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Signal From the First Stars of the Universe Detected by Astronomers

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In what appears to be a revolutionary cosmic observation, astronomers have reportedly detected a signal from the first stars of the universe. According to reports, the discovery has given researchers an unparalleled glimpse into the events that occurred right after the Big Bang.

While our current night sky is teeming with bright, twinkling stars, scientists say that this has not always been the case.

Apparently, the ancient signal that they have detected suggests that it took nearly 200 million years after the Big Bang for the earliest stars to emerge from the darkness.

This detection was discovered in the form of a radio signal by researchers from the EDGES project. It was assumed to have been triggered when lights from the earliest stars began making interactions with hydrogen gas.

Studies suggest that this gas was one of the first elements to have filled the primordial empty space of the early universe.

The detection of this signal is likely to open up a new line of inquiries and issues to be tackled by the scientific community.

“The era of cosmic dawn has been entirely uncharted territory until now,” Cynthia Chiang, a physicist from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, was quoted as saying. “It’s extremely exciting to see a new glimpse of this slice of the universe’s history, and the EDGES detection is the initial step toward understanding the nature of the first stars in more detail.”

Timeline of how the Universe was created from the Big Bang showing when the first stars emerged | NASA

Signal From the First Stars

For hundreds of years, many myths and scientific theories have been formulated to explain the origins of the cosmos. Among these theories, the most popular and widely accepted is the Big Bang theory.

Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Catholic priest, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven, was the first scientists to suggest that the universe is expanding.

In the late 1920s, he proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory based on his hypothesis of the primeval atom or the cosmic egg.

According to studies, the universe was conceived billions of years ago with a fixed amount of energy and matter. However, shortly after it was born, it was plunged into deep darkness. It was only until hot gases fused with masses of dark matter that the first stars were formed.

This phenomenon eventually ignited the nuclear hearts of young suns.

These early stars breathed ultraviolet light into the cosmos and their photons merged with primordial hydrogen gas. This led the photons to absorb background radiation and become translucent.

After this event, the hydrogen atoms started producing radio signals that traveled through space at a predictable frequency. This same signal was what astronomers detected through a radio antenna, the size of a tabletop, called EDGES.

“This is the first real signal that stars are starting to form, and starting to affect the medium around them,” Alan Rogers, a scientist at MIT’s Haystack Observatory, said in a statement.

“What’s happening in this period is that some of the radiation from the very first stars is starting to allow hydrogen to be seen. It’s causing hydrogen to start absorbing the background radiation, so you start seeing it in silhouette, at particular radio frequencies.”

New Findings from the Early Universe

In a studypublished by the researchers in the journal Nature, they described the signal from the first stars as “stretched” or “redshifted”. These are terms used to identify fingerprints of the earliest stars in radio waves. This is because the signal has been traveling through space for a long time now.

“The first indication of the signal emerged within weeks of turning on the instrument in 2015,” Judd Bowman, a coauthor of the study from the Arizona State University, said. “At first we assumed it was a problem with the instrument, because it was larger than anything we expected.”

The astronomers admitted that detecting the signal has been a tremendous technical challenge. Peter Kurczynski of the National Science Foundation, said:

“There is a great technical challenge to making this detection. Sources of noise can be a thousand times brighter than the signal they are looking for. It is like being in the middle of a hurricane and trying to hear the flap of a hummingbird’s wing.”

The radio signal reportedly dates back to around 180 million years after the Big Bang that occurred over 13 billion years ago.

One substantial information that the researchers found from the distant signal was that the gas in the early universe was apparently much colder than what was expected.

One explanation that they offered is that baryons, or ordinary matter, may have lost their energy when they interacted with dark matter during those early times.

It is believed that dark matter makes up a vast portion of the matter in our universe. However, it has never been directly observed.

According to Bowman, if their theory is confirmed, it would be considered as another fundamental discovery about the mysterious dark matter.

Bowman said that they welcome other researchers to confirm their detection using different radio telescopes.

In the future, he hopes that they would have new resources dedicated to the study of the signal from the first stars to gain more information.

“Now that we know this signal exists, we need to rapidly bring online new radio telescopes that will be able to mine the signal much more deeply,” he went on to say.

Oldest Monster Black Hole Ever Found Is 800 Million Times Bigger Than The Sun

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Astronomers have discovered the oldest supermassive black hole ever found — a behemoth that grew to 800 million times the mass of the sun when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age, a new study finds.

(Artist’s illustration of the most-distant supermassive black hole ever discovered,(Similar to the one in Interstellar) (Robin Dienel, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science))

This newfound giant black hole, which formed just 690 million years after the Big Bang, could one day help shed light on a number of cosmic mysteries, such as how black holes could have reached gargantuan sizes quickly after the Big Bang and how the universe got cleared of the murky fog that once filled the entire cosmos, the researchers said in the new study.

Supermassive black holes with masses millions to billions of times that of the sun are thought to lurk at the hearts of most, if not all, galaxies. Previous research suggested these giants release extraordinarily large amounts of light when they rip apart stars and devour matter, and likely are the driving force behind quasars, which are among the brightest objects in the universe.

Astronomers can detect quasars from the farthest corners of the cosmos, making quasars among the most distant objects known. The farthest quasars are also the earliest known quasars — the more distant one is, the more time its light took to reach Earth.

The previous record for the earliest, most distant quasar was set by ULAS J1120+0641.

That quasar is located 13.04 billion light-years from Earth and existed about 750 million years after the Big Bang. The newfound quasar (and its black hole), named ULAS J1342+0928, is 13.1 billion light-years away.

Explaining how black holes could have gobbled up enough matter to reach supermassive sizes early in cosmic history has proved extraordinarily challenging for scientists. As such, researchers want to look at as many early supermassive black holes as possible to learn more about their growth and their effects on the rest of the cosmos.

"The most distant quasars can provide key insights to outstanding questions in astrophysics," said study lead author Eduardo Bañados, an astrophysicist at the Carnegie Institution for Science.

The researchers predicted that only 20 to 100 quasars as bright and as distant as the newfound quasar exist in the whole sky visible from Earth.

"This particular quasar is so bright that it will become a gold mine for follow-up studies and will be a crucial laboratory to study the early universe," Bañados told Space.com. "We have already secured observations for this object with a number of the most powerful telescopes in the world. More surprises may soon arise."

Finding a behemoth

The researchers detected and analyzed quasar ULAS J1342+0928 using one of the Magellan Telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, as well as the Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona and the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. Its central black hole has a mass about 800 million times that of the sun and existed when the universe was just 690 million years old, or just 5 percent of its current age.

"All that mass — almost 1 billion times the mass of the sun — needs to be gathered in less than 690 million years," Bañados said. "That is extremely difficult to achieve and is something that theorists will need to explain in their models."

Quasars like J1342+0928 are rare. The researchers searched one-tenth of the entire sky visible from Earth and found just one quasar from this early epoch.

Only about 60 million years separate this newfound quasar from the previous record holder. Still, this span of time was "about 10 percent of the age of the universe at those early cosmic epochs, when things were evolving very rapidly," Bañados said. That means this difference in time could yield important clues about the evolution of the early universe.

This new quasar is also of interest to scientists because it comes from a time known as "the epoch of reionization," when the universe emerged from its dark ages. "It was the universe's last major transition and one of the current frontiers of astrophysics," Bañados said in a statement.

Right after the Big Bang, the universe was a rapidly expanding hot soup of ions, or electrically charged particles. About 380,000 years later, these ions cooled and coalesced into neutral hydrogen gas. The universe stayed dark until gravity pulled matter together into the first stars. The intense ultraviolet light from this era caused this murky neutral hydrogen to get excited and ionize, or gain electric charge, and the gas has remained in that state since that time. Once the universe became reionized, light could travel freely through space.

Glimpsing the early universe

Much remains unknown about the epoch of reionization, such as what sources of light caused reionization. Some prior work suggested that massive stars were mostly responsible for reionization, but other research hinted that black holes were a significant, and potentially dominant, culprit behind this event.

"How and when the reionization of the universe occurred has fundamental implications on how the universe evolved," Bañados said.

The new findings revealed that a large fraction of the hydrogen in the immediate vicinity of the newfound quasar was neutrally charged. This suggests that this quasar comes from well within the epoch of reionization, and further analysis of it could yield insight into what happened during this pivotal time.

However, to really learn more about the epoch of reionization, scientists need more than just one or two early, distant quasars to look at. "We need to find more of these quasars at similar or larger distances," Bañados said. "This is extremely difficult, as they are very rare. This is really like finding the needle in a haystack."

Still, the fact that this newfound quasar is so bright and large suggests that "it's probably not the first quasar ever formed, so we need to keep searching," Bañados said.

The scientists detailed their findings in the journal Nature. The researchers also released a companion paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Original article on Space.com.

Multiverse: Astronomers may have Found the First Evidence of Parallel Universes

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Last year seems as if we have already fallen into a parallel universe but Trump and Brexit are nothing matched to the alternate universes many astronomers are considering.

Cosmologists call it the multiverse. It’s a space or cosmos in which there are multiple universes. And by multiple, I mean countless number. These infinite realms sit side by side in advanced dimensions that our minds are unqualified of perceiving directly.

Yet gradually astronomers seem to be using the multiverse to enlighten mystifying observations.

The support is high. Each parallel universe moves its own altered version of reality. There will be one alternate universe where you wrote this column and I read it; even a really creepy one in which Donald Trump uses twitter and posts nothing but entertaining cat videos.

It sounds crazy but the most recent piece of proof that could favor a multiverse comes from the United Kingdom’s Royal Astronomical Society. They published a research on the so-called ‘cold spot’. This is a mostly cool area of space seen in the radiation formed by the formation of the Universe more than Thirteen billion years ago.

The ‘cold spot’ was first seen by NASA’s WMAP satellite in 2004, and then confirmed by European Space Agency’s Planck mission in 2013. It is extremely puzzling. Most cosmologists believe that it is extremely doubtful to have been formed by the birth of the universe as it is mathematically tough for the foremost theory – which is known as inflation – to explain.

This most recent study claims to exclude a last-ditch prosaic detail:

The spiral galaxy M101 is pictured in this undated handout photo from NASA's

That the cold spot is an optical deception produced by the absence of dominant galaxies.

One of the study’s scientist, Professor Tom Shanks of Durham University (DU), told the RAS, “We can’t completely say that the Spot is caused by a doubtful fluctuation explained by the standard theory of the Big Bang (BB). But if that is not the accurate answer, then there are more interesting explanations. Possibly the most exciting of these is that the ‘Cold Spot’ (CS) was produced by an impact between our universe and another bubble universe. If further, more detailed, study … shows this to be the situation then the Cold Spot might be considered as the first proof for the multiverse.”

Strong stuff. But the insincerity is that if there is a multiverse, researchers will have to admit that the ultimate goal of physics (to describe why our universe is the way it is) could be forever out of reach from mankind.

The end-game for physics has been to deliver the reason why our universe adopts the form it does. To do this it must explain why some vital quantities have the values they do. For example: the mass of an electron, the speed of light and the strength of the gravitational interaction etc.

If there exist a multiverse, however, that search could be doomed to disappointment.

Just as there are an infinite number of similar yet faintly different universes, like the one in which you have written this article not me, there will also be countless number in which the simple laws of physics are different.

So, every imaginable combination of physics is tried out through the multiverse. Certainly then, by nothing more than blind luck, at least one will have the circumstances we see everywhere us today. It’s just a big old calamity, and that barely seems very satisfying.

One of the most spoken enemies of the multiverse theory is, ironically, one of its new architects.

Paul Steinhardt, Princeton University, help out developing inflation, the theory of the foundation and origin of our universe. It’s the one that fights to explain the Cold Spot’, whereas also giving rise to the multiverse because as maths says once a universe begins to form it activates more to be born ad infinitum.

But, Steinhardt turned against his own concept.

In 2014, he said to Scientific American magazine, “Our visible universe would be just one chance out of endless spectrum of results. So, we haven’t explained any pieces of the universe by introducing inflation theory after all. We have just lifted the problem of the unique big bang model, how can we enlighten our simple universe when there is approximately infinite range of possibilities that could occur from the big bang?, to the inflationary idea (how can we explain our humble universe when there is approximately countless variety of possibilities that could occur in a multiverse?).”

Put it this way, a multiverse doesn’t appear attractive. It would cut to the very heart of physical science purpose. Nature also doesn’t care about this. Perhaps the cosmos actually is this way and we just have to admit it. Surely, there are many who are prepared to defend the multiverse as an effective direction for thought.

Encouragingly, if we do exist in a multiverse, we can be certain that somewhere out there is a different version of you and me that have also figured all this out (and won a Nobel Prize for the struggle).

"Solved!" -- Existence Of Supermassive Black Holes At Very Dawn Of The Universe

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The appearance of supermassive black holes at the dawn of the universe has puzzled astronomers since their discovery more than a decade ago. A supermassive black hole is thought to form over billions of years, but more than two dozen of these behemoths have been sighted within 800 million years of the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

In a new study in the journal Nature Astronomy, a team of researchers from Dublin City University, Columbia University, Georgia Tech, and the University of Helsinki, add evidence to one theory of how these ancient black holes, about a billion times heavier than our sun, may have formed and quickly put on weight. The massive black hole shown at left in this drawing is able to rapidly grow as intense radiation from a galaxy nearby shuts down star-formation in its host galaxy. (John Wise, Georgia Tech)

In computer simulations, the researchers show that a black hole can rapidly grow at the center of its host galaxy if a nearby galaxy emits enough radiation to switch off its capacity to form stars. Thus disabled, the host galaxy grows until its eventual collapse, forming a black hole that feeds on the remaining gas, and later, dust, dying stars, and possibly other black holes, to become super gigantic.

"The collapse of the galaxy and the formation of a million-solar-mass black hole takes 100,000 years—a blip in cosmic time," says study co-author Zoltan Haiman, an astronomy professor at Columbia University. "A few hundred-million years later, it has grown into a billion-solar-mass supermassive black hole. This is much faster than we expected."

In the early universe, stars and galaxies formed as molecular hydrogen cooled and deflated a primordial plasma of hydrogen and helium. This environment would have limited black holes from growing very big as molecular hydrogen turned gas into stars far enough away to escape the black holes' gravitational pull. Astronomers have come up with several ways that supermassive black holes might have overcome this barrier.

In a 2008 study, Haiman and his colleagues hypothesized that radiation from a massive neighboring galaxy could split molecular hydrogen into atomic hydrogen and cause the nascent black hole and its host galaxy to collapse rather than spawn new clusters of stars.

A later study led by Eli Visbal, then a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia, calculated that the nearby galaxy would have to be at least 100 million times more massive than our sun to emit enough radiation to stop star-formation. Though relatively rare, enough galaxies of this size exist in the early universe to explain the supermassive black holes observed so far.

The current study, led by John Regan, a postdoctoral researcher at Ireland's Dublin City University, modeled the process using software developed by Columbia's Greg Bryan, and includes the effects of gravity, fluid dynamics, chemistry and radiation.

After several days of crunching the numbers on a supercomputer, the researchers found that the neighboring galaxy could be smaller and closer than previously estimated.

"The nearby galaxy can't be too close, or too far away, and like the Goldilocks principle, too hot or too cold," said study coauthor John Wise, an associate astrophysics professor at Georgia Tech.

The current study, led by John Regan, a postdoctoral researcher at Ireland's Dublin City University, attempted to model the process. Using simulations to measure how radiation from one galaxy influenced black hole formation in the other, the researchers found that the neighboring galaxy could be smaller and closer than previously estimated.

"The nearby galaxy can't be too close, or too far away, and like the Goldilocks principle, too hot or too cold," said study coauthor John Wise, an associate astrophysics professor at Georgia Tech.

Though massive black holes are found at the center of most galaxies in the mature universe, including our own Milky Way, they are far less common in the infant universe. The earliest supermassive black holes were first sighted in 2001 through a telescope at New Mexico's Apache Point Observatory as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The researchers hope to test their theory when NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to Hubble, goes online next year and beams back images from the early universe.

Other models of how these ancient behemoths evolved, including one in which black holes grow by merging with millions of smaller black holes and stars, await further testing.

"Understanding how supermassive black holes form tells us how galaxies, including our own, form and evolve, and ultimately, tells us more about the universe in which we live," said Regan, at Dublin City University.

Via Columbia University

Human Consciousness is Linked to a Law That Governs the Universe, New Study Reveals.

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Our species has long agonized over the concept of human consciousness. What exactly causes it, and why did we evolve to experience consciousness? Now, a new study has uncovered a clue in the hunt for answers, and it reveals that the human brain might have more in common with the universe than we could have imagined.

According to a team of researchers from France and Canada, our brains might produce consciousness as something of a side effect of increasing entropy, a process that has been taking place throughout the universe since the Big Bang.

Their study has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review E.

The concept of entropy is famously confusing, and the definition has evolved over time. Essentially, entropy is a thermodynamic property that refers to the degree of disorder or randomness in a system. It can be summed up as the description of a system’s progression from order to disorder.

The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy can only remain constant or increase within a closed system — a system cannot move from high entropy to low entropy without outside interference. A common example that demonstrates entropy is an ice cube melting — the cube is in a state of low entropy, but as it melts and disorder grows, entropy increases.

Many physicists think that the universe itself is in a constant state of increasing entropy. When the Big Bang occurred, the universe was in a state of low entropy, and as it continues to gradually spread out, it is growing into a higher entropy system. Based on this new study, our brain may be undergoing something similar, and consciousness happens to be a side effect of the process.

The Brain and Disorder

To see how the concept of entropy could be applied to the human brain, the researchers analyzed the amount of order in our brains while we’re conscious compared to when we’re not. They did this by modeling the networks of neurons in the brains of nine participants, seven of whom had epilepsy.

They looked at whether or not neurons were oscillating in phase with one another as this could tell them if the brain cells were linked. They compared observations from when patients were awake, when they were asleep, and when patients with epilepsy were having seizures.

The researchers found that the participants’ brains displayed higher entropy when fully conscious. “We find a surprisingly simple result: normal wakeful states are characterized by the greatest number of possible configurations of interactions between brain networks, representing highest entropy values,” the team wrote in the study.

This finding prompted the researchers to suggest that consciousness might be a side effect of a system working to maximize information exchange. In other words, human consciousness emerges due to increasing entropy.

While the team’s theory is exciting and will likely lead to further research exploring a potential link between human consciousness and entropy, it is far from conclusive. The study’s sample size was exceptionally small, so they’ll need to replicate their results on larger groups and different types of brain states. Still, it provides a fascinating explanation for human consciousness and may be the clue that eventually helps us fully understand the strange phenomenon.

References: ScienceAlert, arXiv

Article was originally published on Futurism.

Everything You Need to Know About Particle Physics and the Origins of the Universe

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Big Bang Theory Challenged - Universe Should Not Have Lasted For More Than A Second

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Cosmologists from Britain are confused: they guess that the universe should not have lasted for more than a second. This surprising assumption is the outcome of merging the newest interpretations of the sky with the latest discovery of the Higgs boson.

Image demonstrates gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background. Credit: ESA/Planck Collaboration

According to Robert Hogan of King's College London (KCL), who presented the new research at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting. After the Universe created in the Big Bang, it is supposed to have moved out over a short period of quick expansion known as 'cosmic inflation'.

Even though the details of this procedure are not yet completely understood, cosmologists have been able to make predictions of how this would affect the Universe we understand currently. Scientists from the BICEP2 collaboration claimed to have identified one of these projected effects. If correct, their outcomes are a major development in our understanding of cosmology and a validation of the inflation theory, but they have proven debatable and are not yet completely acknowledged by cosmologists.

In the new study, researchers from KCL have studied what the BICEP2 interpretations mean for the constancy of the Universe. To do this, they joined the outcomes with new developments in particle physics. The discovery of the Higgs boson by the Large Hadron Collider was proclaimed in July 2012; ever since, much has been understood about its properties. Measurements of the Higgs boson have permitted particle physicists to display that our universe lies in a valley of the 'Higgs field', which defines the way that other particles have mass. Though, there is a dissimilar valley which is far deeper, but our universe is avoiding from sinking into it by a huge energy barrier. The difficulty is that the BICEP2 outcomes forecast that the universe would have received huge 'kicks' during the cosmic inflation stage, pushing it into the additional valley of the Higgs field in a fraction of a second. If that had occurred, the universe would have rapidly shrunken in a BigCrunch.

"This is an unacceptable prediction of the theory because if this had happened we wouldn't be around to discuss it" said Hogan, who is a PhD student at KCL and led the study. "If BICEP2 is shown to be correct, it tells us that there has to be interesting new particle physics beyond the standard model" Maybe the BICEP2 outcomes comprise an error. If not, there has been some other, as yet unknown, procedure which stopped the universe from collapsing.

Credit: Royal Astronomical Society

Article was originally published on DailyGalaxy.

Stephen Hawking Was Wrong: "Spacetime Was Infinite At The Big Bang"

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According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the curvature of space-time was infinite at the big bang. In fact, at this point all mathematical tools fail, and the theory breaks down. However, there remained the notion that perhaps the beginning of the universe could be treated in a simpler manner, and that the infinities of the big bang might be avoided. This has indeed been the hope expressed since the 1980s by the well-known cosmologists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking with their "no-boundary proposal", and by Alexander Vilenkin with his "tunneling proposal".

Now scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and at the Perimeter Institute in Canada have been able to use better mathematical methods to show that these ideas cannot work. The big bang, in its complicated glory, retains all its mystery.

"Hence the "no-boundary proposal" does not imply a large universe like the one we live in, but rather tiny curved universes that would collapse immediately", says Jean-Luc Lehners, who leads the "theoretical cosmology" group at the AEI.

One of the principal goals of cosmology is to understand the beginning of our universe. Data from the Planck satellite mission shows that 13.8 billion years ago the universe consisted of a hot and dense soup of particles. Since then the universe has been expanding. This is the main tenet of the hot big bang theory, but the theory fails to describe the very first stages themselves, as the conditions were too extreme. Indeed, as we approach the big bang, the energy density and the curvature grow until we reach the point where they become infinite.

As an alternative, the "no-boundary" and "tunneling" proposals assume that the tiny early universe arose by quantum tunneling from nothing, and subsequently grew into the large universe that we see. The curvature of space-time would have been large, but finite in this beginning stage, and the geometry would have been smooth - without boundary (see Fig. 1, left panel). This initial configuration would replace the standard big bang. However, for a long time the true consequences of this hypothesis remained unclear.

Now, with the help of better mathematical methods, Jean-Luc Lehners, group leader at the AEI, and his colleagues Job Feldbrugge and Neil Turok at Perimeter Institute, managed to define the 35 year old theories in a precise manner for the first time, and to calculate their implications. The result of these investigations is that these alternatives to the big bang are no true alternatives.

As a result of Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, these models do not only imply that smooth universes can tunnel out of nothing, but also irregular universes. In fact, the more irregular and crumpled they are, the more likely (see Fig. 1, right panel).

Hence one cannot circumvent the big bang so easily. Lehners and his colleagues are now trying to figure out what mechanism could have kept those large quantum fluctuations in check under the most extreme circumstances, allowing our large universe to unfold.

More information: Job Feldbrugge et al. Lorentzian quantum cosmology, Physical Review D (2017). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.95.103508

Don’t Panic, But The Universe Is Slowly Dying

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We know that our universe has already lived through great number of exciting phases. But new research released overnight shows the universe has long passed its peak and is slowly but surely dying.

The research was presented at the year’s largest gathering of astronomers at the International Astronomical Union‘s General Assembly in Hawaii. But before we start writing any obituaries, let’s have a quick recap of the good times.

When the universe was less than a second old and more than a billion degrees Celsius, it was hot enough for exotic particles to freely pop in and out of existence. As the universe expanded, it cooled and was no longer able to produce hugely energetic particles.

A representation of the evolution of the universe over 13.77 billion years. NASA / WMAP Science Team

After a few seconds, the universe was a sea of protons and neutrons, and after a few minutes it was mostly a dense fog of hydrogen and helium. In terms of building more complex matter, that was pretty much the end of the action for 400,000 years.

Then, quite suddenly, matter and radiation were decoupled and photons of light were able to free-stream across the universe for the first time. This is all very exciting for cosmology, but something important had also happened to the hydrogen and helium: it could now hold onto electrons and create neutral atoms.

Early building blocks of life

This is another step on the path to making you and me: we need neutral hydrogen in order to form molecular hydrogen, we need this to efficiently cool pockets of gas that collapse rapidly to form the first stars, and we need stars to form the heavy elements such as carbon and oxygen that are the building blocks of life.

By this stage the universe was a few hundred million years old, and it was now busy heating itself back up as these first stars irradiated the surrounding material.

These stars were blowing themselves apart and dumping large quantities of heavy atomic species into space, producing many of the heavier elements we see today. Some of them may also have collapsed into black holes, sowing the seeds of some of the most massive galaxies that exist in the present day universe.

After this early phase of forming the first stars, we began to see the first structures that resemble modern galaxies, but in a very messy and violent form. For the next few billion years galaxies smashed together to form more massive systems and star formation was rapidly turned on and off.

This activity continued until the universe was about 3 billion years old, a period we know as the peak of cosmic star formation. So the universe got most of the exciting stuff out of the way really early on.

A top down view of the major 3D redshift surveys of the local universe with the Earth at the centre. Each dot represents a single galaxy, and the direction shows their location on the sky. The distance from the centre shows the light travel time from Earth. Here we see the most recent 5 billion years of the universe, which has taken thousands of nights of observing on some of the most massive telescopes to construct. ICRAR/GAMA

What has it been doing since then? It is slowly but steadily dying. It is still producing new stars every now and again, but the rate at which old stars are fading outstrips these bright young things.

Enter the dark stuff

To exacerbate things even further, about 3 billion years ago a mysterious (and much studied) entity called dark energy began to dominate the energy contents of the universe and accelerate everything apart (measuring this acceleration won Australian researcher Brian Schmidt and others a Nobel prize).

The universe had already started cooling off by this stage, so dark energy arriving on the scene really twisted the knife.

How do we know all of this? Well, we have been building the evidence for a while and careful models of galaxy evolution have already suggested that the universe is fading, but we wanted to directly observe this effect over many billions of years.

In the past few years a large Australian led project called the Galaxy And Mass Assembly (GAMA) survey invested huge effort into measuring most of the energy output from stars.

We had to observe nearby galaxies from the far-ultraviolet (where young stars produce much of their light) through the optical and the near-infrared (where most stars peak in energy output) all the way into the far-infrared (where star light absorbed by dust is re-emitted).

A galaxy from the GAMA survey observed at different wavelengths from the far ultraviolet to the far infrared. The inset graph shows how much energy is being generated at different wavelengths. ICRAR/GAMA, CC BY-NC

GAMA has been able to measure this huge span of radiation over the past 5 billion years for almost 200,000 galaxies, categorically establishing that the energy output of stars in the universe is winding down.

The end of the universe?

The good news is that the stars made to date will still last many billions of years yet (including our own sun). Some of the smaller stars should keep shining for longer than the current age of the universe.

There are questions over what exactly the dominance of dark energy will mean in the long term, with some of more exotic theories speculating that it could tear everything apart in a “Big Rip”.

Less dramatic, and more likely given our current knowledge, is the theory that the universe will continue to cool forever, and non gravitationally bound structures will steadily move apart from each other. After trillions of years we will only be able to see our own galaxy as the others will have raced too far away. After hundreds of trillions of years no new stars will be made anywhere at all.

Next our galaxy will eject most of its remaining stars into the cosmic void, and what is left will collapse into our central black hole. All matter as we know it will eventually decay, the black holes will evaporate and what is left will be a very lonely and empty place.

The universe will have ceased converting mass into light, and it will be left in almost total darkness. Every once in a while the remaining photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos will meet and dance, but they will soon continue their solitary journeys. The universe, in any sense that we know it today, will be over.

The phase we are in now could be considered to be the slow death throes of the universe. But on a more upbeat note, this is its Indian summer. After those hectic early days I think we can all agree that it deserves a good rest.

10 Strange Physics Facts About Antimatter That Everyone Should Know About

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Antimatter, basically, is matter with reverse electrical charge. For instance, antiprotons are like protons but with merely a negative charge. Here are some important facts about antimatter that everyone should know about:-

1. Antimatter reacts to gravity the just like normal matter (it does not repel material). As was noted, antimatter and matter particles have the same mass but contrast in properties, for instance electric charge and spin.

2. The Standard Model forecasts that gravity should have the similar effect on matter and antimatter, and we have no actual reason to believe otherwise.

3. It would cost us one-hundred-billion dollars to generate one milligram of antimatter (the least amount required for big scale applications, like power or propulsion).

4. Researchers may have discovered a particle that acts both as a matter and antimatter.

5. The Big Bang should have produced antimatter and matter in equal quantities. If that had been so, everything that we know of would have been shattered in, well, a bigger bang. As far as researchers know, there possibly have been one additional matter particle for every billion matter-antimatter pairs. Physicists are still working to understand why the cosmos didn’t annihilate itself and why this asymmetry really exists.

6. Bananas generate antimatter (one positron almost every 75 minutes). Yes, you can still securely eat bananas without any destruction. They’re only a slight radioactive.

7. You could be generating positrons right now. Don’t worry however, they don’t live long enough to respond to ordinary matter and become unsafe.

If all the antimatter ever prepared by humans were annihilated at once, the energy created wouldn’t even be enough to make a cup of tea.

8. Nonetheless, in 2009, antimatter caused the biggest detonation ever recorded in the known universe.

9. In 1964, physicists discovered that the weak force is not reasonably symmetrical in its contacts with matter and antimatter, resulting in something called as “CP violation.”

10. A mirror antimatter universe might exist, theoretically. Numerous fictional movies, comics, books, etc. cover this type theory. The Justice League’s Evil Counterpart, the Crime Syndicate, for instance, originate from an antimatter universe.

Time Is NOT Real: Physicists Show EVERYTHING Happens At The Same Time

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TIME is not real – it is a human construct to help us differentiate between now and our perception of the past, an equally astonishing and baffling theory states.

The concept of time is simply an illusion made up of human memories, everything that has ever been and ever will be is happening RIGHT NOW.

That is the theory according to a group of esteemed physicists who aim to solve one of the universe’s mysteries.

Most people do not even consider the concept of time but there is nothing in the laws of physics to state that it should move in the forward direction that we know.

The laws of physics are symmetric ultimately meaning that time could have easily moved in a backward direction as it does forward.

Time is a human concept

Indeed some adherents to the ‘big crunch’ theory say time WILL run backwards when the universe stops expanding and starts contracting back in on itself.

This conundrum as to why we interpret time in a forward motion has led scientists to question why.

Inevitably, some have concluded that time is simply human construct.

Past, present and future are all 'now'.

They argue that there is a ‘block-universe’ where time and space are connected, otherwise known as spacetime.

The theory, which is backed up Einstein’s theory of relativity, states that space and time are part of a four dimensional structure where everything thing that has happened has its own co-ordinates in spacetime.

This would allow everything to be ‘real’ in the sense that the past, and even the future, are still there in spacetime – making everything equally important as the present.

Time is formed by memories, according to physicists / GETTY Images

Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Max Tegmark, told space.com: "We can portray our reality as either a three-dimensional place where stuff happens over time, or as a four-dimensional place where nothing happens [‘block universe’] — and if it really is the second picture, then change really is an illusion, because there's nothing that's changing; it's all just there — past, present, future.

“We have the illusion, at any given moment, that the past already happened and the future doesn't yet exist, and that things are changing.
But all I'm ever aware of is my brain state right now. The only reason I feel like I have a past is that my brain contains memories.”

Julian Barbour, a British physicist who has authored several books on the subject of time, describes everything as a series of “nows”.

Dr Barbour told physicist and author Adam Frank in the book ‘About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang’: "As we live, we seem to move through a succession of Nows, and the question is, what are they?” He explains, adding to the spacetime theory where everything has its own place: "You can think of it as a landscape or country. Each point in this country is a Now and I call the country Platonia, because it is timeless and created by perfect mathematical rules."

He adds that what we perceive as the past is simply an illusion formed in our brain.

Dr Barbour: "The only evidence you have of last week is your memory. But memory comes from a stable structure of neurons in your brain now. The only evidence we have of the Earth's past is rocks and fossils. But these are just stable structures in the form of an arrangement of minerals we examine in the present. The point is, all we have are these records and you only have them in this Now."

You are a Simulation & Physics Can Prove It

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“There Have Been 10,000 Generations Before Us -- Ours Could Be The First To Discover Extraterrestrial Life” --NASA

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In 1960, the astrophysicist Francis Drake pointed a radio telescope situated in Green Bank, West Virginia, in the direction of two Sun-like stars 11 light years away. His faith: to pick up a signal that would verify gifted life might be out there. Fifty years have departed by since Drake’s pioneering SETI experiment, and we’ve yet to perceive the aliens. But because of a host of discoveries, the idea that life might survive outside Earth now appears more believable than ever. For one, we now know that life can flourish in the most extreme surroundings here on Earth — from deep-sea methane seep and Antarctic sea ice to acidic rivers and our thirstiest deserts.

We’ve also discovered that liquid water isn’t exclusive to our planet. Saturn’s moon “Enceladus” and Jupiter’s moons “Ganymede” and “Europa” have large oceans underneath their icy surfaces. Even Saturn’s largest moon “Titan” could seed some kind of life in its lakes and rivers of methane-ethane. And then there’s the finding of exo-planets, with more than 1800 alien worlds outside our Solar System recognized so far. In fact, astrophysicists think there may be a million and millions of planets in our galaxy alone, one-fifth of which may be like Earth. As Carl Sagan excellently said: “The Universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

Now some researchers trust the hunt for life outside Earth may well repay in our lifespan. “There have been 10K generations of humans before us. Ours could be the first to know,” said SETI astrophysicist Seth Shostak.

But what can occur once we do? How would we deal with the discovery? And what would be its influence on humanity? This overwhelming question was the focus of a meeting organized last September by the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the Library of Congress. For two days, a group of researchers, historians, philosophers and theologians from round the world discussed how we might prepare for the preordained discovery of life — microbial or intelligent — somewhere else in our Universe. The conference was hosted by Steven J. Dick, the 2nd yearly Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress.

Of course, the influence of discovery will rest on on the specific situation. In a talk titled “Current Approaches to Finding Life Beyond Earth, and What Happens If We Do,” Shostak proposed three ways — or three “horse races” — for discovering life in space. First, we could discover it close, in our Solar System. NASA’s Curiosity Rover is at present studying the Martian surface for clues of past or present life. And “Europa Clipper”, a mission to Jupiter’s icy moon, is now under attention. Second, we could “discover it out” of the atmosphere of an exo-planet, using telescopes to look for gases such as methane and oxygen that might clue at a biosphere. The James Webb Space Telescope, to be launched in 2018, will be able to carry out that kind of work.

Discovering life in our Solar System, which possibly would be microbial, might not have as great an impression as hearing from an intellectual civilization far away. We’d have to worry about matters like contamination. We might also find some different biochemistry, maybe exposing new visions about the nature of life. But that type of finding wouldn’t affect us as much as the view of communicating with intellectual life.

Then again it would take hundreds, if not thousands of years for a signal to mobile from side to side, Shostak mentioned. So that third situation would only show us a very few things immediately, such as their locality or what type of star they orbit. However, picking a signal might have other tempting implications about the nature of alien intellect.

Several scientists, including Shostak, put forward the following proposition: “That once a society creates the technology that could put them in touch with the cosmos, they are only a few hundred years away from changing their paradigm from biology to artificial intelligence.” The knowledge is based on the so-called “time scale argument” or “short window observation.” Many scientists forecast we’ll have industrialized a strong A.I by 2050 here on Earth — about a hundred years after the creation of computers, or a hundred and fifty years after the creation of radio connectio. “The point is that, going from creating radios to devising thinking machines is very short — a few centuries at most,” Shostak said. “The leading intelligence in the cosmos may well be non-biological.”

In a talk titled “Alien Minds,” Susan Schneider, a philosophy professor at the University of Connecticut, explained that idea further. The idea of “whole brain emulation” is becoming gradually general among certain scientists, she explained. So are other unbelievable sounding ideas like “mind uploading” and “immortally.” So, to her, a civilization able to radio communicate would probably be “super-intelligent” by the time we hear from them.

According to the "short window observation" concept, a civilization talented of radio communication would possibly have established artificial intelligence by the time we hear from them. She also claimed that alien super-intelligence would be sensible in principle, since the neural code is similar to a computational code, and thoughts could well be inserted in a silicon-based substrate. A silicon-based intelligence would also have wonderful effects for long distance space travel. But again, a repeated theme throughout the conference was to be alert of our anthropocentric tendencies. There’s been a vast gap between microbial life and intelligent life on Earth, and even intelligent life has even progressed on a spectrum.

Lori Marino, a neuroscientist and current director of the Kimela Center for Animal Advocacy, debated as such in a talked titled “The Landscape of Intelligence.” We have a lot to study from other intelligent beings here on Earth (such as dolphins) before even thinking about contacting aliens.

Eventually, the utmost implications might be philosophical. Whether it turns out to be microbial, compound or intelligent, finding life somewhere else will increase fascinating questions about our place in the cosmos. A couple of presentations, by theologian Robin Lovin and Vatican astronomer Guy Consolmagno, even spoke the potential influence on the world’s religions. But what if we don’t find anything soon, or even at all?

The hunt itself can give us a sense of direction, and help us furnace a planetary characteristics, argued the philosopher Clement Vidal in a talk titled “Silent Impact.” And if we’re really alone, then we should start taking good care of life here on Earth, and consider our duty of colonization, he added. The hunt itself can help us forge a planetary identity, said philosopher Clement Vidal. In the interim, astrobiology can help thin the gap among the sciences and humanities, as many presenters highlighted. And it can be a step to incorporating our knowledge across a wide range of disciplines.

So, how do we get ready for something we know so little about? We do so “by on-going to do good science, but also by understanding that science is not metaphysically neutral,” finished the conference host Steven Dick. “We get ready by continuing to question our suppositions about the nature of life and intelligence.”

Via Astrobio.net

"The Big Bang Was A Mirage From A Collapsing Higher-Dimensional Star"

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Big Bang was a mirage from collapsing higher-dimensional star, theorists propose. While the recent Planck results “prove that inflation is correct”, they leave open the question of how inflation happened. A new The study could help to show how inflation was triggered by the motion of the Universe through a higher-dimensional reality.

The event horizon of a black hole — the point of no return for anything that falls in — is a spherical surface. In a higher-dimensional universe, a black hole could have a three-dimensional event horizon, which could spawn a whole new universe as it forms.

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.

The standard Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But nobody knows what would have triggered this outburst: the known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment.

“For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,” says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

It is also difficult to explain how a violent Big Bang would have left behind a Universe that has an almost completely uniform temperature, because there does not seem to have been enough time since the birth of the cosmos for it to have reached temperature equilibrium.

To most cosmologists, the most plausible explanation for that uniformity is that, soon after the beginning of time, some unknown form of energy made the young Universe inflate at a rate that was faster than the speed of light. That way, a small patch with roughly uniform temperature would have stretched into the vast cosmos we see today. But Afshordi notes that “the Big Bang was so chaotic, it’s not clear there would have been even a small homogenous patch for inflation to start working on”.

In a paper posted in the arXiv preprint server1, Afshordi and his colleagues turn their attention to a proposal made in 2000 by a team including Gia Dvali, a physicist now at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. In that model, our three-dimensional (3D) Universe is a membrane, or brane, that floats through a ‘bulk universe’ that has four spatial dimensions.

Ashfordi's team realized that if the bulk universe contained its own four-dimensional (4D) stars, some of them could collapse, forming 4D black holes in the same way that massive stars in our Universe do: they explode as supernovae, violently ejecting their outer layers, while their inner layers collapse into a black hole.

In our Universe, a black hole is bounded by a spherical surface called an event horizon. Whereas in ordinary three-dimensional space it takes a two-dimensional object (a surface) to create a boundary inside a black hole, in the bulk universe the event horizon of a 4D black hole would be a 3D object — a shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D brane surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand.

The authors postulate that the 3D Universe we live in might be just such a brane — and that we detect the brane’s growth as cosmic expansion. “Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang — but that is just a mirage,” says Afshordi.

The model also naturally explains our Universe’s uniformity. Because the 4D bulk universe could have existed for an infinitely long time in the past, there would have been ample opportunity for different parts of the 4D bulk to reach an equilibrium, which our 3D Universe would have inherited.

The picture has some problems, however. Earlier this year, the European Space Agency's Planck space observatory released data that mapped the slight temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background — the relic radiation that carries imprints of the Universe’s early moments. The observed patterns matched predictions made by the standard Big Bang model and inflation, but the black-hole model deviates from Planck's observations by about 4%. Hoping to resolve the discrepancy, Afshordi says that his is now refining its model.

Despite the mismatch, Dvali praises the ingenious way in which the team threw out the Big Bang model. “The singularity is the most fundamental problem in cosmology and they have rewritten history so that we never encountered it,” he says. Whereas the Planck results “prove that inflation is correct”, they leave open the question of how inflation happened, Dvali adds. The study could help to show how inflation is triggered by the motion of the Universe through a higher-dimensional reality, he says.

Nature doi:10.1038/nature.2013.13743

Via Zeeya Merali/nature.com and The Perimeter Institute

Image credit: The Perimeter Institute

Why Does The Universe Exist? Physicists Have Found The Answer And It Will Blow Your Mind

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It was a matter to investigation for the physicists that why this universe exists???

So finally now they have found the answer to this mysterious question.

Why the state of nothingness was replaced by something???

There are many questions which arise in metaphysics including ‘why are we conscious?’, ‘where did we come from?’ etc. Such questions are answered by the scientists who are studying physics of extremely small particles and applying their knowledge and learning on excessively large.

The Quantum physicists did research on this matter .They first presented a theory and then provided a proof that such particles suddenly make an appearance from nowhere. Also they further presented a theory that the universe can’t be something really like nothing and possibly ‘nothingness’ is an impossible kind of state.

These particles which make a sudden appearance are called Quarks and they appear in form of small threads called Mesons and Baryons.

According to law of Conservation of Energy — Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed. The new theories and findings are opposing this classical law of physics in the way that energy can make a sudden appearance within a closed system any time absolutely from nowhere. Scientists have presented a theory that once this diversion from law is proven the other is just matter to measure.

A speaker from a science explainer channel named as Strange Mysteries said:

“According to quantum mechanics the idea of nothingness persisting for all time is unrealistic as there’s no such thing as empty space. Even in a perfect vacuum particles and anti-particles flash in and out of existence, and they return to no-where when they’re done. Stephen Hawking found that space is unstable. Empty space, in time, eventually starts to froth and bubble. These bubbles of space-time form particles out of nothing just like those weird particles, and we think a similar bubble may have formed out of nothing to create our entire universe.”

Mr. Frank Wilczek from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has done specialization in quantum chromo-dynamics has given a theory that describes the behavior of quarks inside the nucleus of an atom and presented a finding that this universe is not at all like a state of nothingness.

Existence of something– seems far preferable.

Mr. Frank Wilczek said:

“You can form a state that has no quarks and antiquarks in it, and it’s totally unstable. It spontaneously starts producing quark-antiquark pairs.”

Physicists from the University of Colorado in Boulder, Mr. Victor Stenger added to chain:

“Something is the more natural state than nothing. According to quantum theory, there is no state of ’emptiness’.

Professor Wilczek said:

“There is no barrier between nothing and a rich universe full of matter. Possibly the big bang was just nothingness doing what comes naturally”

Even many quantum physicists concluded that nothingness cannot exist. Quantum physics maintains a balance between two factors, time and energy. The thing lasting for long time will have more energy i.e. more time less energy and vice versa. The universe being approximately 13 billion years old indicates low energies.

Right after the Big Bang --- Inflation, it was a time of immense energy but at the same time due the negative energy of gravity it get cancelled which left behind a zero sum. If the overall sum obtained is zero then the problem is solved according to the law of Conservation of Energy. Zero energy to conserve means no problem exists. Thus, a universe which is thought to be popped out from nowhere becomes not only reasonable but also credible.

A cosmologist at MIT, Alan Guth, who presented an inflation theory 30 years ago said:

“I like to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch. Maybe a better way of saying it is that something IS nothing.”