big bang

What small, red, a bit dim and very, very old? (Clue: It's not an ancestral mentally-challenged Ooopa Loompa)

Fri, 10/22/2010 - 10:08 — Ben Gilliland

It's a galaxy from the dawn of the universe!

Thirteen billion years is a long time to wait to be noticed but, for UDFy-38135539 (which we’ll call Bob for convenience), the wait has finally paid off and Bob is now a record breaker.
Bob is the tiny little dot that you (might) be able to see hiding in the middle of that circle on the right. It may not look like much, but that slightly red-tinged dot is officially the most distant galaxy ever recorded.
It is red because its light has been slogging its way across the universe for more than 13billion years and, in doing so, its wavelength has become stretched until (from where we are looking at it) it moved into the red end of the spectrum. This colour change is called ‘redshift’ and more shift the red has, the further away the object is.

It's just black holes all the way down...

Mon, 05/03/2010 - 11:21 — Ben Gilliland

Was our universe born in a wormhole in another universe?

(excuse me Sir, my brain is full!)

A long time ago in a universe far, far away a giant star is in its death throws. It has shone undiminished for billions of years, faithfully illuminating its corner of the cosmos but, its fuel finally exhausted, it collapses. Its quiet implosion concentrates all of its formerly colossal bulk into a tiny speck, a black hole that bends the fabric of the universe to such a degree that it tunnels into another reality and the star becomes a wormhole. Within the wormhole’s womb, a seed of matter expands to become a whole new universe in which, one day, you will be born, live out your days and die.

This might sound pretty fantastic but a theoretical physicist believes that just such a scenario could answer some of cosmology’s most annoying problems.

One of those problems is gravity. For decades scientists – including Einstein – have struggled to mathematically unite this force with the other fundamental forces (electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces).

Another problem is the messy reality that our universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate when, theoretically, its expansion should be slowing. The last is more of a question than a problem – what came before the Big Bang?

Theme by Dr. Radut.