CMB tagged posts

The clearest and most precise images yet of the universe in its infancy—the earliest cosmic time accessible to humans—have been produced by an international team of astronomers.

Measuring light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), that traveled for more than 13 billion years to reach a telescope high in the Chilean Andes, the new images reveal the universe when it was about 380,000 years old—the equivalent of hours-old baby pictures of a now middle-aged cosmos.

The research, by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration, shows both the intensity and polarization of the earliest light after the Big Bang with unprecedented clarity, revealing the formation of ancient, consolidating clouds of hydrogen and helium that later developed into the first stars an...

One of the biggest mysteries in science—dark energy—doesn’t actually exist, according to researchers looking to solve the riddle of how the universe is expanding.

Their analysis has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

For the past 100 years, physicists have generally assumed that the cosmos is growing equally in all directions. They employed the concept of dark energy as a placeholder to explain unknown physics they couldn’t understand, but the contentious theory has always had its problems.

Now a team of physicists and astronomers at the university of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand are challenging the status quo, using improved analysis of supernovae light curves to show that the universe is expanding in a mor...

Astronomers analyzing 13 years of data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have found an unexpected and as yet unexplained feature outside of our galaxy.

“It is a completely serendipitous discovery,” said Alexander Kashlinsky, a cosmologist at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, who presented the research at the 243rd mee...

As the universe evolves, scientists expect large cosmic structures to grow at a certain rate: dense regions such as galaxy clusters would grow denser, while the void of space would grow emptier.

But University of Michigan researchers have discovered that the rate at which these large structures grow is slower than predicted by Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

They also showed that as dark energy accelerates the universe’s global expansion, the suppression of the cosmic structure growth that the researchers see in their data is even more prominent than what the theory pr...