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POPSCarl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot I did a search and found several clips for a Pale Blue Dot, but this one is special. This has Carl Sagan himself speaking. Absolutely wonderful!
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POPSIs Time disappearing from the universe? At an everyday level, the change would not be perceptible. However, it would be obvious from cosmic scale measurements tracking the course of the universe over billions of years. The change would be infinitesimally slow from a human perspective, but in terms of the vast perspective of cosmology, the study of ancient light from suns that shone billions of years ago, it could easily be measured Difficult to fathom.
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POPSBefore the Big Bang - the Big Bounce Now, however, Dr Bojowald and fellow physicists are exploring territory unknown even to Einstein - the time before the Big Bang - using his new theory, called Loop Quantum Cosmology. An analysis of this, one of a series of newly-emerging theories which combine Einstein's theory of gravity (general relativity) with that of the subatomic world (quantum theory), "is supposed to provide a non-singular framework in which one could address the question of what was there before the Big Bang," he says.
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POPSHow did the Universe Begin ? The no-boundary wave function also states that space-time was not what we see today at the outset of universal expansion. “When the universe started out,” Hartle explains, “there wasn’t ordinary space-time. Instead of three space directions, as we have now, there were four space directions. At some point, a transition was made to ordinary space-time.”
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POPS50 Billion Suns! -The Biggest Single Object in the Universe Based on this self-regulating maximum rate, scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Massachusetts, and the European Southern Observatory, Chile, have calculated an upper limit for these mega-mammoth masses. Fifty billion suns, that's 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 kg, otherwise known as "ridiculously stupidly big" and triple the size of the largest observed black hole, OJ 287.
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POPSIs a 'Dark Force' Pushing the Universe Apart? Astronomers now recognize that the eventual fate of the universe is inextricably tied to the presence of dark energy and dark matter.The current standard model for cosmology describes a universe that is 70 percent dark energy, 25 percent dark matter, and only 5 percent normal matter.
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POPSBefore the beginning of the universe Alan Guth of MIT, who first proposed the inflation theory nearly three decades ago, says he suspects “the reported lopsidedness will more likely turn out to be a fluke.” However, he adds, “the concept of inflation is really only the framework of a theory, and so far experiment has given us very little guidance in trying to fill in the details.
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POPSDark, Perhaps Forever - Clueless about the universe Whatever proposal is eventually selected, the dark energy satellite will return a tidal wave of data about the universe and its weird denizens, both visible and invisible. This data is likely to transform astronomy in unpredictable ways, but there is no guarantee that it will nail the mystery of dark energy. “We really need new theory, and we have none,” Dr. Krauss said.
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POPSNew twist to matter-antimatter mystery Here is an "almost breakthrough" A major mystery of modern physics is why normal matter particles are the building blocks of the observable universe. Why are we not made of antimatter? Or pure energy? Scientists speculate that a tiny imbalance in the early universe allowed a small fraction of normal matter – one particle for every one billion – to avoid annihilation and survive to form stars, planets, and humans. When we come to know that we don't know, there is a new place for hope...
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POPSCommon Misconceptions This articlecovers a broad field of misconceptions, such as geography, health, even food. Evolution is, to me, the most interesting.
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POPSMassive Radio-telescope in China to Explore 'Dark Age' of Early Universe The new study is part of a broader effort to understand the early years of the universe, after the big bang using computer simulations can help scientists understand events like the birth of the first stars in the universe. During much of the universe's first billion years, the awesome brilliance born of the big bang faded to black. This dark age represents the least-understood chapter in the history of the cosmos scientists have compiled.
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POPSIs our universe fine-tuned for life? The Anthropic Principle Under Scrutiny Adams selected a range of possible values for each of these constants, then put them into a computer model that created a multitude of universes, or a virtual "multiverse". Each universe within the multiverse used different values for the three constants and was subject to slightly different laws of physics. About a quarter of the resulting universes turned out to be populated by energy-generating stars. "You can change alpha or the gravitational constant by a factor of 100 and stars still form," Adams says, suggesting that stars can exist in universes in which at least some fundamental constants are wildly different than in our universe.
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POPSAn Exceptionally Simple "Theory of Everything" Awesome!! "My brain exploded with the implications and the beauty of the thing," he tells New Scientist. "I thought: 'Holy crap, that's it!'" --------- So far, all the interactions predicted by the complex geometrical relationships inside E8 match with observations in the real world. "How cool is that?"
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