New Universes Can Form Inside Dying Stars, Physicists Show

Could our universe have been born inside a collapsing star? That idea recently made headlines, and I got a lot of questions about it. The paper behind them describes a new solution to Einstein's equations in which a collapsing star expands on the inside and never forms a black hole. Let's take a look.

Alien Spacecraft Are On the Moon, Astronomers Claim. Seriously now?

A group of astronomers say they've spotted more than twenty giant unidentified objects racing around the Moon, some of them forty kilometres across, and that the Moon serves as a base for them. The daily mail loved it. My bullshit meter did not survive it. But underneath all this nonsense there's a serious question that almost nobody is looking into. Let's take a look.

Mathematicians Explain The Universe’s Expansion Without Dark Matter

About 25 years ago, astrophysicists noticed that the universe’s expansion is accelerating. To account for this observation, physicists came up with a new type of energy – called dark energy – which supposedly makes up more than 75% of the universe, and also has negative pressure. In a new paper, mathematicians claim that dark energy isn’t needed to explain that accelerating expansion, and physicists have been barking up the wrong tree for decades. Let’s take a look.

Our Solar System Lost Two Planets

A new, computer-based calculation shows that our solar system used to have 5 or 6, rather than 4 gas giants. It seems that, billions of years ago, we lost two planets due to an instability that probably also tilted Uranus’s axis and scrambled up its moons. Let’s have a look.

The Biggest Argument for Dark Matter Just Died

Physicists have been arguing about dark matter for almost a century, and now, after all this time, their most favourite evidence for dark matter – the Bullet Cluster – disappeared. This isn’t just an interesting development from a scientific perspective, it is also a good illustration for what is going wrong in this research area. I have a brief summary.

Controversy Erupts over Expansion of Universe: Nobel Prize Awarded in Error?

In 2011, three physicists won the Nobel Prize for showing that the expansion of the universe speeds up, which is usually attributed to aa mysterious type of energy called “dark energy”. But last year, though, a different group published research showing that universal expansion isn’t actually getting faster. Since then, the two groups have engaged in a whole bunch of back-and-forth refuting each other’s claims and now a third one has chimed in. Let’s take a look.

Physicists Are Rethinking Dark Matter… In The Wrong Way.

Physicists believe that 80% of the matter in the universe is made of ‘dark matter’ that we can’t see. But despite decades of work, they haven’t been able to confirm that this matter really exists. In the past years, physicists have been rethinking the dark matter idea… but not in the way you might expect. Let’s take a look.

This Giant Ring In Space Poses A Massive Problem For Cosmology

Scientists say that they’ve just detected a massive cloud of gas some 3 billion lightyears in diameter, floating in space roughly 7 billion light years away from us. This is pretty cool, but the problem is that our current models of the universe say that it (and other massive structures like it) just shouldn’t exist. Let’s take a look.

New Theory Explains How Time Began

The biggest open problem in the foundations of physics is that Einstein’s theory of gravity, General Relativity, does not cooperate with quantum mechanics. Physicists have tried to solve this issue by coming up with a theory of quantum gravity, but those theories fall apart when you need them most – inside of black holes and at the Big Bang. Recently, though, physicists published a new calculation for the Big Bang, with a theory called quadratic gravity, which lets us skip over quantum gravity entirely, and that could explain the origin of time. Let’s take a look.

Bacteria could survive trip on asteroid, scientists find

That life might have come to earth traveling through outer space used to be a fringe theory called ‘panspermia’. But in the past decade or so, we have seen an interesting shift in how scientists regard the idea. Let’s take at one new study that might support ‘panspermia,’ as well as other facts that support the theory.

The Fermi Paradox Just Got Worse

The Fermi Paradox is the question of why we haven’t been contacted by any extraterrestrial species. In a recent paper, astrophysicists analyzed the paradox by instead examining how civilizations with the ability to send signals through space might develop. Unfortunately for us, their findings are quite bleak – but let’s take a look anyway.

The Dark Matter Mystery Just Took a Weird Turn

MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) is a theory of gravity that explains the physical phenomena we observe in galaxies with surprising accuracy, but it falls apart when it’s applied to galaxy clusters. The widely accepted dark matter theory, meanwhile, can apply to both. But according to new research by astrophysicists, observational data shows that our universe is full of more dead stars than we thought – with that in mind, they claim that MOND is now more widely applicable than dark matter theory. Let’s take a look.

More Evidence for UAPs! Scientists Afraid to Speak Out

UFOs are now known as UAPs, which stands for “unidentified anomalous phenomena.” These phenomena are increasingly popping up in headlines as technology advances, but for some reason scientists are still reluctant to research them. Let’s take a look at some recent UAP sightings and why we need to invest more into UAP research.

Evidence for Life In Other Solar Systems? No but yes.

The search for life on another planet is one of the most exciting things in astrophysics. As humanity has searched the universe for signs of life, we’ve found a surprising number of clues suggesting that alien life might exist on multiple other planets. Let’s take a look at how this search is developing and what “signs of life” really are.

Surprise! Milky Way Might Not Have a Black Hole After All

Using our observations and predictions based off of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, physicists are pretty sure that there’s a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. But according to a new paper, that prediction might be incorrect – instead, physicists claim that there’s actually a dense core of dark matter at the center of the galaxy instead. Let’s see if that makes sense, and what it might mean for physics.

Nuclear Fusion Reactors Could Produce Dark Matter, Physicists Show

Fusion reactors, according to a recently published paper, could produce theoretical particles that might make up dark matter. More specifically, physicists predict that they might produce large quantities of axions, low-mass elementary particles that some physicists believe might explain dark matter. Let’s take a look.

We Live In Between Two HUGE Dark Matter Voids

Our universe is a very strange place, but a new dark matter simulation seems to suggest that we live in a particularly strange area in it. According to a new paper published by a group of astrophysicists, simulations seem to indicate that our galaxy cluster exists in a thin area of highly concentrated dark matter, which itself is located between two voids of dark matter. Let’s take a look.

A New Link Between Quantum Physics and Gravity

We know that Einstein’s general relativity is, strictly speaking, wrong. That’s because it doesn’t account for quantum effects despite the fact that those effects really do exist. In a new paper, physicists say they’ve re-done Einstein’s equations with quantum effects taken into account. According to them, there’s a “clear difference” between the two. Let’s take a look at what they’ve done and what it could mean for physics.

Action at a Distance Can Explain Dark Matter, Physicists Show

Physicists don’t actually know what the universe is really made of. The currently most popular theory is that most of the universe is made of dark matter, a mysterious type of matter that we can only detect through its gravitational pull on other objects. But according to a new paper, we’ve misunderstood how gravity works. The authors say that gravity really can do action at a distance and that explains the observations that we currently ascribe to dark matter. Let’s take a look.

Are Black Holes Real?

I have been alerted that black holes don’t exist, again. This isn’t the first time I have been asked to assess an argument which seems to prove that black holes aren’t real, but let’s take a look at all the new developments in this debate.