Subatomic Particles Maintain Constant Weight in Time
	According to a new study carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, the mass ratio between the electron and the proton remained constant over the past 6 billion years. This comes to contradict the findings of a study conducted nearly two years ago which suggested that the masses of the two particles varied significantly since the Big Bang event which is responsible for the birth of the universe. There are some theories ... [read more >>]
	14 July 2008, 08:48GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Galactic Map Shows the Chemical Composition of the Milky Way
	The most detailed map of the chemical composition of the galaxy we live in has been recently released by the research team of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, after completing the study of a population of stars extending on a radius of more than 30,000 light years around the Sun. "This compilation of the compositions of more than 2.5 million stars in the Milky Way will greatly enhance our understanding of our galactic home, and likel ... [read more >>]
	13 June 2008, 09:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Physicists Claim Evidence of Universe Before Big Bang
	What was before this universe is currently anybody's guess, but it is highly likely that it was preceded by a similar universe and therefore time existed before the Big Bang. The evidence to back this theory is said to be found in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation left behind by the light created when the universe was only 400,000 years old and could explain why time seems to move in a single direction, when logic says it shou ... [read more >>]
	07 June 2008, 05:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Dark Energy Is More Real than Ever
	Approximately a decade ago astronomers discovered that not only is the universe expanding in space-time, but also that this expansion is accelerating. Since there was no explanation to why this is happening, they proposed the concept of dark energy, a form of energy that makes up about 75 percent of the mass of the universe, was never directly observed and exerts a force of repulsion towards all normal matter in the universe, causing the l ... [read more >>]
	24 May 2008, 04:54GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Supermassive Black Hole Progenitors Still a Mystery
	Supermassive black holes, weighing several billion times more than the Sun, are widely believed to have begun their lives as smaller black holes that fed on the large masses of gas surrounding them. Computer models however tell another story. Small black holes cannot feed and grow rapidly to super-size because there's not much to feed on. Supermassive black holes are usually found inside quasi-stellar objects, swallowing ... [read more >>]
	20 May 2008, 03:32GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Universe in a Test Tube
	What better way to understand the universe than to create your very own? Of course, black holes, supernova explosions and Big Bangs are off limits for laboratories on Earth, but helium-3 cooled to only 17,7 degrees Celsius above absolute zero will do just as good in replicating the processes that took place soon after the Big Bang event, leading to the rapid expansion of the universe in space-time and ultimately to the creation of galaxies ... [read more >>]
	09 May 2008, 04:18GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Young Galaxies Appear to Be Ultra-Compact
	While observing galaxies in the early life of the universe, Yale University researchers discovered nine young galaxies presenting unusual high densities of stars. Although measuring only 5,000 light years in diameter, as opposed to the Milky Way which is more than 100,000 light years across, these galaxies contain amounts of matter some 200 billion times larger than our Sun. "Seeing the compact sizes of these galaxies is a puzzle. ... [read more >>]
	29 April 2008, 10:09GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Gravitational Radiation Full of Hot Air, Researchers Say
	Inflation theory predicts that, right after the Big Bang event, the universe went through a period of rapid expansion in space-time, which left behind a 'gravitational radiation' signature in the form of gravitational waves, distortions in the fabric of space-time, not yet proven to exist. However, a team of researchers from the Case Western Reserve University reckons that the same 'gravitational radiation' can be produ ... [read more >>]
	16 April 2008, 05:14GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

What was Before the Universe?
	The Big Bang theory says that the universe began at T=0 as it suffered a sudden expansion into space-time, from a singularity-like object of zero volume but of infinite mass and density. So what was before that? Certainly, things do not just appear out of nowhere. Some kind of structure must have preceded the current universe, such as another universe, maybe. Loop Quantum Gravity, for example, suggests that our universe is the result of a ... [read more >>]
	10 April 2008, 02:37GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Peering Back into the Universe's Past
	Take a patch of the sky with an area four times that of the apparent size of the Moon, study it over a period of three years and you may obtain the most sensitive infrared map of the distant universe. By doing so, researchers from the University of Nottingham obtained the image of more than 100,000 galaxies, as they appeared in the early days of the universe. Because light does not travel instantaneously through space, we are ... [read more >>]
	09 April 2008, 04:11GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

'God Particle' to be Found Soon
	"Higgs Boson" or the "God Particle", was predicted almost four decades ago by British physicist Peter Higgs as a mean to explain how fundamental particles gain mass in the space-time continuum. Higgs believes that it will be found by CERNs Large Hadron Collider, expected to become operational by the end of this year. In an interview yesterday, Higgs revealed: "the likelihood is that the particle will show up pr ... [read more >>]
	08 April 2008, 05:17GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Look Back into the Universe's Past
	Because light does not travel instantaneously through space, when we look towards distant objects in the universe we actually see them as they appeared in their past. By using this property, astronomers are able to observe how galaxies looked, back in the early days of the universe. Just recently, they discovered what seem to be two classes of unique galaxies. While studying distant galaxies, a research team observed a galaxy that appe ... [read more >>]
	02 April 2008, 02:44GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Fartherst Galaxy Cluster Discovered - 11.4 Billion Light-Years Away
	LBG-2377 is a galaxy proto-cluster located 11.4 billion light years away from Earth – the most distant galaxies ever observed. In fact, these galaxies are so far away from us, that they appear as they looked when they were in the first days of their lives. Previously, the most distant such galaxy proto-cluster was located only 9 billion light years away from Earth. "When you observe this far away, you are actually seeing the unive ... [read more >>]
	01 April 2008, 03:28GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Universe's Precise Age: 13.73 Billion Years
	After two additional years of measurements with NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which narrowed the uncertainty by a few tens of millions of years, last week astronomers finally confirmed the precise age of the universe: 13.73 billion years, give or take 120 million years. "Everything is tightening up and giving us better and better precision all the time. It's actually significantly better than pr ... [read more >>]
	27 March 2008, 05:49GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Lunar Telescope to View the Early Days of the Universe
	The Dark Ages, as we call the period of time between the Big Bang event and the birth of the first star in the universe, is one of the most debated topics in Cosmology, and one of the most unexplored periods in the history of the universe. All this will hopefully change in the near future with the design of the next-generation of telescopes, able to peer back into the past nearly 100 million years after the universe came to be. The Dark Ag ... [read more >>]
	12 March 2008, 10:25GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

New Sub-Atomic Particle Discovered!
	Based on a prediction made more than three decades ago, CLEO physicists conducting a high-energy experiment claim to have discovered a new sub-atomic particle named 'charmed-strange meson'. The discovery of a new type of meson may be a pivotal point in particles physics and cosmology in special, by observing a new way through which elementary particles of atoms, namely protons and neutrons, can be created. The charm ... [read more >>]
	11 March 2008, 07:47GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Universe Empty? No, Filled With Neutrinos
	The universe is certainly not empty, that's a fact, but its not very dense either. Today, the visible universe consists mostly of empty space, void, while ordinary matter accounts for only 4 percent of the total mass. So where is the rest of 95 percent of the universe's mass? In dark energy and dark matter, according to some physical theories. Further still, the void doesn't seem to be so empty after all, but filled with[ADM ... [read more >>]
	06 March 2008, 03:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Astronomers Find the Most Distant Galaxy in the Universe
	Using the help provided by a gravitational lensing phenomenon created by a large galaxy cluster, known as Abell 1689, astronomers from NASA have discovered, with the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, what seems to be one of the youngest and brightest galaxies in the universe, located more than 12.8 billion light years away from Earth. They argue it might be one of the first galaxies to populate the universe, only 700 million years after ... [read more >>]
	12 February 2008, 10:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Correcting Particle Trajectories at the Speed of Light
	Some may say that such actions are close to impossible, but researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, RHIC for short, have already achieved the performance of correcting the trajectory of particles traveling at 99,995 percent of the speed of light, by measuring fluctuations of particle beams as they speed through the 3.84-kilometer-long circumference of the particle accelerator. The work carried about at the RHIC facility has the ... [read more >>]
	07 February 2008, 08:50GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

LHC Starts the Search for Sparticles in April
	The long expected CERN Large Hadron Collider will become operational somewhere this spring, and physicists all around the world can hardly wait to see what new discoveries it will bring. For example, whether the LHC accelerating particles towards each other at speeds close to that of light are able to prove the supersymmetry theory or not. Supersymmetry predicts that each elementary particle in the Standard Model must have a superpartn ... [read more >>]
	28 January 2008, 10:19GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Just Add Primordial Black Holes, Antimatter Will Soon Follow...
	The Big Bang theory suggests that, in the early life stages of the universe, a massive number of black holes might have been created. Although not as massive as most of the black holes created from stellar remnants, a part of these tiny black holes might still be lurking through space. In the 1970s, the famous physicists Stephen Hawking showed that singularities are allowed to exist in the fabric of space-time. Furthermore, a bla ... [read more >>]
	23 January 2008, 06:43GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Universe Might Be Hanging on a String
	String theory predicts that the universe could be populated with entities of pure mass-energy called cosmic strings, which are basically defects in the space-time fabric that are create while spacetime suffers a rapid change in phase. Such changes in phase might have taken place in the early stages of the universe, during the Big Bang. String theory abandons the classical belief that elementary particles are point-like object ... [read more >>]
	19 January 2008, 05:34GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Is the Universe Really Expanding?
	Geza Dyuk, the director of Astronomy at the Adler Planetarium, says that the universe is indeed expanding. Incredibly, even the great German physicist Albert Einstein didn't know for certain if the universe was expanding or contracting, at the time when he published his Theory of Relativity back in 1905. So, while working at the General Theory of Relativity, he considered the universe to be static, only to find out later tha ... [read more >>]
	19 January 2008, 03:40GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Quantum Physics Gets Weirder by the Day
	The universe mush have had some kind of beginning no doubt about that, thus the Big Bang model has been proposed as the simplest theory to explain the processes which took place in the first stages of the universe's life. Though physicists can approximate exactly what happed inside the universe just a few fractions of a second after the Big Bang, what was before that remains mostly a mystery. In order to resolve this matter, a new app ... [read more >>]
	17 January 2008, 09:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Forget About the Big Bang!
	Even today, most of the scientific communities still believe that the universe might have originated in a Big Bang explosion, but have no way to prove such process ever took place. Furthermore, although singularity-like objects are allowed to exist in the fabric of space-time, models explaining how such structures could experience a rapid expansion are currently unavailable. Over time, alternative theories have been construc ... [read more >>]
	15 January 2008, 11:03GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

WiiWare Big Bang Approaching!
	As if the Wii wasn't casual enough already, Engine Software (Netherlands-based developer) has recently confirmed their debut title for download via ... [read more >>]
	10 January 2008, 05:06GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Universe Might Have Originated in a Big Splat!
	Current theories about the beginning of the universe predict that all the observed matter originated in a single point in space, a singularity, which suddenly expanded in space-time provoking the so-called Big Bang. The light emitted by the glowing matter in the beginning of the universe slowly shifted towards the infrared spectrum and is currently detected in the microwave wavelength as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, ... [read more >>]
	27 December 2007, 02:52GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Early Galaxies Had Incredibly Fast Star Formation Processes
	The Milky Way usually spawns about four new stars every year, although the recent discovery of a new galaxy reveals that it is furiously creating a thousand times more stars than our own. Situated at more than 12 million light years away from Earth, the new galaxy appears as it looked 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang, thus providing us with an intriguing insight on how fast the galaxies and stars developed in the early life of the univ ... [read more >>]
	19 December 2007, 05:53GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Computers Might Point Towards the Missing Matter
	Simulations show a large amount of the interstellar gas that forms the filaments between galaxy clusters and that has so far been hiding in the intergalactic clouds of gas, also known as the Warm-Hot Interplanetary Medium. The discovery was made through one of the most challenging simulations ever performed, which consisted of using about 2.5 percent of the visible universe to create a region of 1.5 billion light years across. The algor ... [read more >>]
	07 December 2007, 06:29GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Giant Cold Spot Evidence of Parallel Universe?
	In August this year, astronomers studying the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation or CMB, a 'remnant' of the Big Bang, discovered a texture of a giant cold spot in the universe, completely empty of any normal matter or dark matter and even any kind of radiation. In order to explain how such a void might have formed in the middle of our universe, physicists and cosmologists developed a theory in which the giant void might be evi ... [read more >>]
	26 November 2007, 03:00GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

Don't Look There, The Universe Will End!
	A shocking new theory in the world of physics suggests that we might have accidentally brought the universe closer to its death, just by looking at it. The observation of the dark matter back in 1998, which is thought to be responsible for the acceleration of the cosmic expansion, may have caused the universe to shift to a state similar to one in its past, in which the universe had more chances to end. Physicists Lawrence Krauss of Case ... [read more >>]
	22 November 2007, 04:30GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia

The Image of the Early Universe Contaminated
	Data collected by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe or WMPA is not flawed, but rather contaminated with radio radiation coming from our galaxy. The WMPA is a satellite, launched in 2001 by NASA, to probe the Cosmic Microwave Background or CMB, and find minute differences of temperature to test certain theories about the nature of our universe. The CMB is a remnant of the afterglow of the universe produced 380,000 years after the Big ... [read more >>]
	14 November 2007, 10:07GMT | (c) 2008 Softpedia