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Cosmology

Hubble Explodes Star-Formation Assumption in Globular Clusters
May 3, 2007
The Hubble Telescope found three episodes of star formation in a globular cluster.  While this announcement might make a layman yawn, what’s interesting are the expressions of grief and anguish coming from astronomers about what this does to their theories.  For many years, astronomers had prided themselves on their understanding of globular clusters.  These massive, […]
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Astronomy

Cosmology: Crisis or Confidence?
April 13, 2007
What is it with cosmology these days?  On the one hand, astronomers seem more confident than ever.  They speak of this as the era of “precision cosmology,” when the only task remaining seems to be refining the decimal points; e.g., the first refinements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) won John Mather and George Smoot […]
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Cosmology

Deconstructing Darwinese:  Delighting in Ignorance
March 8, 2007
When is ignorance a good thing?  When is confidence in one’s answers a bad thing?  One science writer expressed his desire for mystery over explanation – as long as the mysterious allowed room for lucky breaks without design.     Science writer Ben Shaberman got to share his views on the last page of the […]
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Cosmology

Tangled String: Cosmology on the Brink
February 18, 2007
The February cover of Astronomy Magazine poses an intriguing question: “What if string theory is wrong?”  Maybe you are unfamiliar with string theory.  Writer Sten Odenwald is not talking about violins or balls of string, but about the current leading theory of fundamental physics.  “Superstring theory,” Odenwald explains, “is based on three ideas that remain […]
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Cosmology

No Evolutionary Tree for Galaxies
January 18, 2007
Edwin Hubble was famous for many important discoveries, including the confirmation of external galaxies and the expansion of the universe (no, he did not build the Hubble Space Telescope; he died in 1953).  One of his theories, though, a kind of evolutionary story of galaxies, has not fared so well.  Sidney van den Bergh discussed […]
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Cosmology

Why Are We Here? Because We’’re Not All There
December 4, 2006
The anthropic principle survived another criticism.  Charles Q. Choi on Space.com reported on a critique by two physicists who think the cosmological constant is not so finely tuned.  In the end, the argument was shot down.  The story, asking “Why Are We Here?” was picked up by Fox News. Watch the new film The Case […]
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Biomimetics

ID Support from Unlikely Quarters
November 27, 2006
While Nature 11/24 described intelligent design (ID) as a threat to science, support for it came from two new scientific books reviewed in the same issue.  Both of them, while not using the phrase intelligent design, deal with concepts that imply science must reach beyond material causes. Just right universal soup:  Jim Al-Khalili (U of […]
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Cosmology

Strange Exploding Star Continues to Puzzle Astronomers
November 1, 2006
The Hubble took another image of the expanding shell of star V838 Monocerotis (see ESA and Hubblesite).  Four years after the first dramatic sequence (see 05/29/2003), astronomers are still puzzled by this star, with the most dramatic light echo ever photographed.  Leading hypothesis now is that two stars collided before the outburst.  The image made […]
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Bible and Theology

Will Cosmology Emerge from the Dark Ages?
October 31, 2006
To cosmologists, the “dark ages” were not after the fall of Rome, but the time between the release of the microwave background radiation, and the light from the first stars.  In a feature article for the November Scientific American, Abraham Loeb discussed how astronomers hope to shed light on this epoch with new telescopes measuring […]
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Astronomy

Deep Field Survey Shows Oldest Galaxies Yet
September 24, 2006
Astronomers continue to find mature galaxies at higher and higher redshifts.  The latest record, reported in Nature,1 is z=6.96, interpreted to mean the galaxy was present 700 million years after the big bang (usually dated at 13.7 billion years ago).  A survey of distant galaxies from the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), also reported in […]
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Astronomy

Whistling in the Dark Matter Debate
September 7, 2006
Who’s right?  Douglas Clowe’s team at U of Arizona claimed two weeks ago that they found dark matter in the Bullet Cluster – they even had a picture of it.  The Chandra X-Ray Center called it “direct proof” of dark matter.  Two days later, EurekAlert posted a story about a new proposal to bring back […]
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Cosmology

Big Bang Fails Prediction: Is the Theory in Trouble?
September 5, 2006
Astronomers looking at WMAP data (03/20/2006, 05/02/2003) of the cosmic background radiation failed to find shadows predicted by the big bang, reported Science Daily.  So what?  Here’s what Dr. Richard Lieu (U of Alabama) said this means: “Either it (the microwave background) isn’t coming from behind the clusters, which means the Big Bang is blown […]
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Astronomy

Early Large Spiral Galaxy Resembles Milky Way
August 18, 2006
Astronomers using adaptive optics at the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Paranal, Chile took spectra of a galaxy at red-shift 2.38 described as an “early young galaxy” that must have, according to current theory, formed very rapidly, because it looks like the Milky Way.  The observations by Genzel et al., published in Nature,1 were described […]
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Cosmology

Cosmologists Dragged Kicking and Screaming to the Anthropic Principle
August 11, 2006
Those who view science as a dispassionate, logical pursuit of the truth should savor the emotions in two articles by Tom Siegfried about cosmology in Science this week.1,2  He reported on the passionate rivalry between theoretical physicists who embrace superstring theory as the eventual “theory of everything” and those who oppose it because of its […]
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Cosmology

Theory Battles Observations in Near-Field Cosmology
July 23, 2006
Which is more important in science: a consistent model, or a good fit with observations?  Clearly both would be the ideal.  A report in Science1 this week revealed that astronomers are having trouble holding the two together.  The problem is especially acute for near-field cosmology that deals with nearby galaxies.     It may seem […]
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