Big Bang tagged posts

Composite image of the galaxy cluster from three different filters on the Hubble Space Telescope. The wave charts (insets at left) show spectra of the multiply imaged systems. The fact that they share peaks at the same wavelength shows that they belong to the same source. At bottom right, the Keck I and Keck II Telescopes at Hawaii’s the W. M. Keck Observatory. Credit: BRADAC/HST/W. M. Keck Observatory

Discovery could help explain how ‘cosmic dark ages’ ended. Using the W. M. Keck Observatory on the summit on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the researchers detected the galaxy as it was 13 billion years ago. The researchers made the discovery using gravitational lensing to see the incredibly faint object, which was born just after the Big Bang...

The nuclear phase diagram: RHIC sits in the energy “sweet spot” for exploring the transition between ordinary matter made of hadrons and the early universe matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

An in-depth look at the origins of matter and the environmental conditions that helped shape the universe today. Our understanding is shaped by re-creating events that constituted the Big Bang and by studying the primordial soup of fundamental particles of the very early universe. One of the best science tools for this is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

RHIC, a particle collider, is the first machine capable of mashing together heavy ions, which are atoms that h...

This display shows a neutrino event candidate in the MicroBooNE detector. Credit: MicroBooNE

It detected its first neutrinos on Oct. 15, marking the beginning of detailed studies of these fundamental particles whose properties could be linked to dark matter, matter’s dominance over antimatter in the universe and the evolution of the entire cosmos since the Big Bang.

The MicroBooNE detector – a so-called time projection chamber filled with 170 tons of liquid argon – spotted neutrinos that were generated when proton beams from Fermilab’s accelerator complex slammed into a target a few hundred yards away from the detector.

Researchers from Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are developing tools for the acquisition of the experiment’s data and for the reconstruction of...

Galaxy EGS8p7, as seen from the Hubble Space Telescope (wide and top right) and Spitzer Space Telescope (inset, bottom right), taken in infrared. Credit: I. Labbé (Leiden University), NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech – See more at: http://www.caltech.edu/news/farthest-galaxy-detected-47761#sthash.HzTzLROU.dpuf

Researchers have reported the detection of the farthest object yet, galaxy EGS8p7. At >13.2 billion years old, it provides a fascinating glimpse of the very early universe, just 600,000 years after the Big Bang.

Earlier this year, EGS8p7 had been identified as a candidate for investigation based on Hubble and Spitzer data. Using the multi-object spectrometer for infrared exploration (MOSFIRE) at the W.M...