“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…)
The Greek god of darkness was Erebus, one of the primordial deities in Greek mythology, born out of Chaos, the primeval void, foreshadowing the contemporary, emerging reality of the dark side of our universe. Enter physicist Sir Roger Penrose, and his Erebon field theory, a novel explanation of dark matter. Despite dedicated searches, no signs of a dark matter particle have turned up.
“The Hubble constant anchors the physical scale of the universe,” said Simon Birrer, an astronomer at UCLA. Without a precise value for the Hubble constant, astronomers can’t accurately determine the sizes of remote galaxies, the age of the universe or the expansion history of the cosmos.
A fossil cloud of gas, orphaned after the Big Bang, that reveals how the first galaxies were formed, has been discovered in the distant universe by astronomers using the world’s most powerful optical telescope, the W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea, Hawaii.
