Sometimes I’m dissatisfied with this little spinning puffball we’re stuck on, but then I see that there’s a supermassive black hole out there with a mass of two of our suns, powering an unfathomably large quasar. Luckily, it’s very, very distant. More »
Hawking’s covered the end of the world, now he’s examining the beginning—writing “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going”. The Big Bang was a certainty. [Reuters] More »
Maybe I like this because it looks like a Leopard desktop—I hope Leopard came with the animations—but if you have to watch a science video today, let astrophysicist Janne Levin explain you what the Big Bang was. More »
I don’t watch The Hills, but that doesn’t mean I’m not entertained when I see Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt prancing around and pretending they aren’t posing for the cameras: in this clip, Audrina attempts to get scientific with the Big Bang theory and the Large Hadron Collider. Her friend explains that the Large Hadron Collider is used for colliding subatomic particles together—but maybe it can be used to see if there are any particles in that organ that lies between Audrina’s ears. [GeekSugar]
For the first time ever, scientists have captured an spiral galaxy in its early stages of formation, only two billion years after the Big Bang. This time, however, they haven’t used the magic Hubble, but the ten-metre Keck telescope in Hawaii helped by something called gravitational lensing, or Mother Nature’s own optical zoom lenses.
PopSci has a great article about scientists who are trying to recreate the events of the Universe, such as the big bang and black holes, with controlled lab experiments. The Universe in a Teacup, shown above, cools Helium to 0.0003°F above absolute zero, and moves around the particles so that little whirlpools remain after the Helium settles. The state inside this pinky-sized tube is thought to be the condition of the universe just after the big bang.
