All posts tagged: Universes

Yes, the universe’s expansion is still accelerating, researchers say

Yes, the universe’s expansion is still accelerating, researchers say

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON, June 16 : Taking a fresh look at data involving a specific type of stellar explosion, a team of researchers says it has confirmed the long-accepted notion that the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate – the very observation that led to the identification in the 1990s of an enigmatic cosmic force called dark energy. The study’s results rebut research published last year that concluded that this cosmic expansion is no longer speeding up – a finding that had challenged the basic understanding of the universe. “The universe is still accelerating,” said astrophysicist Brodie Popovic of the University of Southampton in England, one of the leaders of the study published this month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “There’s still a lot we don’t know and are excited to learn, but we think we’re on the right track,” Popovic said. The study’s findings, by a team that included two Nobel Prize recipients, were guided by observations in two different datasets of a type of stellar explosion called a Type …

Cosmic Voids May Contain the Universe’s Best Secrets

Cosmic Voids May Contain the Universe’s Best Secrets

Published by skeptic

Nature abhors a vacuum, so the saying goes, but nobody told the universe. Space is filled with cosmic voids—vast regions mostly free of matter that have opened between dense threads of material that make up a cosmic web. Far from being vacant backwaters with little to study, these voids may hold solutions to some of the most persistent cosmic mysteries, such as the behavior of gravity, the nature of dark energy, and the so-called Hubble tension, an observational mismatch in the expansion rate of the universe that has caused astronomers’ headaches for years. “With voids, we have the power to tackle most of the interesting cosmological riddles,” says Alice Pisani, a research professor in cosmology working at the Centre for Particle Physics in Marseille (CPPM) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. She adds that because there’s less interference from matter, there’s a “high signal-to-noise” ratio in terms of what researchers can observe. The advent of new telescopes and advanced simulations has supercharged this field, inspiring a growing community of scientists worldwide to specialize …

DC Universe’s Lanterns TV show reveals Ozark star in dramatic new first look trailer

DC Universe’s Lanterns TV show reveals Ozark star in dramatic new first look trailer

Published by Daniella Wilson

HBO has cast Ozark star Laura Linney in its upcoming show Lanterns as a dramatic first-look trailer drops. The new show, which will be released in the UK on Monday 17 August, will star Linney alongside Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre as its leads, based on the DC comic characters from Green Lantern. Lanterns’ official logline reads: “The series follows new recruit John Stewart (Aaron Pierre) and Lantern legend Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler), two intergalactic cops drawn into a dark, earth-based mystery as they investigate a murder in the American heartland.” A teaser trailer released today revealed a first look at all three stars in action. The nearly two-minute long trailer begins with Hal Jordan placing a Green Lantern ring in front of John Stewart and declaring: “This ring. It’s the greatest weapon in the universe.” Want to see this content? This page contains content provided by YouTube. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as YouTube may use cookies and other technologies. To view this content, choose ‘Accept and continue’ to allow …

Versions of You in Other Universes May Be Subtly Affecting Your Destiny, Oxford Physicist Says

Versions of You in Other Universes May Be Subtly Affecting Your Destiny, Oxford Physicist Says

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech You may think you’re the protagonist of your own story. According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, however, you’re more like a puppet — whose strings are being pulled into a million parallel universes at any given time. As Vedral argues in a recent issue of Popular Mechanics, the pop-sci version of the “observer effect” — where the act of observation or measurement affects a system — gets the cause-and-effect backward. The typical story goes something like this: quantum objects hang out in multiple states at once, until some observer glances over. At this point, the multiple states collapse and only one is left, an assumption that can lead various woo-woo interpretations, like that we create reality simply by observing it. Physics, Verdal says, does not support that idea. That collapse effect isn’t a special power of human consciousness, but rather a fact of physics that says interactions — any interaction — forces a quantum system to commit to …

Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes

Physicist Proposes Dark Matter Is Made of Black Holes That Survived Dead Universes

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Here’s a fun dark matter solution. The invisible and as yet hypothetical substance could be made of “relic” black holes that survived the deaths of previous universes. This idea is explored as part of a new study published in the journal Physical Review D, which the lead author Enrique Gaztanaga breaks down in an essay for The Conversation. It hinges on two key concepts: the “Big Bounce,” a controversial idea that the Big Bang was part of an endless cycle in which the universe expands and contracts and expands again; and so-called primordial black holes. “The universe may not have begun once, but may have rebounded,” Gaztanaga wrote. “And the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be relics from a time before the Big Bang.” Black holes as a dark matter candidate have a powerful allure. Both are largely invisible but still massive, and pinning the blame on black holes means we don’t have to search for undiscovered …

Our local universe’s expansion rate doesn’t add up, astronomers find

Our local universe’s expansion rate doesn’t add up, astronomers find

Published by Jenni Sidey

A difference of a few kilometers per second might not sound like much. In cosmology, it has become one of the field’s most stubborn problems. An international team of astronomers has now delivered one of the sharpest direct measurements yet of how fast the nearby Universe is expanding, and the answer again lands on the high side. Their new value for the Hubble constant, the number used to describe that expansion rate, is 73.50 ± 0.81 kilometers per second per megaparsec. That is just over 1% precision. It also keeps the long-running Hubble tension very much alive. The result, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, comes from the H0 Distance Network Collaboration, or H0DN. The project grew out of a March 2025 workshop at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland, where researchers from across the field worked to build a shared framework for combining local measurements of cosmic distance. This graphic represents the tension that exists between measurements of the expansion rate of the late, nearby Universe, versus what would be expected based on …

Cosmic inflation explains the Universe’s low entropy at birth

Cosmic inflation explains the Universe’s low entropy at birth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Right now, at this very moment, the total amount of entropy contained within the observable Universe is greater than it’s ever been before. Tomorrow’s entropy will be even greater still, while yesterday, the entropy wasn’t quite as great as it is today. With each passing moment, inevitably, the Universe inches closer to its seemingly inevitable maximum entropy state known as the “heat death” of the Universe: a situation where all the particles and fields have reached their lowest-energy, equilibrium state, and no further energy can be extracted to perform work, or any other useful, order-creating tasks. The reason for the inevitable increase in entropy is as simple as it is inevitable: the second law of thermodynamics. It states that the entropy of a closed-and-isolated, self-contained system can only increase or, in the ideal case, stay the same over time; it can never go down. It has a preferred direction for time: forward, as systems always tend toward greater (or even maximal) entropy over time. Commonly thought of as “disorder,” it seems to take our Universe …

We may have just glimpsed the universe’s first stars

We may have just glimpsed the universe’s first stars

Published by skeptic

An artist’s impression of star formation in the early universe Adolf Schaller for STScI/NASA Astronomers have had the most compelling glimpse yet of some of the universe’s first stars. These are unlike any other stars we have seen and could help us understand crucial properties about the early universe, such as how massive the earliest stars were and how they shaped those that formed later. It is thought that the first stars to form in our universe were made from almost entirely from hydrogen and helium, with no heavier elements. They were also enormous and blazingly hot, hundreds of times more massive and tens of thousands degrees hotter than the sun. But because most of these so-called Population III stars lived for only a relatively short amount of time before blowing up, astronomers have yet to conclusively find a galaxy filled with them because they existed so early in the universe’s history. Now, Roberto Maiolino at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have found that the galaxy Hebe, a group of stars that existed …

Why “CPT” is the Universe’s most unbreakable symmetry

Why “CPT” is the Universe’s most unbreakable symmetry

Published by Jenni Sidey

The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations and at all times. They must be good enough so that, no matter what conditions exist or what experiments we perform, our theoretical predictions match, or at least are consistent with, the measured outcomes. And having predictive power, explicitly, means that if you know the initial conditions of your system and the laws that govern it, you can predict what the outcomes — or the relative probability of the set of possible outcomes — will always turn out to be. The most successful physical theories of all fall into two separate categories: the quantum field theories that describe each of the fundamental interactions (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, and strong nuclear) that occur between particles, as well as General Relativity, which describes spacetime and gravitation. And yet, there’s one fundamental, …

Dramatic changes observed in one of universe’s biggest stars

Dramatic changes observed in one of universe’s biggest stars

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON, Feb 28 : The largest stars in the universe live the life of a rock star – they are born brilliant, live fast and die young. If that is the case, the one named WOH G64 might be considered the stellar equivalent of Jimi Hendrix. WOH G64, which is 28 times the mass of the sun and resides in a satellite galaxy to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud, is one of a handful of the biggest stars known, just like Hendrix was in rock ‘n’ roll. And observations spanning more than three decades show it is behaving unlike any star seen before. Astronomers have only an incomplete understanding of the life history of the largest stars, and the WOH G64 observations are providing new insight. Researchers observed a change that occurred in 2014 in the star’s color, corresponding to an increase in its surface temperature, as it evolved from red to yellow. The star had been classified as an extreme red supergiant but rapidly became a yellow hypergiant. This transition happened …