The cosmic confusion of the microwave background

Roughly 380,000 years after the Big Bang, about 13.7 billion years ago, matter (mostly hydrogen) cooled enough for neutral atoms to form, and light was able to traverse space freely. That light, the cosmic microwave background ...

New Amplifier Pushes the Boundary of Quantum Physics

(PhysOrg.com) -- If powerful new quantum computers are to reach their enormous potential, they will need amplifiers capable of transmitting signals so weak they consist of a single photon. In the May 6 edition of the journal ...

Water was plentiful in the early universe

Astronomers have long held that water—two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom—was a relative latecomer to the universe. They believed that any element heavier than helium had to have been formed in the cores of stars and ...

New 3-D map will help solve long-standing cosmic mysteries

A new study led by ANU has created a 3D map of the magnetic field in a small wedge of the Milky Way galaxy, paving the way for future discoveries that will improve our understanding of the origin and evolution of the Universe.

No evidence for 'knots' in space

(Phys.org) -- Theories of the primordial Universe predict the existence of knots in the fabric of space - known as cosmic textures - which could be identified by looking at light from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), ...

Cosmologists cast doubt on inflation evidence

It was just a week ago that the news blew through the scientific world like a storm: researchers from the BICEP2 project at the South Pole Telescope had detected unambiguous evidence of primordial gravitational waves in the ...

ALMA's ability to see a 'cosmic hole' confirmed

Researchers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) successfully imaged a radio "hole" around a galaxy cluster 4.8 billion light-years away. This is the highest resolution image ever taken of such a ...

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