Elements like oxygen, carbon and nitrogen weren’t very common until the first stars had fired up, burnt out and exploded. Now, astronomers using ALMA have detected the most distant – and hence, earliest – signature of oxygen, in a galaxy 13.28 billion light-years away.
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Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away earlier this year, but his legacy to science will live on. His final theory on the origin of the universe has now been published, and it offers an interesting departure from earlier ideas about the nature of the “multiverse.”
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To look through space is to look through time. Astronomers have now peered right back to the “Cosmic Dawn” – when the first stars were beginning to fire up – by picking up an extremely faint radio signal that marks the earliest evidence of hydrogen, just 180 million years after the Big Bang.
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At a distance of about 13 billion lightyears, the most distant supermassive black hole known so far has been spotted. That incredible distance means it dates back to when the first stars blinked on, which raises the question of how a black hole that big arose so soon after the universe began.
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Next time you’re untangling your earbuds, remember that knots may have played a crucial part in kickstarting our universe, and without them we wouldn’t live in 3D. That’s the strange story pitched by physicists in a new paper, to help plug a few plot holes in the origin story of the universe.
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When the universe was a few microseconds old, it was a soupy substance called quark-gluon plasma, exhibiting a host of unusual quantum effects previously only thought to occur just after the Big Bang. For the first time, IBM researchers have now observed a gravitational anomaly in earthly materials
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The Lambda Cold Dark Matter model suggests that 68 percent of the universe is made up of dark energy. But a new study has questioned whether dark energy exists, citing simulations that found that accounting for the structure of the cosmos, the gap in the theory, which dark energy fills, vanishes.
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The question of why time moves forwards, and not backwards, has long been on the minds of physicists. Now, a professor at UC Berkeley has a new theory: as the universe expands, it drives the expansion of time, which creates a constant series of new “now” moments.
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How the universe began is one of the most brain-breaking questions you could possibly ask. But what if the Big Bang was preceded by an earlier universe collapsing in on itself? A new study details how this might be possible.
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A team of astronomers has discovered a faint blue dwarf galaxy nicknamed Leoncino or the "little lion," that could be used as a tool to test the Big Bang Theory.
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