Posts tagged astrophysics

Most reasonable scientists flocked to a theory put forth by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright: alien megastructures. As it turns out, the unusual dimming is almost certainly the result of a massive collection of solar panels known as a Dyson swarm. While SETI observations of the star found no unusual radio or laser signals that might indicate a technologically hyper-advanced civilization, most astrophysicists accept some version of the theory that the aliens are either harvesting solar energy from the past via a n-d timebridge, or, somewhat less likely, from the security of a half-dimensional “spacetime fjord.” Unfortunately, confirming either possibility will have to wait until the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018.

via http://motherboard.vice.com/read/aliens-are-clearly-trying-to-extinguish-an-entire-star

Reaching back across 13.8 billion years to the first sliver of cosmic time with telescopes at the South Pole, a team of astronomers led by John M. Kovac of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics detected ripples in the fabric of space-time — so-called gravitational waves — the signature of a universe being wrenched violently apart when it was roughly a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old. They are the long-sought smoking-gun evidence of inflation, proof, Dr. Kovac and his colleagues say, that Dr. Guth was correct.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/18/science/space/detection-of-waves-in-space-buttresses-landmark-theory-of-big-bang.html?_r=1