Latest TOE News

Supermassive black holes spin at speeds approaching the speed of light, new research suggests. Nine huge galaxies were found to contain furiously whirling black holes that pump out energetic jets of gas into the surrounding environment, according to a study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

A team of physicists and astronomers from the University of Sussex and Imperial College London have uncovered hints that there may be cosmic strings - lines of pure mass-energy - stretching across the entire Universe.

We may not be able—as least not yet—to prove they exist, many serious scientists say, but there are plenty of reasons to think that parallel dimensions are more than figments of eggheaded imagination.

’Dark energy’, which researchers have spent years trying to fathom, isn’t necessary to explain our universe after all, according to a new solution to Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This challenges the notion that dark energy makes up 76% of our universe, as many cosmologists believe.

Is there an opposite to absolute zero? Seems like an innocent enough question, right? Absolute zero is 0 on the Kelvin scale, or about minus 460 F. You can’t get colder than that; it would be like trying to go south from the South Pole. Is there a corresponding maximum possible temperature?

Are the laws of nature merely fancy bookkeeping, a way of organizing facts about the world? Do they govern nature or just describe it? And does it matter that we don’t know and that most scientists don’t seem to know or care where they come from?

Scientists have come up with the radical suggestion that the universe’s end may come not with a bang but a standstill - that time could be literally running out and could, one day, stop altogether.

Much of the gaseous mass of the universe is bound up in a tangled web of cosmic filaments that stretch for hundreds of millions of light-years, according to a new supercomputer study by a team led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Einstein’s self-proclaimed “biggest blunder”—his postulation of a cosmological constant (a force that opposes gravity and keeps the universe from collapsing)—may not be such a blunder after all, according to the research of an international team of scientists that includes two Texas A&M University researchers.

Researchers using supercomputer simulations have exposed a very violent and critical relationship between interstellar gas and dark matter when galaxies are born – one that has been largely ignored by the current model of how the universe evolved. 

SCIENCE, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

Astronomers are searching for gravitational waves in space, a feat that would literally change what we know about the cosmos. Using new tools to look at the universe often has led to discoveries that change the course of science.

On what scale do the quantum world and the classical world begin to cross into each other? How big does an “observer” have to be? It’s a long-argued question of fundamental scientific interest and practical importance as well, with significant implications for attempts to build solid-state quantum computers. 

Most astronomers say that world-famous images from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite show structures of the early universe. But a lone radio astronomer is claiming that the pictures depict nearby hydrogen gas clouds in our own galaxy, calling a key theory into question.

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists. Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii.