Now, you have to admit that this is a question that will twist the bawain just a bit.  Why? because if you subscribe to either Newtonian or Eisensteinian physics - your going to look at the question differently and therefore your answer is going to vary accordingly.

The question at hand is one that was posited on Slashdot

The question at hand was "How Big Was the Universe When it Was First Born?"  You would think "simple enough" at first blush, that was until it was time to actually answer.   My very first inclination was to answer like a good quantum particle man and answer "at the time of the big bang, the
structure that would come to be the universe was an infinitely small potential but still, calling it potential is really unfair.  Much as calling a Nuclear reaction, "potential" after the first control rod has been raised. Nothing has happened yet, but the release of a great amount of power is all but a given.

So considering how everything tends to be relative, we know how far or the distance covered by a contemporary light year, but what of pre-big bang?

Why?  Well according to the article - traveling back from the big bang  to the very end of inflation and the start of the hot, dense state that scientists identify with as pre-Big Bang, and ask how  big would it be? (I really have to ask here if relativity can be brought into play. If we are asked about a definitive state, isn't that state relative?)  Depending on the particulars of when inflation came to an end, the answer is somewhere between the size of a soccer ball and the size of a city block, no smaller and no larger. 

But that would almost have to be relative to where you are making the observations and could you even make an observation outside?

my bwain hurtz :(

The Universe is Dying

Well, Thanks to Joe, I once again revisit a subject that was, to me, at least, dead (sorry about the choice of words) and buried.

It seems that, yes indeed according to  Professor Simon Driver, from the International Center for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia.  Studying 200,000 galaxies, astronomers confirmed that the Universe is slowly dying.

Not just energy generated in the visual band but near,mid, far infrared plus ultraviolet, each and every energy band is showing dying. 

But we should be honest here....  astronomers have known for some time now that the Universe's days were numbered.  There really isn't anything new here except maybe a more refined end time and date I suppose. 

An international team of apx. 100 scientists using information garnered from the world's most powerful telescopes - both land and space based - to study the energy emitting from more than 200,000 galaxies,  in a wide slice of the observable universe.

The up to date data has confirmed the cosmos is radiating only half as much energy as it was 2 billion years ago.

It really should be pointed out that the universe is an elder statesman at over 13 billion years old.  Our sun alone is a third generation star.  Vast amounts of energy have to be squeezed into smaller and smaller areas to make star formation possible, hence far fewer stars.

Death is a bit of a misnomer because the universe will  still be there, but its stars and all else that produces light and stellar fire will fizzle out.

It will just grow old forever, slowly converting less and less mass into energy as billions of years pass by until eventually, it will become a cold, dark and desolate place, where all of the lights go out,I paraphrased - astronomer Luke Davies.

Check the CNN online page HERE  
and the NPR HERE 

The Universe Never Started....

Presently accepted universe model

Ok, how many of you just went HUH?!  Really, How many of you subscribe to the cyclic or the constant expansion of the universe?  I know I am partial to the constant expansion theory that holds to the Universe starting when  an infinitely dense singularity began expanding 13.9 billion years ago.

Now in my mind, that lends itself to a very orderly universe, however there is a problem  with the steady expansion of the universe.  Einstein's mathematics of general relativity  predicts the singularity but can not explain what happens immediately  at or before—the singularity, only directly after the start of the singularity.  Physics breaks down at the moment of the event.

Now scientists  have shown in a paper published in Physics Letters B that the Big Bang singularity can be resolved by their new model in which the universe has no beginning and no end.

Of course if you have no big bang singularity you can not have any kind of cyclic theory.  No boom diddy boom - no crunchity crunch.......

So what is exactly holding things all together?  Well the new model predicts a new particle.

From the Phys Org article:

• In physical terms, the model describes the universe as being filled with a quantum fluid. The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.

For more click HERE for the complete Phys Org article

I want to thank my in-house anime expert Meebles for bring this new Universe Theory to my attention:

http://phys.org/news/2015-02-big-quantum-equation-universe.html

The Universe Came From Nothing?!

I don't think we have to go over the big bang theory here do we?  You know the Universe began from an infinitely small point and expanded in all directions all at once.  We ok so far?  So the question is what came before the infinitely small point of space/time?

Well that has been the 10,000 dollar question as of late.  From the Slash-Dot article:

• Cosmologists at the Wuhan Institute have published a proof that the Big Bang could indeed have occurred spontaneously because of quantum fluctuations. "The new proof is based on a special set of solutions to a mathematical entity known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation.

The words that make my heart go pitter patter are 'quantum fluctuations' which the Wikipedia explains as  'the temporary change in the amount of energy in a point in space'

We know that energy can not be destroyed, simply changed and matter is just another form of energy.  So I would suspect that a temporary change in the amount of energy at any given point would result in a quantum particle.  If this particle is stable or not is moot, as long and the process once started does not stall.  Because at any given point an unstable quantum particle could evolve into a much more stable unit which given enough time and fluctuations could lead to a macro particle with a much higher energy potential plus the added attraction of being significantly more stable. 

The neat thing is, I  one heard this ripple, quantum energy flux first applied to the very end of the universe, when all matter has bled down to an even quantum state.  At some point a quantum fluctuation would bring about a temporary energy point and damn if that don't sound like the whole universe starting up again.

Here is the Wikipedia on quantum fluctuations

A More Refined Defination of the Distrabution of Galactic Super-Clusters Across the Universe

Superclusters  are areas in the universe that are densely packed with galaxies.  These are the biggest structures in the Universe.

Scientists have struggled to define exactly where one super-cluster ends and another begins. Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space.

Run the short video below to get an idea of the problem and the unique solution the Hawaiian team formulated to demonstrate a solution.

 

Complete Adafruit article HERE

Hubble Being Used to Study Star Formation Using the Ultraviolet Ultra Deep Field Study.

Hey, check out this pic.  As nice as it looks just looking at it, becomes amazing when you know just what it is.   First off, there is no doubt about it being a Hubble shot.  Or that it is an extremely narrow shot.  But the Caltech in Pasadena astronomers who took the photo used one of Hubble's greatest abilities of being able to see very deep into the universe.  This shot covers less real-estate than a full moon but peers back into the universe to within just a few hundred million years after the big bang.

As noteworthy as the photo is, it is ground breaking for another reason.  For most of its operational life, Hubble has explored the visible and near infra-red spectrum.  Recently astronomer   Harry Teplitz has had Hubble look deep into space using using its ability to photograph in the ultraviolet wavelengths.   From the article:

• "Ultraviolet is where we see the hottest light from the youngest stars," said Teplitz, who led a new study called "Ultraviolet Coverage of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field." "It is a direct measure of star formation."

The ability to photograph in the  ultraviolet means that now scientists will be able to study star formation  from 5 to 10 billion years ago when the bulk of star formation to place. 

  You can see a much better detailed pic at the LA Science Now page HERE as well as read the complete article.

Was the Early Universe a Cosmic Zoo?

The question, up until recently, was - how did the young universe appear?  Was it an orderly cross section of a few well mannered galaxies or was it a miss-mash of varied galactic types.

According to a recent article in Space.com, NASA's Hubble space telescope's "CANDLES" (Cosmic Assembly Near-Infrared Deep Extra-galactic Legacy Survey) study shows that the universe, even 11 billion years ago, "the diversity of galaxies in the early universe was as varied as the many galaxy types seen today"   This conclusion based on a galaxy classification system known as the Hubble Sequence of which CANDLES is a part.  The Sequence shows that the universe over the past 11 billion years was just as diverse as present day.

This becomes important when we look at how the Hubble Sequence is set up and the results that were garnered from the young universe.  The Sequence divides galaxies into three basic types based on their appearance:  Spiral which has plenty of gas for star building.  As the gas runs out galaxies transition to elliptical galaxies which are for all intents, blobs or middle aged to older.  In between Spiral and elliptical is the transitional lenticular galaxy which has a blob like bright center but also maintains some spiral arm structures.  The lenticular galaxies are middle aged.   What the Sequence is showing however is that all three galaxy types were in evidence in the young universe. 

From the Space.com article:

• Arjen van der Wel of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany said "The galaxies look remarkably mature, which is not predicted by galaxy formation models to be the case that early on in the history of the universe."
• While past research showed that these distinct types of galaxy morphology existed as early as 8 billion years ago, the new study extends that understanding back another 2.5 billion years.

Read the complete Space.com article here

Universe's 1st Objects

Long time fan Courtney sends in this article from Yahoo News, concerning what may be the very first objects created after the big bang.

NASA's Spitzer space telescope, seen in the infrared, might be hugely massive stars or black holes, but are too distant to see individually. These object are estimated to have taken shape about 500 million years after the big bang. At this time, the first stars, galaxies and black holes began to take shape.

Though they can't be confirmed for sure, the objects seem to date from the early universe.

One thing that is also worthy of a thought is how tremendously bright these objects are to be seen at such vast distances. Alexander "Sasha" Kashlinsky of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement "We can't yet directly rule out mysterious sources for this light that could be coming from our nearby universe, but it is now becoming increasingly likely that we are catching a glimpse of an ancient epoch."

to read more click here for the complete Yahoo news item.

Dark Energy, it would seem, Has Been Confirmed

From the IO9 blog comes information that researchers have been able to confirm the existence of Dark Energy. This proof is in the form of a study called the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, or BOSS. This "survey" examined 300+ thousand galaxies with an average age/distance of six billion years. This time in the age of the universe is a telling time. The universe reach a point where matter density/gravity could no longer slow, let alone reverse, the outward expansion. At this point the repulsive forces of dark energy came into play and began speeding up the expansion.

But there is still a problem. We can see the effects, but not what is causing said effect. It is hoped that by studying the 300 plus thousand galaxies, it is hoped that scientists will be able to determine more and hopefully what this mysterious force really is.

One of the effects that the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey has been able to
observe some of the effects of and there by hinting that they are indeed on the right track is the Baryon Oscillation for which the study is named for. The Baryon Oscillation were massive oscillations, sound waves if you like, that took place very shortly after the big bang (30 thousand years or so) These sound waves ultimately could have been responsible for the overall make up of the Universe billions of years ago.

Check out the IO9 article here
BBC News online
Wiki on Baryon Oscillation Survey

Ultra Red Galaxies Discovered

Science Daily reports of a news type of extreme galaxy discovered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These galaxies are so very red that not even Hubble can detect them. Spitzer it seems is much more sensitive to infrared than Hubble.

It would appear that the redness comes from a variety of causes. First is their great distance. At the very edge of the universe and created just 1 billion years after the big bang accounts for a great deal of red shift, at that distance the universe expansion causes massive red shift. Also these galaxies appear to be make up of mostly red stars plus the amount of dust between them and us causes attenuation of all but the longest wavelengths of light.

What makes these galaxies even more unusual is that at that distance, galaxies should be young proto galaxies for the most part. These galaxies have all the monikers of extreme age.

Read complete article here

photo is artist representation. courtesy of physorg.org

Galaxy Formation Started Much Earlier Than Expected

A Science Daily article reports that recent research into when galaxy formation started has brought to light some rather startling findings.

Astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. They found a very distant galaxy that began forming stars just 200 million years after the Big Bang. One such galaxy was observed through a gravity lens formed by a cluster of galaxies called Abell 383, without the lensing effect, the extremely distant galaxy would have been too faint to observe.

Though its not the oldest by several hundred million years, it is very unusual in that it is comprised almost totally of very old stars, unlike most of the very distant galaxies that contain mostly young bright stars. This told researchers that the galaxy was made up of stars already nearly 750 million years old -- pushing back the epoch of its formation to about 200 million years after the Big Bang, much further than had expected.

Read more here

Hubble Discovers Oldest Object in the Universe

According to NASA's website, the Hubble Space Telescope has found what could be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. Light first left this object 13.2 billion years ago. That makes it about 150 million years older than the previous record holder. That makes the age of the universe a bit older than 13.5 billion years old and somewhere nearer 13.7 Billion years.

The extremely dim object is a compact galaxy of blue stars. This small dim galaxy would have existed 480 million years after the big bang, very exciting news when you consider that this finding puts our understanding of the early universe and when the first stars arrived. This also means that there is now evidence that the rate of star birth in the early universe grew dramatically, increasing 10 fold from 480 million years to 650 million years after the big bang.

One thing is very evident however. There were big changes during this early period of the universe. It's clear that as astronomers peer further back and further out in time and space, they're going to see even more dramatic changes, closer to when the first galaxies were just starting to form.

The known universe by the American Museum of Natural History

Again, just for a few moment, sit back and let this short video do it's magic. From the American Museum of Natural History we have a quick trip through the known universe. Believe me, just one minute out at light speed and you start feeling VERY insignificant!

Hubble Finds The Oldest Galaxy So Far

Tim Sayell send in a great article concerning a recent discovery by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope.

Studying a NASA photograph, released earlier this year, European astronomers have uncovered a galaxy 13.1 billion years old. That makes the universe just shy of 600 million years old when it was a separate entity. It is quite literally the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far. It is so old in fact that the astronomers do not even think it exists in it observed form any longer. It was most likely swept up by younger and much larger galaxies.

What makes this discovery equally important is the age of the galaxy in the image. Astronomers put it at apx. 100 million years. They can say that with a fair amount of certainty because of the lack of heavy metals and an abundance of massive blue giant stars. The age is important in that at the time this old galaxy was first formed, the universe was itself only 100 million or so years old. Astronomers feel that they are very close to discovering objects from the creation of the universe.

complete article in Yahoo News

Could our universe be 150 billion years old?

The Daily Galaxy blog posted a rather interesting article that questions the conventional age of the universe. Instead of the commonly held age of 13 billion years, a team of the British, American, and Hungarian astronomers say that there is evidence that the true age of the universe may be as long as 150 billion years instead.

Their evidence? The group states that there are 13 gigantic "rivers" of galaxies that are so huge and so well organized that it would take upwards of 150 billion years for these structures to form, based on their speed of movement and using the standard Big Bang cosmology.

For more on this subject - check the posting on the Daily Galaxy site here

Hubble Confirms Accelerated Expansion of the Universe

A recent Hubble project requiring 600 Earth orbits and 1000 observational man hours has confirmed that the Universe is indeed expanding and expanding at an accelerated rate.

European scientists from the Leiden Observatory and the University of British Columbia studied over 400,000 galaxies in the hopes to better understand cosmic expansion. The model that had been in use until recently was constructed using only 2d information. With the new Hubble observations and additional ground based telescopic data has allowed for an extremely accurate model to be constructed.

The scale of this study enables an independent confirmation that the expansion of the Universe is accelerated by an additional component that researchers have labeled dark energy, which up to this point has been all but impossible to study let alone quantify.

The results of the study will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

For a more detailed explanation of the study, check out the article at Spacetelescope.org

Is Time Disappearing From the Universe?

In a mind bending alternative explanation to the apparent acceleration of galaxies at the edge of the universe - Professor Jose Senovilla, and his colleagues at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain suggest that there is no such thing as Dark Energy, which conventional theory has at it's core for the force driving these galaxies apart at an ever increasing pace. Instead Professor Senovilla theorizes that time itself is leaking out of the universe!

Scientists today base their models on the red-shift that far reaching galaxies present, demonstrating that as these galaxies move away from us, they stretch or shift light to a lower energy level making them appear redder. The farther away, the more pronounced the red-shift. The lynch-pin however is that for this theory to work, time must remain constant across the universe.

Senovilla however posits that time IS NOT constant and in fact is slowing down. The net effect would present itself in exactly the same manner. With time slowing down, far reacihng galaxies would indeed appear to speed up.

Professor Senovilla explains that the universe IS indeed expanding, just that it is NOT accelerating.

The team's proposal will be published in the journal Physical Review D.

For more on this mind bending theory, click on the article title for the complete Daily Galaxy post

The Universe may be recycled!

You have got to love IO9 for articles that just twist the top of your head to let the evil spirits out.

For those of you that are Poul Anderson fan and just ate up his novel Tau Zero, you're, like me, going to see Anderson's novel come to life in this recent OP9 article.

As theories of the Universe go, the most popular is the "big bang" theory of how things started. It's pretty well thought out and supported almost, excuse the pun, universally. Well along comes Martin Bojowald and his associates with a theory that closely resembles Anderson's cyclic Universe. Bojowald postulates that there is a possibility that our universe was created by the death of an earlier universe. How do ya like dem apples!

Martin Bojowald and Abhat Ashtekar began researching their theory of loop quantum cosmology (LQC), an approach to cosmology that combine’s Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics.

From the IO9 article:

• Bojowald's major realization was that unlike general relativity, the physics of LQC did not break down at the big bang. Cosmologists dread the singularity because at this point gravity becomes infinite, along with the temperature and density of the universe. As its equations cannot cope with such infinities, general relativity fails to describe what happens at the big bang. Bojowald's work showed how to avoid the hated singularity, albeit mathematically.
• The researchers have found that when applying LQC, the universe does not revert back to a singularity as it contracts. Instead of seeing a big bang, the models indicate that the universe experienced a big bounce, with a predecessor universe contracting as it ended and then reemerging as our new, expanding universe. ....it could mean that our universe does not have a finite beginning and end but is, instead, part of a chain of universes that expand and then contract to give way to a brand new universe.

<- New Scientist article ->

Young Universe data show Old Galaxies?!!!

Now here is something that would drive a science fiction writer nuts. Astronomers using Gemini North Telescope located on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, now have the ability to peer farther back into the past with greater resolution than ever before. Their goal, to observe galaxy formation in the early universe at an age of 20 to 40% of its' present age. This early formative period in the universe should be dominated by little galaxies crashing together. But that is when the weirdness begins. What should have appeared as stars and galaxies in their formative period instead appear to be more fully formed and mature than expected at this early stage in the evolution of the Universe.

<- read more of this very intriguing research in the Daily Galaxy ->

Stargate Universe Revealed!

Gateworld via Sciframa are breaking the news concerning Sci-Fi's newest Star Gate franchise called Stargate Universe.

“The idea of Stargate Universe is that it is set on a ship that was part of an Ancient experiment that was set in motion probably millions of years ago — one that they never saw to fruition, but that we can,” Wright told GateWorld exclusively. “They got busy with the whole ascension thing.”

The first obstacle that Universe ran into was the writer's strike...next was expense...universe is going to be one of the more expensive shows for the Sci-fi Channel. Finally the writing team of Brand Wright and Robert Cooper are still quite busy and word has it that they don't relish returning to the schedule that requires them to produce 40 hours of television each year, indicating that Stargate Atlantis could share a fate of SG-1. Then again, it could also mean Stargate Universe will be put on hold until Atlantis concludes its run.