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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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A Cosmologist’s Wish List: Four Most-Wanted Discoveries

Cosmology is a fairly young science, one which attempts to reconstruct the history of our Universe from billions of years ago. Looking back so far in time is extremely difficult, and adding to the complexity is that many of the pillars upon which the theories of cosmology rest have only been conceived within the last …

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Colliding Galaxies Created the First Black Holes

[/caption] How were the Universe’s first supermassive black holes formed? A new model of the evolution of galaxies and black holes show collisions show that colliding galaxies likely spawned black holes that formed about 13 billion years ago. The discovery fills in a missing chapter of our universe’s early history, and could help write the …

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Speed of Gravity

[/caption] What is the speed of gravity? It’s 299,792,458 m/s. Seem familiar? Yep, it’s the speed of light (in a vacuum)! How do we know that that’s the speed of gravity? Not by direct measurement, yet, but by the great success of Einstein’s theory of general relativity (GR). In general, because it is so successful, …

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