorded in the Old Testament. More »
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Seconds after the Big Bang, the Universe was a soup of matter and antimatter. But today, everything around us is matter. So what and where is the antimatter? Last week, scientists came one step closer to finding out. More »
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The cosmic microwave background radiation has provided scientists with some of the best data on the earliest days of the universe. Cosmologists may have worked out how to learn even more, involving a painstaking search for the universe's oldest helium. More »
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Most cosmologists believe that our universe emerged from a singularity during the Big Bang. But now physicists are exploring the possibility that our universe was created by the death of an earlier universe. More »
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You know that "I'm an insignificant dot in the middle of this enormous universe" feeling you get when you stare up into the night sky a little too long? Well, some Oxford scientists think you might be a little more special than that - or at least, the planet you live on is. Their radical new theory would not only obviate the need for dark energy to explain observed patterns of galactic motion, it would overturn the centuries-old Copernican Principle. Not bad for a day's work. More »
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