Teams of researchers working in underground laboratories across the world believe the decades-long hunt for dark matter might soon bear fruit. But their excitement about detecting these hypothetical ghost particles is only matched by growing doubt about whether they even exist at all. A mysterious power has the universe in its grip and, like a giant fist, it bends entire… Read more →
Traces of ancient viruses which infected our ancestors millions of years ago are more widespread in us than previously thought. A study shows how extensively viruses from as far back as the dinosaur era still thrive in our genetic material. It sheds light on the origins of a big proportion of our genetic material, much of which is still not… Read more →
Dark matter is mysteriously missing from the sun‘s neighborhood, according to a new study that could provide ammunition for skeptics who argue that the invisible substance is just an illusion. “There will be people claiming dark matter doesn’t exist because of this result,” predicted study leader Christian Moni-Bidin, an astronomer at Chile’s University of Concepción. “These observations alone do not prove that… Read more →
(multimedia) There’s more to the cosmos than meets the eye. About 80 percent of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes, yet its gravitational influence is manifest in the orbital speeds of stars around galaxies and in the motions of clusters of galaxies. Yet, despite decades of effort, no one knows what this “dark matter” really is. Many scientists… Read more →
The mysteries of the universe are as vast and wide as existence itself. Throughout history, mankind has searched and struggled to find the answers tucked away inside the universe and everything we see around us. As Deep Thought said in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never… Read more →
Astronomers have spotted a “dwarf” galaxy some 10 billion light-years away which may be made mostly of the mysterious material called dark matter. The dwarf was found using a technique called gravitational lensing. It is only the second dark dwarf ever seen, and it is by far the most distant. The fact that so few dwarf galaxies are seen in… Read more →
A US team has found the two biggest “supermassive” black holes known to science, Nature journal reports. Sitting at the centres of two nearby galaxies, the two objects have masses close to 10 billion times greater than our Sun. Such large black holes had been suspected to exist, but, until now, the biggest known was some 6.3 billion times the… Read more →
New Haven, Connecticut (CNN) – On Tuesday, three U.S.-trained scientists won the Nobel prize in physics, for finding definitive evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
