“Such stunning cosmic coincidences reveal so much about nature.” ~ Leonidas Moustakas, Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern. The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. Read more: "Einstein’s [...]

String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we see as the Big Bang was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes.  In their view of the universe the complexities [...]

In 2004 astronomers found an enormous hole in the southern hemisphere of the Universe, nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen “dark matter.” This was a startling finding, since accepted models of the early universe say that the big bang created an initially uniform cosmic landscape, when viewed on large scales. While earlier studies have shown holes, or voids, in the large-scale structure of the Universe, [...]

That might sound like what happens when a poet reads a physics textbook, but it’s an actual theory put forward by Stephen Hawking-grade scientists.  Stephen Hawking, in fact, and Professor Thomas Hertog of CERN, who came up with a unique answer to how the universe began: “In every way imaginable.” That’s not the result of chemically-assisted consciousness, either, they actually derived their way to that solution to solve problems in the existing approach.  Physics is excellent [...]

Lawrence Krauss gives a brilliant talk on our current picture of the universe, how it will end, and how it could have come from nothing. Krauss is the author of many bestselling books on and Cosmology, including “The Physics of Star Trek.” More: Lawrence Krauss: "A Universe from Nothing" (VIDEO)

Did dark matter destroy the universe?  You might be looking around at the way things “exist” and thinking “No”, but we’re talking about ancient history.  Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around – only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark.  Why? Most believe that the first quasars, active [...]

The Great Filter is the idea that there is some single, almost insurmountably improbable barrier on the path to the stars that explains why we've never seen any sign of alien life.  It combines aspects of astronomy, biology and history to arrive at one inescapable conclusion: university professors dream of book deals. Robin Hanson of George Mason University posits a “Great Filter” that prevents the rise of intelligent, self-aware, technologically advanced, space-colonizing civilizations. [...]