All the matter and radiation in the universe was created by the big bang. The radiation stopped interacting with the matter about 300,000 years later – when the universe had cooled down enough f...
Read article: The universe is flat – official
The CXB covers a range of photon energies, with a peak around 40 kiloelectron volts (keV). The soft X-ray part of the background – photon energies between about 0.5 and 2 keV – was extensi...
Confirmation that the universe is flat – expanding at just the right rate not to collapse – came from measurements of ripples in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang...
Our understanding of the universe has advanced immeasurably in the last century, and there seems no end to the wealth of new discoveries as we approach the next millennium
Read article: Astrophysics and cosmology: the golden age
Astronomers have argued about high-velocity clouds for over thirty-five years. Wakker and colleagues detected ionized sulphur in one such cloud using the Hubble Space Telescope. According to their cal...
The first evidence for the accelerating universe came from observations of distant supernovae. However, the data were also consistent with an open universe – a universe that would expand forever...
The team were able to measure the distance because NGC4258 is one of 22 nearby galaxies that have active nuclei consisting of a supermassive black hole (over 100 million solar masses) surrounded by a ...
String theory dates back some 30 years, but it was the “first string revolution” of 1984 that intensified interest in this, the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything&#...
Read article: String theory: simple yet elegant
An eight-year effort to measure the Hubble constant has yielded a result
Read article: New age of precision cosmology
1. The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brian Greene A fascinating and thought-provoking journey through the mysteries of space, time, and ma...
