I laughed and sighed when I read this. I have never been really happy about the alleged existence of matter that cannot be detected nor energy that has no known source. However for the last decade or two, cosmologists have been pushed into these enigmatic hypothetical features by what they believed to be the hard facts of cosmological measures, particularly those of the cosmic background radiation. Now astronomers from the British Royal Astronomical Society, Utane Sangawit and Tom Shanks, have found that these measures were incorrect after all, and very much so. While the data is still insufficient, it is possible that we can in then scrap the mysterious dark side of the Universe off the equations needed to explain it. According to Sangawit:If our result is repeated in new surveys of galaxies in the Southern Hemisphere then this could mean real problems for the existence of dark energy.
More information at the RAS (found via SD).
I can't resist this one. Whether right or wrong the hypothesis by Nikodem J. Poplatski is so suggestive that I have at least to mention it.It all has to do with the controversial wormholes (or Einstein-Rosen bridges), thought to exist within black holes. What Poplatski says is that actual observed black holes may be of this kind, hosting wormholes with whole universes inside them and that, therefore, our own universe may well be one of such universes within a black hole. This would provide an explanation for the Big Bang itself, which would be a white hole (something I have always thought quite logical).It's complicated to explain and even to understand. A longer article can be read at Science Daily and the full original article can be found here (pay per view):Nikodem J. Popławski, Radial motion into an Einstein–Rosen bridge. Physics Letters B, 2010.
I'm starting to think that cosmologists are truly in the dark about what's really going on in our Universe. But it's intriguing anyhow. A large are of the sky is affected by it: galaxies in that zone are moving at incredibly high speeds ("a million miles per hour") apparently towards something that is beyond our horizon (that is: farther than 13.5 billion light years, which is the age of the Universe). The opposite sense of the motion is not totally ruled out but seems quite less likely. More details at Science Daily. So what is it? Is it some sort of sink hole by which this universe gets lost into some other universe (of whichever number of dimensions)? Is it the coalescing big crunch, the super-huge-macro-giga-ultra-giant black hole that would suck the universe in order to create a new Big Bang in a parallel reality (time only seems to exist within our universe, not clearly outside it)? No damn idea!
A couple of paradigm-shattering news from outer space in SD today:1. Very High Energy (VHE) gamma rays seem now to be produced in many spots out there and also able to reach us, providing with another source of astronomical info. So far it was thought that such high energy rays lost their energy fast and were unable to reach us, except from nearby sources. The fact now seems to be, on light of MAGIC telescope research, that this is not the case at all and allows astronomers to watch things so far unknown and review some scientific assumptions - like that of most energetic sources being also the brightest stuff up there, what now seems obvious it's not the case at all, as there are objects that are only emitting in this VHE area of the spectrum. (Original news article).2. The other finding is that of the a galaxy that has the record of stars being generated in the shortest period. It's known as the "Baby Boom galaxy" and it's creating stars at a rate of one to four thousand per year, many more than the 10 or so the Milky Way produces. It is a Galaxy from the very early universe, some 12.3 billion light-years away. This finding was made thanks to the use of several of the most modern telescopes, like Spitzer and the Very Large Array. (Original news article).
The Baby Boom galaxy
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