Lifeboat Foundation

An experiment in the United Kingdom has failed to find evidence of a particle meant to explain most of the universe’s mass. But the search isn’t over.

When cosmologists observe the way the universe expands, they find that present-day theories of matter can’t explain most of the universe’s energy. They call the unknown energy “dark energy,” and theorists have tried to explain it by proposing undiscovered particles and corresponding fields. Experiments have failed to find evidence of such particles, but in physics, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

By Leah Crane

Some ideas about the quantum world appear to suggest there are many versions of you spread out across many parallel universes. Now, two scientists have formulated a proof that attempts to show this is really true.

The proof involves a fundamental construct in quantum mechanics called Bell’s theorem. This theorem deals with situations where particles interact with each other, become entangled, and then go their separate ways. It is what’s called a “no-go theorem”, one designed to show that some assumption about how the world works is not true.

Mysterious swirling shapes could be leftovers from a black hole.

There is no good evidence that our universe even had a beginning, a startling proposition that means the cosmos could collapse in about 100 billion years.

BIG GULP Gravitational waves may have revealed a black hole in the process of swallowing up a neutron star (illustrated). If confirmed, the event would be the first of its kind ever seen.

SUPERNOVA SNOWFALL Scientists have found a fingerprint of exploding stars, or supernovas, in Antarctic snow that fell within the last 20 years. Here, part of a supernova remnant, Vela, is shown.

The EOR will also provide an unprecedented test for the current best model of cosmic evolution. Although there is plenty of evidence for dark matter, nobody has identified exactly what it is. Signals from the EOR would help to indicate whether dark matter consists of relatively sluggish, or ‘cold’, particles — the model that is currently favoured — or ‘warm’ ones that are lighter and faster, says Anna Bonaldi, an astrophysicist at the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) Organisation near Manchester, UK. “The exact nature of dark matter is one of the things at stake,” she says.

Radioastronomers look to hydrogen for insights into the Universe’s first billion years.

Figuring out how our reality took shape over billions of years is no easy task for scientists. Theories about how the Big Bang played out and the immediate aftermath are a dime a dozen, but researchers led by a team from the University of Arizona think they might stumble upon some of the secrets of galaxy formation by asking a supercomputer to simulate millions of virtual universes and seeing which ones come closest to what we see today.

In a new research paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the team explains how they used a supercomputer system nicknamed the “Universe Machine” to watch billions of (virtual) years of galaxy formation play out before their eyes.

Astronomer Dr David Whitehouse said the “enormous” black hole discovered by astronomers in South America showed the whole universe might one day be swallowed by a black hole. He told Sky News: “We’re beginning to realise that we had thought that there was a limit to the size of black holes in the centre of a galaxy because they can only swallow so many stars. Black holes grow by swallowing matter and gas and stars and dust.