The universe may have been created by an explosion within a black hole, according to a new theory by two mathematicians recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A..

“It’s a mathematically plausible model which refines the standard model of the Big Bang,” said Blake Temple, professor of mathematics at UC Davis and co-author of the paper with Joel Smoller, professor of mathematics at the University of Michigan.

In the standard model o

Measurements of 11 exploding stars spread throughout the visible universe made by the Hubble Space Telescope confirm an earlier, ground-based study which produced the first evidence that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an increasing rate.

The new study, which has been posted online [http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309368] and will soon appear in the Astrophysical Journal, also provides some tantalizing new insights into the nature of the mysterious repulsive force, d

Observations of the bright side of the Moon with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected oxygen, magnesium, aluminum and silicon over a large area of the lunar surface. The abundance and distribution of those elements will help to determine how the Moon was formed.

“We see X-rays from these elements directly, independent of assumptions about the mineralogy and other complications,” said Jeremy Drake of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass, at a

Galileo, the NASA space probe in which UK scientists have played a key role, will dramatically end its 14-year mission when it plunges into Jupiter’s dense atmosphere on the 21st September. The spacecraft, which has revealed a wealth of scientific data on Jupiter and its moons, with fuel and power exhausted, will vaporize like a meteor as its descends through the giant planet’s turbulent atmosphere (an artist’s impression of what this might look like is available – please see notes to

For over 60 years now, the University of Liege Astrophysics and Geophysics Institute (IAGL) has been concerned with the study of comets. Again today, four of its researchers have just made a major discovery for the understanding of these celestial objects : a lot of extra heavy nitrogen detected in two comets suggests the presence of great quantities of complex organic molecules in them. The results obtained by the Liege team will be published in the next number of the international magazine, Science

An astronomer from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, have discovered that a neighboring galaxy — the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) — appears to have formed with an old stellar halo, similar to how our very own Milky Way formed.

The oldest and most metal-poor Milky Way stars form a spherical halo where they move about like atoms in a hot gas, which in turn prompts two major formation scenarios of our galaxy: extended hier

MIT scientists have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded – only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero. The work, to be reported in the Sept. 12 issue of Science, bests the previous record by a factor of six, and is the first time that a gas was cooled below 1 nanokelvin (one-billionth of a degree).

“To go below one nanokelvin is a little like running a mile under four minutes for the first time,” said Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle, co-leader of the team.

A lack of rigorous design methods and comprehensive performance data has slowed U.S. acceptance of natural ventilation technology, which proponents argue can increase energy efficiency in commercial buildings as well as improve indoor environmental conditions. The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) new LoopDA 1.0 software program (for Loop Design and Analysis) helps fill this critical information gap.

The LoopDA simulation tool enables building designers and engineers to

Prototype microsensor arrays connected to artificial neural networks—computer models that “learn”—can reliably identify trace amounts of toxic gases in seconds, well before concentration levels become lethal, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientists and a guest researcher reported Sept. 7 at the American Chemical Society annual meeting in New York City. The system has the potential to provide cost-effective early warning of chemical warfare agents.

Lab experiments sh

ESA’s Herschel spacecraft will collect infrared radiation from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. But why are observations of infrared light so special?

The Universe is full of radiation of all types but most of this does not reach us here on Earth because our atmosphere blocks out many wavelengths of radiation, but lets others through.

Fortunately for life on Earth, the atmosphere blocks out harmful, high-energy radiation like X-rays, gamma rays and

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory detected sound waves, for the first time, from a super-massive black hole. The “note” is the deepest ever detected from an object in the universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in astrophysics.

The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster, located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster.

A common table commodity that people sprinkle on their food every day is the main ingredient in new measurements by scientists at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO).

In a presentation on Sunday September 7th, at TAUP2003, a major scientific conference in Seattle, Washington, new measurements were reported that strongly confirm the original SNO results announced in 2001 and 2002 that solved the “Solar Neutrino Problem” and go much further in establishing the properties of neutrin

Physicists in the UK are ready to start construction of a major part of an advanced new experiment, designed to search for elusive gravitational waves. They are already part of two experiments: the UK/German GEO 600 project and the US LIGO experiment (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), both in their commissioning phases. By bringing GEO 600 technology to LIGO, they and their German colleagues from the Albert Einstein Institute are now set to become full partners in Advanced LIGO, a

A new software tool promises to aid scientists whose research has forced them to lead double lives – as computer programmers.

The tool, called the Tensor Contraction Engine (TCE), automatically generates the computer code that chemists, physicists, and materials scientists need to model the structure and interaction of complex molecules, saving them weeks or even months of work.

By making the computer code more efficient, the TCE could even reduce the amount of time required

St. Petersburg researchers have designed an original thermometer for fast-moving electrons in thermonuclear reactors. The laser beam in this device is used to instantly determine the temperature of burning hot plasma, at frequencies required for precise diagnostics.

This device is a further step forward to controlled nuclear fusion. The device will help researchers to get precise information about energy distribution of hot plasma electrons inside the tokamac – the most promising current pro

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered three of the faintest and smallest objects ever detected beyond Neptune. Each lump of ice and rock is roughly the size of Philadelphia and orbits just beyond Neptune and Pluto, where they may have rested since the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The objects reside in a ring-shaped region called the Kuiper Belt, which houses a swarm of icy rocks that are leftover building blocks, or “planetesimals,” from the sola