When the jets of a black hole interact with the cosmic microwave background, something brilliant can occur.
Science in the Raw
The cosmic microwave background tells us a great deal about the origin and history of our universe. But how?
The Sound of Creation
The cosmic microwave background can be converted to sound, just as a radio converts radio waves to sound. The result is the sound of the big bang.
After the Fact
In 1948 Ralph Alpher, and Robert Herman published a paper predicting a consequence of the big bang model, which we now call the cosmic microwave background.
Second Light
The period between the end of the big bang and the appearance of the first stars is known as the cosmic dark ages. It lasted longer than we thought.
And the Number Shall Be Three
In earlier posts about dark matter, I’ve written about how neutrinos would seem to be a good candidate, but there simply aren’t enough of them to account for all of dark matter. As far as we can tell, there are three types (flavors) of neutrinos, and we know the upper limit of their mass from the distribution of galaxies in the universe. So the three known neutrino flavors can’t be the solution to dark matter.
Everything’s Fine, Situation Normal
More results from the Planck collaboration are coming in, this time from conference in Italy. There’s been a lot of excitement building up to this new release, particularly given some of the unresolved issues in the standard model of cosmology.
Nine Skies
This month Astronomy & Astrophysics released 31 articles on data gathered by the Planck satellite. This includes nine all-sky surveys at a range of wavelengths from radio to infrared. It represents the most detailed map of the cosmic sky to date, and already there are some interesting results.
It’s Not Nothing
Polarization in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is in the news again. This time with new results from a project known as POLARBEAR. The results were published this week in the Astrophysical Journal, and it swings the observational needle back towards the existence of cosmic inflation.