Latest Exotic matter Stories

By Scott Malone BOSTON (Reuters) - A team of U.S. scientists has found the first direct evidence of the existence of "dark matter," a little-understood substance with a huge influence on gravity, the team's leader said on Tuesday. Scientists still do not know what exactly dark matter is, but have theorized it must exist to account for the amount of gravity needed to hold the universe together. They estimate that the substance accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the matter in the universe....

Though he couldn't be observed directly, the Invisible Man knew his presence could be betrayed by his effect on visible things. Employing a similar principle, a team led by Andrew Gould of Ohio State University will hunt for hard-to-see celestial objects, like black holes and dark matter, by observing how they affect light coming from stars behind them. This "gravitational lens" effect, predicted by Albert Einstein, has been observed repeatedly from the ground. But NASA's SIM...

Using data from ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory, an international group of astrophysicists discovered that one spinning neutron star doesn't appear to be the stable rotator scientists would expect. These X-ray observations promise to give new insights into the thermal evolution and finally the interior structure of neutron stars.Spinning neutron stars, also known as pulsars, are generally known to be highly stable rotators. Thanks to their periodic signals, emitted either in the radio or...

(RedOrbit) Scientists from The University of Exeter and the International University, Bremen, Germany have discovered what may be the strongest magnetic field in the Universe. The scientists have shown that this field, which is 1000 million million times larger than the Earth's magnetic field, is created by violent collisions between neutron stars in the outer reaches of space. Neutron stars are the collapsed core of a massive star remaining after a supernova explosion. When two neutron stars...

Max Planck -- Dark matter could light up the first stars in the universe if the dark matter is made up of sterile neutrinos. According to a paper by Peter Biermann, (Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, Bonn) and Alexander Kusenko (University of California at Los Angeles), recently published in "Physical Review Letters", sterile neutrino decays speed up the formation of molecular hydrogen and light up the first stars as early as 20-100 million years after the Big Bang. The...

BERKELEY "“ Physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have the universe's coldest substance running in circles.The UC Berkeley team has created a Bose-Einstein condensate of rubidium atoms and nudged it into a circular racetrack 2 millimeters across, creating a particle storage ring analogous to the accelerator storage rings of high energy physics. This ring, the first to contain a Bose-Einstein gas, is full of cold particles at a temperature of only one-millionth of a degree...

Using high-speed collisions between gold atoms, scientists think they have re-created one of the most mysterious forms of matter in the universe -- quark-gluon plasma. This form of matter was present during the first microsecond of the Big Bang and may still exist at the cores of dense, distant stars. UC Davis physics professor Daniel Cebra is one of 543 collaborators on the research. His main role was building the electronic listening devices that collect information about the collisions, a...

Using high-speed collisions between gold atoms, scientists think they have re-created one of the most mysterious forms of matter in the universe -- quark-gluon plasma. This form of matter was present during the first microsecond of the Big Bang and may still exist at the cores of dense, distant stars.UC Davis physics professor Daniel Cebra is one of 543 collaborators on the research. His main role was building the electronic listening devices that collect information about the collisions, a...

A gigantic explosion on a neutron star halfway across the Milky Way galaxy, the largest such explosion ever recorded in the universe, should allow astronomers for the first time to probe the interiors of these mysterious stellar objects.An international team of astrophysicists, combing through data from a NASA X-ray satellite, the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer, reports in the July 20th issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters that the explosion produced vibrations within the star, like a ringing...

Cambridge, MA -- In 1987, earthbound observers saw a star explode in the nearby dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Astronomers eagerly studied this supernova-the closest seen in the past 300 years-and have continued to examine its remains. Although its blast wave has lit up surrounding clouds of gas and dust, the supernova appears to have left no core behind. Astronomers now report that even the sharp eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope failed to locate the black hole or...