All posts tagged: universe

From astronaut health to space weather: the discoveries changing our understanding of the universe | Driving Change. Inspiring Potential

From astronaut health to space weather: the discoveries changing our understanding of the universe | Driving Change. Inspiring Potential

Published by skeptic

Many of us grow up fascinated by space and the universe. The question of whether there’s intelligent life out there is a continuing preoccupation among scientists and citizens alike. But research into space goes far beyond the hunt for extraterrestrial life – there are many different areas that students and researchers are investigating, from space weather and space law, to astronaut health and satellite communication. At Northumbria University, Newcastle – which is developing NESST, a new £50m North East Space Skills and Technology Centre – academics are working across a range of projects that could transform our understanding of space. For many people, their only experience of space weather is seeing the stunning phenomenon of the aurora borealis, more commonly known as the northern lights. “The northern lights are part of space weather,” says Clare Watt, professor of space plasma physics. “When there’s a significant storm or disturbance in space, the aurora lights up.” Prof Clare Watt. Photograph: Simon Veit-Wilson Space weather forecasts can help experts to predict when and where the northern lights will …

Detecting the first stars in the Universe

Detecting the first stars in the Universe

Published by skeptic

Studying the first stars in the Universe will be vital in understanding the development of existence as we know it. Stars play a fundamental role in the creation of life in the Universe, generating elements essential for life, such as carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, through processes like nuclear fusion. When massive stars reach the end of their life cycle and explode in supernovae, they release these elements into space, enriching interstellar clouds with the building blocks of life. These enriched clouds can then give rise to new stars and planetary systems, where planets like Earth may form. However, despite our deep understanding of the pivotal role of stars in the cosmos, our knowledge of the oldest stars in the Universe is sparse. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope aims to fill in this gap in our stellar knowledge. Set to launch in May 2027, the Roman Space Telescope will analyse the Universe’s first stars. The telescope will provide a panoramic field view 200 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s infrared view of the sky, …

Does the Universe expand by stretching or creating space?

Does the Universe expand by stretching or creating space?

Published by skeptic

It’s been almost 100 years since humanity first reached a revolutionary conclusion about the nature of our Universe: space itself cannot and does not remain static, but rather evolves with the passage of time. One of the most unsettling predictions of Einstein’s general relativity is that any Universe — so long as it’s uniformly (or almost uniformly) filled with one or more species of matter, radiation, or energy — cannot remain the same over time. Instead, it must either expand or contract, something initially derived independently by three separate people: Alexander Friedmann (1922), Georges Lemaitre (1927), and Howard Robertson (1929), and was later generalized by Arthur Walker (1936). Right at around the same time, starting in 1923, observations began to show that the spirals and ellipticals in our sky were actually galaxies: “island universes” that were well outside of our own Milky Way. With new, more powerful measurements, we could determine that the farther away a galaxy was from us, the greater the arriving light in our instruments was redshifted, or observed at longer wavelengths, compared to the light …

Physicists Say They May Have Found a Powerful Glitch in the Universe

Physicists Say They May Have Found a Powerful Glitch in the Universe

Published by skeptic

“Once you reach a cosmic scale, terms and conditions apply.” Einstein 2.0 Researchers have discovered what they’re calling a “cosmic glitch” in gravity, which could potentially help explain the universe’s strange behavior on a cosmic scale. As detailed in a new paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, the team from the University of Waterloo and the University of British Columbia in Canada posit that Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity may not be sufficient to explain the accelerating expansion of the universe. Einstein’s “model of gravity has been essential for everything from theorizing the Big Bang to photographing black holes,” said lead author and Waterloo mathematical physics graduate Robin Wen in a statement about the research. “But when we try to understand gravity on a cosmic scale, at the scale of galaxy clusters and beyond, we encounter apparent inconsistencies with the predictions of general relativity.” “It’s almost as if gravity itself stops perfectly matching Einstein’s theory,” he added. “We are calling this inconsistency a ‘cosmic glitch’: gravity becomes around one percent weaker when …

The big idea that our Universe is a hologram

The big idea that our Universe is a hologram

Published by skeptic

Have you ever wondered whether there’s more to reality than what we can see, perceive, detect, or otherwise observe? One of the most intriguing but speculative ideas of 20th and 21st century physics is the notion that our Universe, which seems to consist of three spatial and one temporal dimension, might possess additional, extra dimensions beyond the ones we can see. Originally thought up independently by Theodr Kaluza and Oskar Klein in an attempt to unify Einstein’s General Relativity with Maxwell’s electromagnetism, the idea lives on in the modern context of quantum field theory and a specific extension of its ideas: string theory. But for all of its mathematical beauty and elegance, does it have anything to do with our physical Universe? That’s what our Patreon supporter Benhead, who was thinking about this recent New York Times piece, wrote to inquire about: “I’ve never really bought into the holographic thing as a physical concept. I’m not even sure how well it works as a mathematical abstraction… in the analogy I thought we were the image …

‘Masters of the Universe’ Movie Gets 2026 Release Date

‘Masters of the Universe’ Movie Gets 2026 Release Date

Published by Sam

The long gestating, live-action Masters of the Universe film is finally getting a release date. Amazon MGM has dated the Mattel film for a June 5, 2026 worldwide theatrical release. The film will follow, according to its synopsis, “10-year-old Prince Adam who crashed to Earth in a spaceship and was separated from his magical Power Sword—the only link to his home on Eternia. After tracking it down almost two decades later, Prince Adam is whisked back across space to defend his home planet against the evil forces of Skeletor. But to defeat such a powerful villain, Prince Adam will first need to uncover the mysteries of his past and become He-Man: the most powerful man in the Universe!” Travis Knight is directing from a script by Chris Butler. Mattel Films’ Robbie Brenner, and Escape Artists’ Todd Black, Jason Blumenthal and Steve Tisch are producing. Mattel’s Masters of the Universe brand was first introduced in 1982 via a line of action figures and later, in 1983, became the beloved animated series He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. …

Inside the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy

Inside the quest to map the universe with mysterious bursts of radio energy

Published by skeptic

As a leader in the field and a key player in the advancement of FRB research, Macquart would have been interviewed for this piece. But he died of a heart attack one week after the paper was published, at the age of 45. FRB researchers began to call the relationship between dispersion and distance the “Macquart relation,” in honor of his memory and his push for the groundbreaking idea that FRBs could be used for cosmology.  Proving that the Macquart relation would hold at greater distances became not just a scientific quest but also an emotional one.  “I remember thinking that I know something about the universe that no one else knows.” The researchers knew that the ASKAP telescope was capable of detecting bursts from very far away—they just needed to find one. Whenever the telescope detected an FRB, Ryder was tasked with helping to determine where it had originated. It took much longer than he would have liked. But one morning in July 2022, after many months of frustration, Ryder downloaded the newest data …

The scientific story behind the timeline of our Universe

The scientific story behind the timeline of our Universe

Published by skeptic

Today, it’s now 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang occurred. Our observable Universe extends for 46.1 billion light-years in all directions, and is made of: 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, 4.9% normal (atom-based) matter, 0.09% neutrinos, and 0.01% radiation, with no hint of other components like spatial curvature, cosmic strings, domain walls, or any other weird stuff we can imagine. If we were to run the clock backward, however, we’d find that dark energy wasn’t always dominant. There was a time when matter dominated, and before that, when radiation did. There was a time when there were no stars, no neutral atoms, no atomic nuclei, no protons and neutrons, and even no massive particles. But how do we know precisely when these events and epochs occurred? That’s what Marshall Randolph wants to know, asking: “When I read about the epochs of the universe, they are tagged with a specific time. The Hadron epoch, for example, started at 10^-6 seconds. The timelines of the epochs are given almost as if I should know them. …

The Mysterious ‘Dark’ Energy That Permeates the Universe Is Slowly Eroding

The Mysterious ‘Dark’ Energy That Permeates the Universe Is Slowly Eroding

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Beyond DESI, a slew of new instruments are coming online in the coming years, including the 8.4-meter Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission. “Our data in cosmology has made enormous leaps over the last 25 years, and it’s about to make bigger leaps,” Frieman said. As they amass new observations, researchers may continue to find that dark energy appears as constant as it has for a generation. Or, if the trend continues in the direction suggested by DESI’s results, it could change everything. New Physics If dark energy is weakening, it can’t be a cosmological constant. Instead, it may be the same sort of field that many cosmologists think sparked a moment of exponential expansion during the universe’s birth. This kind of “scalar field” could fill space with an amount of energy that looks constant at first—like the cosmological constant—but eventually starts to slip over time. “The idea that dark energy is varying is very natural,” said Paul Steinhardt, a cosmologist at Princeton …

Contemplating Our Role in the Universe

Contemplating Our Role in the Universe

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By Ran D. Anbar, MD, with Mac E. Lancaster, BS In working with patients and their subconscious through hypnosis, I have learned about subconscious observations regarding the nature of our existence within the universe. Two recent interactions with patients from my counseling practice illustrate the intricacies of such observations. In this post, I summarize my patients’ subconscious observations. I have previously written about both of these patients in previous PsychologyToday.com posts. Source: Funstarts33/Shutterstock Hallucinations After Dabbing I worked with “Matthew” (not his real name) beginning when he was 13 years old with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Matthew learned to calm himself with hypnosis and interact with his subconscious. Matthew’s first encounter with cannabis occurred in college when he was 18 years old. As described here, Matthew’s subconscious told him he needed to stop using cannabis so that it wouldn’t interfere with his aspirations to become a professional soccer player. He did not touch cannabis again for the following seven years. However, at the age of 25, he went to a bar with some work …