Tag Archives: astronomy

This universal principle created all space and matter from the beginning of time. Today, it’s still creating strange phenomena around the world.

Emergence is the source of all the laws of physics. Strange spots called fairy circles illustrate the way emergence brings new fundamental properties into the world, including space and matter. There are millions of them. Bare patches in grasslands, remarkably well-defined, regular in shape and spacing, and ordered in a roughly-hexagonal array over long distances, […]

The Dark Matter Mystery Is Solved! LIGO’s observations show mid-sized primordial black holes are not improbable.

For years Dark Matter has confronted physics with a massive mystery. A recent article describes it as ‘the invisible substance that astronomers believe accounts for about 80% of the stuff in the universe.’ But what is it? This question has physicists searching for obscure new particles with the world’s largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider. […]

The Search for the Mystery Planet

A new mystery planet is in the astronomic news. It is a real mystery. But is it a real planet? First the mystery: Planet X, as some are calling it, is thought to roam outside the orbit of Pluto (which was recently demoted to dwarf from ninth-planet status). So far no-one has seen Planet X. […]

A Cosmic Puzzle Provides Insights into New Physics

A new cosmic contradiction is begging for an explanation. We’ve known for years that space is expanding. Now new measurements of the rate at which it is expanding seem to differ from previous ones based on the standard cosmological model. New physics often comes from measurements that don’t fit theory. Here is my take on […]

Why Are We Discovering Double Black Holes?

Black holes are in the news again. Only a few weeks ago news of two surprisingly big black holes colliding in a distant galaxy arrived at Earth. Now astronomers have found a closer and far bigger pair of black holes. First the gravity waves. A fantastically sensitive instrument called LIGO measured them as they rolled […]

LIGO’s Tiny Twitch is a Big Deal

It may be the top science story of this century so far (though I hope an even bigger one is coming): Physicists detected gravitational waves; you can hear them here. This discovery has profound implications for the future of cosmology. It will affect our lives in ways we cannot yet conceive. It was a long […]

Extreme Physics

In its search for new discoveries physics seeks extremes. Now an inconceivably vast explosion is in the news. What can it teach us? First let’s be clear about the extremes that physics seeks. They want information about the very small, smaller than atoms for example, and the very large, larger than our Sun and other […]