Flow chart of how the emulator developed by the research team works. Credit: Kavli IPMU, NAOJ By applying a machine-learning technique, a neural network method, to gigantic amounts of simulation…
Category: Cosmology
New Gaia data paint the most detailed picture yet of the Milky Way
1.6 billion stars. 11.4 million galaxies. 158,000 asteroids. One spacecraft. The European Space Agency’s Gaia space observatory, which launched in 2013, has long surpassed its goal of charting more than…
Information energy accounts for dark energy, resolves Hubble tension, avoids the ‘big chill,’ and is falsifiable
Stellar heated gas and dust in the Centaurus-A galaxy. Credit: NASA Hubble. Stellar heated gas and dust has an entropy, or information content, with an equivalent energy of 1070 joules,…
Astrophysicists simulate a fuzzy dark matter galactic halo
Density slices zooming into a fuzzy dark matter halo. The plot on the right shows the reconstructed fuzzy dark matter wave function with self-consistent interference pattern and central solitonic core…
A century ago, Alexander Friedmann envisioned the universe’s expansion
For millennia, the universe did a pretty good job of keeping its secrets from science. Ancient Greeks thought the universe was a sphere of fixed stars surrounding smaller spheres carrying…
Bilayer graphene inspires two-universe cosmological model
A curved and stretched sheet of graphene laying over another curved sheet creates a new pattern that impacts how electricity moves through the sheets. A new model suggests that similar…
A supernova’s delayed reappearance could pin down how fast the universe expands
A meandering trek taken by light from a remote supernova in the constellation Cetus may help researchers pin down how fast the universe expands — in another couple of decades.…
Astronomers may have seen a star gulp down a black hole and explode
For the first time, astronomers have captured solid evidence of a rare double cosmic cannibalism — a star swallowing a compact object such as a black hole or neutron star.…
‘Flashes of Creation’ recounts the Big Bang theory’s origin story
Flashes of CreationPaul HalpernBasic Books, $30 The Big Bang wasn’t always a sure bet. For several decades in the 20th century, researchers wrestled with interpreting cosmic origins, or if there…
Vera Rubin’s work on dark matter led to a paradigm shift in cosmology
Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and BeyondAshley Jean YeagerMIT Press, $24.95 Vera Rubin’s research forced cosmologists to radically reimagine the cosmos. In the 1960s and ’70s, Rubin’s observations of stars whirling…
