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Has the Cosmology Standard Model become a Rube Goldberg Device?

This week at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting in the UK, physicists are challenging the evidence for the recent BICEP2 results regarding the inflation period of the Universe, announced just 90 days ago. New research is laying doubt upon the inclusion of inflation theory in the Standard Cosmological Model for understanding the forces …

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Watch Live Webcast: Secrets of the Universe’s First Light

Just a month ago came the news of the first direct evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime — providing the first direct evidence the Universe underwent a brief but stupendously accelerated expansion immediately following the Big Bang. This almost unimaginably fast expansion when the Universe was only a trillionth …

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Cosmologists Cast Doubt on Inflation Evidence

It was just a week ago that the news blew through the scientific world like a storm: researchers from the BICEP2 project at the South Pole Telescope had detected unambiguous evidence of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, the residual rippling of space and time created by the sudden inflation of the Universe …

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Landmark Discovery: New Results Provide Direct Evidence for Cosmic Inflation

Astronomers have announced Nobel Prize-worthy evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of spacetime — providing the first direct evidence the universe underwent a brief but stupendously accelerated expansion immediately following the big bang. “The implications for this detection stagger the mind,” said co-leader Jamie Bock from Caltech. “We are measuring a signal …

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A Jodrell Odyssey – Part 2 – The Observatory

Caption: The original Jodrell Bank Control Desk with view of the Lovell telescope. Credit: Anthony Holloway. Last week we took a look at the public face of the Jodrell Bank Observatory, the Discovery Centre. But this week we get a behind-the-scenes tour of the heart of this impressive and historic observatory. Dr. Tim O’Brien is …

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GALEX Confirms Nature of Dark Energy

[/caption] From a JPL press release: A five-year survey of 200,000 galaxies, stretching back seven billion years in cosmic time, has led to one of the best independent confirmations that dark energy is driving our universe apart at accelerating speeds. The survey used data from NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Anglo-Australian Telescope on …

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Did the Early Universe Have Just One Dimension?

[/caption] From a University of Buffalo press release: Did the early universe have just one spatial dimension? That’s the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that physicist Dejan Stojkovic from the University at Buffalo and colleagues proposed in 2010. They suggested that the early universe — which exploded from a single point and …

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