Into the Murky Deep.

“It is a smudge of light only a tiny fraction of the size of our own Milky Way galaxy, and it existed when the universe was only 480 million years old…If confirmed, the discovery takes astronomers deep into an era when stars and galaxies were first lighting up the universe and burning their way out of a primordial fog known as the dark ages.“

From a few days ago: The Hubble — also the subject of an excellent IMAX-3D movie I saw on Saturday — (probably) finds the oldest, farthest galaxy yet discovered. “Spectroscopic observations with the forthcoming James Webb Space Telescope, however, are needed to cement the identification of the smudge as a galaxy…The Webb telescope, which is expected to be launched later this decade once NASA figures out how to pay for it, has been designed to find these primordial galaxies and thus illuminate the dark ages.”

V’Ger Sails On.

“‘Needless to say, none of us expected it was going to be operating for so long,’ said Krimigis, now 72. ‘We were all praying to get to Neptune [in 1989]. But after that? Who thought we could be with this 33 years [after launch]?’“

Though it’s past 11 billion miles, it’s feeling very still (after all, no more solar wind)…
By way of a friend, and as the spacecraft reaches the outer edge of the solar system, the Baltimore Sun checks in on Voyager 1 and its makers. “Voyager was the pinnacle of his career, said Ness, now 77. “There is never going to be a mission in anybody’s lifetime, now living, that is ever going to get these observations in hand. So it’s once in a lifetime.“

My God, It’s Full of Stars.

“We may have to abandon this notion of using the Milky Way as a template for the rest of the universe,” Dr. van Dokkum said. If the findings are correct, an undercount of dwarfs would mean astronomers have underestimated the masses of galaxies, and that would mean that galaxies developed earlier and faster than currently thought.“

Another big happening on the astrobiology front. As first seen at Dangerous Meta, a joint Harvard-Yale study published in Nature finds that our universe may have three times as many stars as we thought. “That suggests a universe of roughly 100 sextillion stars, with an approximate margin of error of about 10 times fewer or 10 times more.“

Glimpses of Qward.

“‘What we’d like to do is see if there’s some difference that we don’t understand yet between matter and antimatter,” Professor Hangst said. ‘That difference may be more fundamental; that may have to do with very high-energy things that happened at the beginning of the universe. That’s why holding on to them is so important – we need time to study them.‘”

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern have found a way to hold atoms of antimatter for a fraction of a second. “[T]he ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics….'[W]e need a lot more atoms and a lot longer times before it’s really useful – but one has to crawl before you sprint.’”

The (No) Big-Bang Theory.

“In his proposal, time and space can be converted into one another, with a varying speed of light as the conversion factor. Mass and length are also interchangeable, with the conversion factor depending on both a varying gravitational “constant” and a varying speed of light (G/c2). Basically, as the universe expands, time is converted into space, and mass is converted into length. As the universe contracts, the opposite occurs.“

By way of cdogzilla, PhysOrg’s Lisa Zyga describes a new cosmological theory by Wun-Yi Shu of Taiwan that, among other things,does away with the Big Bang. “Essentially, this work is a novel theory about how the magnitudes of the three basic physical dimensions, mass, time, and length, are converted into each other…The theory resolves problems in cosmology, such as those of the big bang, dark energy, and flatness, in one fell stroke.”

Nothing New Under the Burning Sun.

“‘This world is a strange madhouse. Currently, every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political party affiliation.’ So wrote Albert Einstein in a letter to his one time collaborator, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann in 1920.“

A recent history-of-science paper by a Jeroen van Dongen of Utrecht University looks into the anti-relativity theory movement of the 1920’s, and how it compares to today’s climate change denialism. “Anti-relativists were convinced that their opinions were being suppressed. Indeed, many believed that conspiracies were at work that thwarted the promotion of their ideas.” (See also: Evolution and Scopes.)

Whither the Darkness?

“If DAMA’s signal were due to dark matter, Xenon 100 would have seen dozens of events — unless the properties of dark matter are very different than expected, says Lang. ‘If DAMA really does see dark matter, it has to be something very, very exotic, something much different from what we expect, so it’s getting a bit unlikely.‘” A new study casts doubt on apparent discoveries of dark matter particles by the DAMA experiment. Back to MOND, then?

Good Fences Make Good (Intergalactic) Neighbors.

“‘We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.'” As seen all over the place of late, Stephen Hawking warns of the perils of First Contact. “He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is ‘a little too risky’. He said: ‘If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.‘” Hey, don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos. (FWIW, many astrobiologists disagree.)

Twenty Years of Hubble.

“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.” Let’s not forget Hubble too: As of today, Humankind’s first great orbital telescope turns 20. And to think we’re only at the beginning… [Greatest hits | A brief history of orbiting observatories | what’s next.]

Now We’ve Done It.

Don’t say we weren’t warned: In the wake of the historic particle smashing by the LHC earlier this week, strange and potentially life-threatening anomalies have been reported all around the world, and they’re increasing in both magnitude and frequency. “Dr. Isadora Chin, a spokeswoman for the SCP Foundation, said that several of the anomalies had been granted ‘Euclid’ and even ‘Keter’ status, the designation for life-threatening manifestations of unusual size or behavior…Several have already been relocated to an observation facility in Black Mesa, New Mexico, she said.“

(Maybe Black Mesa? That was a joke, ha ha, fat chance.) Y’know, to be honest, I blame the time travelers from the future who should’ve come back and prevented these catastrophic rips in the fabric of space-time. Bang up job, you effing slackers.