An unknown object, perhaps a cosmic string, was detected at the Milky Way’s galactic center in 2016 that could have profound implications for understanding gravity, space-time and the Universe itself. Cosmic strings, galaxy-sized filaments of raw energy, may be threaded through spacetime, according to some theories. At the Big Bang, our universe exploded into being, expanded at a fantastic speed and cooled perhaps cracking the fabric of the universe with hairline fractures.
On March 21, 2013, the European Space Agency held an international press conference to announce new results from a spacecraft called Planck that mapped the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, light emitted more than 13 billion years ago just after the Big Bang revealing some of the greatest mysteries of cosmology.
“This primitive star surprises us for its high lithium content, and its possible relation to the primordial lithium formed in the Big Bang,” notes David Aguado, a researcher with team at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and the University of Cambridge that have detected lithium in one of the oldest most primitive stars in our galaxy. This discovery, which could give crucial information about the creation of atomic nuclei (“nucleosynthesis”) in the Big Bang, was made at the VLT, at the Paranal Observatory of ESO in Chile.
When antimatter and matter meet, they annihilate, and the result is light and nothing else. Given equal amounts of matter and antimatter, nothing would remain once the reaction was completed. As long as we don’t know why more matter exists than antimatter, we can’t know why the building blocks of anything else exist, either. This is one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics, says Jens Oluf Andersen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. (more…)