Strange dark energy acts as galactic diet enforcer

Mysterious dark energy, which likely causes the universe to keep expanding, seems to have another effect: It prevents the biggest clusters of galaxies from getting too fat. Astronomers used X-rays to study the formation of galactic clusters billions of years ago. Their research supports the hard-to-fathom concept of dark energy as a potent force that governs the growth of the universe.

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Hubble Telescope Makes New Discovery

The Hubble Space Telescope has shown that a mysterious form of energy first conceived by Albert Einstein, then rejected by the famous physicist as his "greatest blunder," appears to have been fueling the expansion of the universe for most of its history.

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The reason physicists are so excited about the LHC, though, is that the kind of supersymmetry that best solves the problem with the Higgs will become visible at the higher energies the LHC will explore.

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Astronomers have used a high-energy burst of light from a distant galaxy to test the fabric of space and time. The work is the best test yet of attempts to create a 'theory of everything'. More Articles

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As if the universe weren't strange enough, scientists have recently discovered that entire galaxy clusters—the largest known structures in the universe, consisting of thousands of galaxies—are moving toward the same area.

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"The pattern that the data reveal is extremely odd. It's like finding a zoo of animals of all ages and sizes miraculously having identical, say, weight in their backbones or something.

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Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely.

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The Shock Heard 'Round The World; Invisible Matter, Energy

Allegedly, 14 billion years ago, the universe flickered into existence in an event known as the Big Bang.

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For neutrinos created recently, the ranges they can exist in are very, very small. But over the roughly 13.7-billion-year lifetime of the cosmos, "relic" neutrinos have been stretched out by the expansion of the universe, enlarging the range in which each neutrino can exist.

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Cosmologists don't usually take their lead from the animal kingdom. But a model that postulates the existence of a 'chameleon' particle — which would change its mass depending on its surroundings — is gaining attention. More Articles

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Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today.

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The sound waves of The Wiggles may send kids into hyper space, but now a team of scientists, dubbed the WiggleZ, at the Anglo-Australian observatory in Coonabarabran, are measuring acoustic oscillations or wiggles from 200,000 distant galaxies.

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Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than five percent. More Articles

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AFTER billions of years of runaway expansion, is the universe starting to slow down? A new analysis of nearby supernovae suggests space might not be expanding as quickly as it once was, a tantalising hint that the source of dark energy may be more exotic than we thought.

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..the universe underwent an unimaginably brief but enormous growth spurt immediately after birth. The baby cosmos ballooned from one billionth of a trillionth of a hydrogen atom's diameter to that of a soccer ball within just 10-35 seconds...

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d/t

.:⋅⋅⋅ SPACE ⋅⋅⋅:. Why is time so hard to comprehend? Should it be easier to comprehend than space?

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From Dark Energy to the Cosmic Microwave Background, space is, well, weird.

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For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation.

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A mysterious screen of extra-loud radio noise permeates the cosmos, preventing astronomers from observing heat from the first stars. The balloon-borne ARCADE instrument discovered this cosmic static on its July 2006 flight. The noise is six times louder than expected.

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The higher speed of the Sun means the galaxy must have more mass — about 50 percent more — so as to generate a stronger gravitational pull to keep hold of the Sun, as well as all its other stars. That expands the Milky Way to roughly the heft of Andromeda. More Articles

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Physicist Lee Smolin talks about how the scientific community works: as he puts it, "we fight and argue as hard as we can," but everyone accepts that the next generation of scientists will decide who's right. And, he says, that's how democracy works, too. More Articles

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"The survey also enabled us to determine that our universe contains some 20 per cent more mass in stars than we had previously realised," Dr Graham adds.

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SWARMS of tiny black holes forged in the big bang may have killed off the universe's first stars by devouring them from within.

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Dark energy is stunting the growth of the universe's galaxy clusters, new observations reveal.

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A bit of science news: Alexey Vikhlinin and collaborators have used observations from the Chandra X-ray satellite to uncover new evidence for dark energy.

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For the first time, astronomers have clearly seen the effects of "dark energy" on the most massive collapsed objects in the universe using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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The same mystery force that is speeding up the expansion of the universe is also stunting the growth of the objects inside it, astronomers said on Tuesday.

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