http://www.physorg.com/ en-us Physorg.com internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (PhysOrg.com) -- Australian astronomers have released the first set of data from the first project to look at the effects of "dark energy" halfway back in the Universe's lifetime. http://www.physorg.com/news179508040.html Space & Earth Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:21:06 EST news179508040 A proposed space mission that aims to measure dark energy could also detect planets that current surveys are unable to find. http://www.physorg.com/news177874211.html Space & Earth Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:00:05 EST news177874211 (PhysOrg.com) -- "One of the major problems in modern astrophysics is the fact that we still do not know exactly what kinds of stellar system explode as a Type Ia supernova," says Patrick Woudt, from the University of Cape Town and lead author of the paper reporting the results. "As these supernovae play a crucial role in showing that the Universe's expansion is currently accelerating, pushed by a mysterious dark energy, it is rather embarrassing." http://www.physorg.com/news177676554.html Space & Earth Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:36:27 EST news177676554 It's the biggest problem in physics: the matter we can see in the universe accounts for just five per cent of the observed gravity that holds galaxies together. http://www.physorg.com/news177230113.html Physics Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:35:57 EST news177230113 A detailed picture of the seeds of structures in the universe has been unveiled by an international team co-led by a Cardiff University scientist. http://www.physorg.com/news176389334.html Space & Earth Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:02:40 EST news176389334 Understanding dark energy is the number one issue in explaining the universe, according to Salman Habib, of the Laboratory's Nuclear and Particle Physics, Astrophysics and Cosmology group. http://www.physorg.com/news175787311.html Physics Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:00:01 EST news175787311 The world's fastest supercomputer, Roadrunner, at Los Alamos National Laboratory has completed its initial "shakedown" phase doing accelerated petascale computer modeling and simulations of a variety of unclassified, fundamental science projects. http://www.physorg.com/news175781501.html Electronics Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:13:49 EST news175781501 (PhysOrg.com) -- The distant past of the universe is moving closer. Astronomers are using special spectrographs to investigate galaxies in the depths of the universe as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. The instruments are very sensitive to infrared light and can even detect very distant galaxies whose light is shifted towards the long-wavelength, red region of the spectrum as a result of the cosmic expansion. The astrophysicists hope that the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) will record the spectra of 1.4 million galaxies and 160,000 quasars by 2014. http://www.physorg.com/news174669985.html Space & Earth Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:40:01 EST news174669985 BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is the most ambitious attempt yet to map the expansion history of the Universe using the technique known as baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO). A part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), BOSS achieved "first light" on the night of September 14-15, when it acquired data with an upgraded spectrographic system across the entire focal plane of the Sloan Foundation 2.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. http://www.physorg.com/news173626603.html Space & Earth Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:50:01 EST news173626603 Among the most astounding, unexpected, and important achievements of the past century (or even more) have been the discoveries of dark matter and dark energy, collectively dubbed the "dark sector." http://www.physorg.com/news171640779.html Physics Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:00:37 EST news171640779 (PhysOrg.com) -- The stellar explosions known as type 1a supernovae have long been used as "standard candles," their uniform brightness giving astronomers a way to measure cosmic distances and the expansion of the universe. But a new study published this week in Nature reveals sources of variability in type 1a supernovae that will have to be taken into account if astronomers are to use them for more precise measurements in the future. http://www.physorg.com/news169303137.html Space & Earth Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:10:02 EST news169303137 (PhysOrg.com) -- Several ways have been proposed to examine dark energy, in hopes of finding out just what it is. One of them, "supernovae" for short, certainly works: it's how dark energy was discovered in the first place. Other independent techniques, such as weak gravitational lensing and baryon acoustic oscillation, also promise great power but are as yet unproven. http://www.physorg.com/news168858441.html Physics Fri, 07 Aug 2009 10:08:13 EST news168858441 Pasadena, CA-The Australian government has announced that it will provide $88.4 million AUD ($72.4 million USD) to help fund the revolutionary 25-meter Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) to be sited at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile's high-altitude Atacama Desert. This brings the funding that has been raised to date to $200 million out of approximately $700 million total needed to complete construction, which is scheduled for 2019. http://www.physorg.com/news168008369.html Space & Earth Tue, 28 Jul 2009 14:19:59 EST news168008369 Ten years ago, on July 23, 1999, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory was launched aboard the space shuttle Columbia and deployed into orbit. Chandra has doubled its original five-year mission, ushering in an unprecedented decade of discovery for the high-energy universe. http://www.physorg.com/news167563042.html Space & Earth Thu, 23 Jul 2009 10:17:57 EST news167563042 In a controversial new paper in the journal Nature, astronomers from Queen's University Belfast have proposed a new physical interpretation of a supernova discovered on 7th November 2008. http://www.physorg.com/news163760815.html Space & Earth Tue, 09 Jun 2009 10:07:23 EST news163760815 Radio astronomers have directly measured the distance to a faraway galaxy, providing a valuable "yardstick" for calibrating large astronomical distances and demonstrating a vital method that could help determine the elusive nature of the mysterious Dark Energy that pervades the Universe. http://www.physorg.com/news163682693.html Space & Earth Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:25:20 EST news163682693 (PhysOrg.com) -- Today Oxford University scientists are joining in a special celebration of the first test of Albert Einstein`s theory of gravity on the remote African island where the ground-breaking experiment took place. http://www.physorg.com/news162820004.html Physics Fri, 29 May 2009 12:47:32 EST news162820004 (PhysOrg.com) -- `Axionlike particles are interesting because they come up regularly when scientists study string theory. By looking at their properties, you hope to learn about string theory, or some other unified theory of physics. From a cosmological point of view, axionlike particles are of interest because they could be connected to dark energy,` Clare Burrage tells PhysOrg.com. The main hiccup in this study of axionlike particles, however, is the fact that their existence - much like their cousins, axions - has yet to be proven. http://www.physorg.com/news162719375.html Physics Thu, 28 May 2009 08:50:18 EST news162719375 (PhysOrg.com) -- A new technique for measuring the distances to supernovae more accurately than ever before has been developed by a team of scientists from Yale University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a consortium of French laboratories. http://www.physorg.com/news162219562.html Space & Earth Fri, 22 May 2009 14:00:02 EST news162219562 (PhysOrg.com) -- The Hubble Space Telescope has been with us for nearly two decades. In that time, its breathtaking images have captured people`s imaginations and its groundbreaking science has revealed some of the many secrets of our universe. http://www.physorg.com/news161960925.html Space & Earth Tue, 19 May 2009 14:15:16 EST news161960925 Members of the international Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory), a collaboration among the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a consortium of French laboratories, and Yale University, have found a new technique that establishes the intrinsic brightness of Type Ia supernovae more accurately than ever before. These exploding stars are the best standard candles for measuring cosmic distances, the tools that made the discovery of dark energy possible. http://www.physorg.com/news161885998.html Space & Earth Mon, 18 May 2009 17:20:36 EST news161885998 US astronauts on Sunday will undertake a fourth in a series of five daily spacewalks intended to equip the 19-year-old Hubble Space Telescope for at least another five years of valuable scientific work. http://www.physorg.com/news161749636.html Space & Earth Sun, 17 May 2009 03:29:38 EST news161749636 Spacewalking astronauts upgraded the Hubble telescope for the first time in seven years, equipping the 19-year-old stargazer with a powerful new camera and science computer. http://www.physorg.com/news161595879.html Space & Earth Fri, 15 May 2009 08:45:23 EST news161595879 The Hubble space telescope, the object of NASA's fifth and last servicing mission next week, is a veritable time machine that has revolutionized humankind's vision and comprehension of the universe. http://www.physorg.com/news161142870.html Space & Earth Sun, 10 May 2009 02:55:16 EST news161142870 Imagine a time when the entire universe froze. According to a new model for dark energy, that is essentially what happened about 11.5 billion years ago, when the universe was a quarter of the size it is today. http://www.physorg.com/news161026176.html Physics Fri, 08 May 2009 18:30:17 EST news161026176 Whatever dark energy is, explanations for it have less wiggle room following a Hubble Space Telescope observation that has refined the measurement of the universe's present expansion rate to a precision where the error is smaller than 5 percent. The new value for the expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant, or Ho (after Edwin Hubble who first measured the expansion of the universe nearly a century ago), is 74.2 kilometers per second per megaparsec (error margin of ± 3.6). The results agree closely with an earlier measurement gleaned from Hubble of 72 ± 8 km/sec/megaparsec, but are now more than twice as precise. http://www.physorg.com/news160923906.html Physics Thu, 07 May 2009 14:05:55 EST news160923906 (PhysOrg.com) -- "In many ways, the standard model of cosmology works very well," Jose Cembranos tells PhysOrg. "However, there are very basic features that we just do not know. We have dark energy and dark matter. They dictate the evolution of late time cosmology. They both together constitute more than 95 percent of the energy content of the present Universe." If this is the case, why do we trust the standard model? It can`t explain such a large portion of the universe. http://www.physorg.com/news159444907.html Physics Mon, 20 Apr 2009 11:17:07 EST news159444907 Scientists are harnessing the cosmos as a scientific 'instrument' in their quest to determine the makeup of the universe. http://www.physorg.com/news154357589.html Space & Earth Fri, 20 Feb 2009 13:07:11 EST news154357589 During the next decade, a delicate measurement of primordial light could reveal convincing evidence for the popular cosmic inflation theory, which proposes that a random, microscopic density fluctuation in the fabric of space and time gave birth to the universe in a hot big bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago. http://www.physorg.com/news154010927.html Space & Earth Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:49:33 EST news154010927 (PhysOrg.com) -- An alternative proposal to dark energy in which the Earth sits near the center of a large void is undergoing scrutiny, and the results show that void models fit poorly with observed data. Nevertheless, scientists say that more research will be needed to determine if void models, dark energy, or something else can accurately explain how the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. http://www.physorg.com/news152374990.html Physics Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:23:51 EST news152374990