Latest Big Bang Stories
The Universe was a more fertile place soon after it was formed than has previously been suspected. A team of French and Italian astronomers [1] made indeed the surprising discovery of a large and unknown population of distant galaxies observed when the Universe was only 10 to 30% its present age. This breakthrough is based on observations made with the Visible Multi-Object Spectrograph (VIMOS) as part of the VIMOS VLT Deep Survey (VVDS). The VVDS started early 2002 on Melipal, one of the...
Large Population of Galaxies Found in the Young Universe with ESO's VLT ESO -- It is one of the major goals of observational cosmology to trace the way galaxies formed and evolved and to compare it to predictions from theoretical models. It is therefore essential to know as precisely as possible how many galaxies were present in the Universe at different epochs. This is easier to say than to do. Indeed, if counting galaxies from deep astronomical images is relatively straightforward,...
Alabama -- A new analysis of 'cool' spots in the cosmic microwave background may cast new doubts on a key piece of evidence supporting the big bang theory of how the universe was formed. Two scientists at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) looked for, but couldn't find, evidence of gravitational "lensing" where you might expect to find it, in the most distant light source in the universe -- the cosmic microwave background. Results of this research by Dr. Richard Lieu, a...
If you want to hear a little bit of the Big Bang, you're going to have to turn down your stereo.That's what neighbors of MIT's Haystack Observatory found out. They were asked to make a little accommodation for science, and now the results are in: Scientists at Haystack have made the first radio detection of deuterium, an atom that is key to understanding the beginning of the universe. The findings are being reported in an article in the Sept. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.The team...
MIT -- If you want to hear a little bit of the Big Bang, you're going to have to turn down your stereo.That's what neighbors of MIT's Haystack Observatory found out. They were asked to make a little accommodation for science, and now the results are in. Scientists at Haystack have made the first radio detection of deuterium, an atom that is key to understanding the beginning of the universe. The findings are being reported in an article in the Sept. 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal...
Physicists have created the state of matter thought to have filled the Universe just a few microseconds after the big bang and found it to be different from what they were expecting. Instead of a gas, it is more like a liquid. Understanding why it is a liquid should take physicists a step closer to explaining the earliest moments of our Universe. Not just any old liquid, either. Its collective movement is rather like the way a school of fish swims 'as one' and is a sign that the fluid...
The University of Chicago's Nicolas Dauphas has developed a new way to calculate the age of the Milky Way that is free of the unvalidated assumptions that have plagued previous methods. Dauphas' method, which he reports in the June 29 issue of the journal Nature, can now be used to tackle other mysteries of the cosmos that have remained unsolved for decades. "Age determinations are crucial to a fundamental understanding of the universe," said Thomas Rauscher, an assistant professor...
The University of Chicago's Nicolas Dauphas has developed a new way to calculate the age of the Milky Way that is free of the unvalidated assumptions that have plagued previous methods. Dauphas' method, which he reports in the June 29 issue of the journal Nature, can now be used to tackle other mysteries of the cosmos that have remained unsolved for decades. "Age determinations are crucial to a fundamental understanding of the universe," said Thomas Rauscher, an assistant professor...
Nuclear fusion reactors could be used to study what the universe was like just after the big bang. So claims a physicist who noticed that the plasma created inside these reactors is distributed in a strikingly similar way to galaxies in today's universe. Nils Basse of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology does not normally concern himself with events in the early universe. Instead, he studies turbulence in the plasma created in fusion reactors. But when he chanced upon the Sloan Digital...
The Virgo consortium, an international group of astrophysicists from the UK, Germany, Japan, Canada and the USA has today (June 2nd) released first results from the largest and most realistic simulation ever of the growth of cosmic structure and the formation of galaxies and quasars. In a paper published in Nature, the Virgo Consortium shows how comparing such simulated data to large observational surveys can reveal the physical processes underlying the build-up of real galaxies and black...
Latest Big Bang Reference Libraries
Image Caption: The Hubble Extreme Deep Field (XDF) was completed in September 2012 and shows the farthest galaxies ever photographed by humans. Each speck of light in the photo is an individual galaxy, some of them as old as 13.2 billion years; the observable universe is estimated to contain more than 200 billion galaxies. Credit: NASA/Wikipedia What is Cosmology? I once commented to an acquaintance that I was fascinated by the field of Cosmology, and mused that if I had more time, I...
Large-Scale Structure of the Cosmos -- Stars are organised into galaxies which in turn appear to form clusters and superclusters, separated by voids. Prior to 1989 it was commonly assumed that the superclusters were the largest structures in existence, and that they were distributed more-or-less uniformly throughout the universe in every direction. However, in 1989, Margaret Geller and John Huchra discovered the "Great Wall", a sheet of galaxies more than 500 million light years long...
Cosmology -- area of science that aims at a comprehensive theory of the structure and evolution of the entire physical universe. Modern Cosmological Theories Present models of the universe hold two fundamental premises: the cosmological principle and the dominant role of gravitation. Derived by Hubble, the cosmological principle holds that if a large enough sample of galaxies is considered, the universe looks the same from all positions and in all directions in space. The second point...
Redshift -- Redshift is the phenomenon that the frequency of light when observed, under certain circumstances, can be lower than the frequency of light when it was emitted at the source. This usually occurs when the source moves away from the observer, as in the Doppler effect. More specifically, the term redshift is used for the observation that the spectrum of light emitted by distant galaxies is shifted to lower frequencies (towards the red end of the spectrum, hence the name) when...
Quasar -- A quasar (from quasi-stellar radio source) is an astronomical object that looks like a star in optical telescopes (i.e. it is a point source), but has a very high redshift. The general consensus is that this high redshift is cosmological, the result of Hubble's law and that their redshift indicates that they are typically very distant from Earth; we observe them as they were several billions of years ago. Since we can see them despite their distance, they must emit more...
