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.
It’s What’s For Dinner
A new paper in Physical Review Letters has led to popular science headlines wondering “Is dark energy eating dark matter?” but that’s not what the paper claims at all.
Not So Spooky
There’s been press recently that astronomers have discovered a “spooky” or “mysterious” alignment of quasars across the universe. While such claims make great headlines, the new results aren’t spooky at all, nor are they that mysterious. They are somewhat interesting, so it’s worth discussing.
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.
Carbon Chain
One of the common ways we can map the distribution of matter in a galaxy is by observing the light emitted neutral hydrogen. This works pretty well because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and its emission lines are pretty distinctive. But for distant galaxies hydrogen emissions aren’t very bright. To observe them you need really long exposure times, and that limits the amount of galaxies you can observe. One alternative is to look at the emissions of carbon instead.
The Phantom Menace
We know the universe is expanding, and we know it is doing so at an ever increasing rate. This cosmic acceleration is part of the evidence for dark energy, which current observations put at about 68% of the observable universe. But beyond its existence as some kind of energy, we’re still trying to determine just what dark energy is.
Older Than the Universe
The star HD 140283 is a subgiant star with an estimated age of 14.46 billion years. That might raise an eyebrow or two for those of you who remember that the age of the universe is estimated as 13.77 billion years. It would seem that this particular star, sometimes referred to as the Methuselah star is older than the universe.
Black Hole Sun
We know that supermassive black holes exist in the center of most galaxies, and they can become quite massive (upwards of billions of solar masses). What we aren’t sure about is just how they come to be.
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.