universe

A different view: This orbiting telescope was launched in July last year and despatched to an observing position some 1.5 million km from Earth. Once commissioned and declared fully operational in December, it was left to slowly rotate and scan the depths of space. eRosita’s first all-sky data-set, represented in the image at the top of this page, was completed only last week. It records over a million sources of X-rays. Jonathan Amos, “Breathtaking new map of the X-ray Universe” at BBC Still amazing.

Thought it all started with a big bang? Well, not so fast. If a new theory turns out to be true, the universe may not have started with a bang. In the new formulation, the universe has never been a singularity, nor an infinitely small and infinitely dense point of matter. In fact, the universe may not have a beginning at all. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once. “The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University and the Zewail City of Science and Technology, both in Egypt, told Phys.org. “Our Read More ›

The largest large quasar group LQG ever has been discovered, stretching an enormous 4 billion light years from end to end. That is 40,000 times larger than our Milky Way galaxy which is only 100,000 light years across. This LQG contains 73 quasars! See: Largest Structure in the universe discovered “The quasar group appears to violate a widely accepted assumption known as the cosmological principle, which holds that the universe is essentially homogeneous when viewed at a sufficiently large scale.” Original publication: Astronomers discover the largest structure in the universe Royal Astronomic Society, Monthly Notices, January 11, 2013. If stochastic homogeneity is disproved, is there an intelligent design based argument for the existence of such an enormous Large Quasar Group?