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ESO's VISTA telescope has created the widest deep view of the sky ever made using infrared light. This new picture of an unremarkable patch of sky comes from the UltraVISTA survey and reveals more than 200 000 galaxies. It forms just one part of a huge collection of fully processed images from all the VISTA surveys that is now being made available by ESO to astronomers worldwide. UltraVISTA is a treasure trove that is being used to study distant galaxies in the early Universe as well as for many other science projects. The telescope has been trained on the same...

NASA Hubble Space Telescope has captured an image of the oldest galaxy on record, the space administration announced Tuesday. The space administration said it has captured an image of a group of galaxies located 13.1 billion light years away. The team said the galaxies represent a cluster in the initial stages of development. “These galaxies formed during the earliest stages of galaxy assembly, when galaxies had just started to cluster together,” said Michele Trenti of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. “The result confirms our theoretical understanding...

Victor Stenger, a retired physics prof from the University of Hawaii, has given us two books that explain both atheism and "multiverses", and behold, they are one. Few other proponents of multiverses are quite as forthcoming with their logic, but clearly something besides data must motivate the science of multiverses, because by definition multiverses are not observable. Stenger makes the connection explicit, whereas Hawking or Susskind is a little more coy with their metaphysics. Multiverse-theory is designed for one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to defend atheism. It makes no predictions, it gives no insight, it provides...

If the Universe expands and contracts in cycles of Big Bangs and Crunches, some black holes may survive from one era to the next, according to a new analysis Black holes are regions of space in which gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. Conventionally, black holes form during a gravitational collapse, after a large supernova for example. But there is another class of objects called primordial black holes that cosmologists think must have formed in a different way. These are essentially leftovers from the hugely dense ball of stuff from which the universe expanded, some...

While astronomers are largely baffled by the question of how the universe began, they should probably hurry up and figure it out. In the far future, most of the evidence will be long gone, a new study suggests. Though future astronomers will likely have the benefit of advanced technology and a more sophisticated understanding of physics, they won't be able to take advantage of the last vestiges of evidence left over from the Big Bang. The trace signals from the explosion that set the universe in motion 13.7 billion years ago will likely be all gone 1 trillion years from...

In nine parts on YouTubePart 1Part 2Part 3Part 4Part 5Part 6Part 7Part 8Part 9 A spectacular exposition featuring heavyweights in astronomy, mathematics, plasma physics, cosmology etc. including Halton Arp, Tony Peratt, Eric Lerner, Fred Hoyle and a number of others, and yet comprehensible to the educated layman. The "big bang" which we've heard about all our lives turns out to be junk physics.

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said on Thursday. "The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star. "Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity...

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said on Thursday. "The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” (Genesis 1:1-3 KJV) In the first three verses of Genesis, we have the order of initial creation. God first establishes that He created everything, and then He proceeds to reveal the secret of how He did it, a secret scientists are just now unraveling. According to creation scientists, the void...

(Reuters) - Scientists at the CERN research center say their "Big Bang" project is going beyond all expectations and the first proof of the existence of dimensions beyond the known four could emerge next year. In surveys of results of nearly 8 months of experiments in their Large Hadron Collider (LHC), they also say they may be able to determine by the end of 2011 whether the mystery Higgs particle, or boson, exists. Guido Tonelli, spokesman for one of the CERN specialist teams monitoring operations in the vast, subterranean LHC, said probing for extra dimensions -- besides length, breadth, height...

The latest experiment at CERN went ahead despite warnings by a group called Heavy Ion Alert that it could trigger a catastrophic chain reaction that might destroy the Earth. The reaction created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun, which have not been reached since the first billionths of a second following the Big Bang. This was expected to cause atomic particles such as protons and neutrons to melt, producing a "soup" of matter in a state previously unseen on Earth. Scientists, including British particle physicists, will now study the particles in the hope of...

<p>The universe was in chaos after the Big Bang kick-started the cosmos, a new study suggests.</p> <p>While one might expect the explosion that began the universe to wreak some havoc, scientists mean something very specific when they refer to chaos. In a chaotic system, small changes can cause large-scale effects. A commonly cited example is the "butterfly effect" — the idea that a butterfly beating its wing in Brazil can bring about a tornado in Texas.</p>

Q-balls zoom through the Universe, according to CERN physicist Brian Cox, vaporizing stars and flouting the laws of physics. Each one is like a new universe in a nutshell. Inside a Q-ball, the familiar forces that hold our world together don't exist, which means that a single Q-ball can eat the heart out of a super-dense star,causing it to self-destruct in an almighty cosmic explosion. This was the scientific premise of the scifi thriller, Sunshine, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, The Beach). That's the fiction. The fact is that a Q-ball would travel through a light star like the sun...

Physics was the reason for the Big Bang, not God, according to scientist Stephen Hawking. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," the professor said in his new book, in a challenge to traditional religious beliefs. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going," he wrote in his book "The Grand Design," extracts of which are printed in London newspaper The Times. The book, co-written by American physicist Leonard Mlodinow and published next week, sets out to contest Sir Isaac...

The Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe, Stephen Hawking has concluded. In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.” “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the...

I had recently one of those rare (to me) lucid dreams where I was so involved and everything was so real. The last time I had one of these dreams, I could fly and when I woke up I was fighting the urge to wake up so that I could record all of my Touch and Goes, my Take Offs, Landings and my Flight Time. This dream was similar but very, very different, this time I am shooting through space... going the opposite direction of all of the Galaxies... I'm shooting for / aimed at the Big Bang and Ground...

Okay let's get off politics and discuss non controversial subjects such as science and religion. LOL! All jokes aside here is a fun video on the creation of life.

Scientists in the Netherlands unveiled the largest radiotelescope in the world on Saturday, saying it was capable of detecting faint signals from almost as far back as the Big Bang. The LOFAR (LOw Frequency ARray) consists of 25,000 small antennas measuring between 50 centimetres and two metres across, instead of a traditional large dish, said Femke Boekhorst of the Netherlands Radioastronomy Institute. It is based near the northeastern Dutch town of Assen, but the antennas are spread out across the rest of the Netherlands and also in Germany, Sweden, France and Britain. "Today we have launched the biggest radiotelescope in...

GENEVA (Reuters) – Dark matter, which scientists believe makes up 25 percent of the universe but whose existence has never been proven, could be detected by the giant particle collider at CERN, the research center's head said Monday. Rolf-Dieter Heuer told a news conference some evidence for the matter may emerge even in the shorter term from mega-power particle collisions aimed at recreating conditions at the "Big Bang" birth of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. "We don't know what dark matter is," said Heuer, Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva....

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe. They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions -- which lasted only for milliseconds. But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed. "That temperature...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has reached back 13.2 billion years -- farther than ever before in time and space -- to reveal a "primordial population" of galaxies never seen before. "The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe," the Space Telescope Science Institute said in a statement released Tuesday. "This makes Hubble a powerful 'time machine' that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago -- just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang," the institute said...

ZURICH (Reuters) -- Scientists have smashed together proton beams for the first time in a 27-kilometre tunnel under the French-Swiss border in an initial step toward discovering how the universe came into existence, they said on Monday. Scientists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) hope experiments will already start giving clues about the origins of the universe in the coming months as the world's biggest particle collider starts moving to full power. "It's a great achievement to have come this far in so short a time," said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer about the collision, achieved by sending...

Pro-Darwin consensus doesn't rule out intelligent design --snip-- (CNN) -- While we officially celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" on November 24, celebrations of Darwin's legacy have actually been building in intensity for several years. Darwin is not just an important 19th century scientific thinker. Increasingly, he is a cultural icon. Darwin is the subject of adulation that teeters on the edge of hero worship, expressed in everything from scholarly seminars and lecture series to best-selling new atheist tracts like those by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. The atheists claim that...

So efforts by scientists to re-create the big bang — that moment, if one can speak of a moment, as in time, before there was time, or at least a decent wristwatch, when energy, or some hot gooey primordial stuff, spewed out a burgeoning universe, eventuating in the birth of galaxies, the advent of life, and the eventual cancellation of Charles in Charge — have failed once again. It seems that the quixotic quest to find Higgs Boson, once thought to be the front man for an Air Supply tribute band, but which turns out to be the “God” particle,”...

Evolutionary philosophy is a bottom-up storytelling project: particles, planets, people. Naturalists (those who say nature is all there is) believe they can invent explanations that are free of miracles, but in practice, miracles pop up everywhere in their stories. This was satirized by Sidney Harris years ago in a cartoon that showed a grad student filling a blackboard with equations. His adviser called attention to one step that needed some elaboration: It said, "Then a miracle happens." Examples of miracles in evolutionary philosophy include the sudden appearance of the universe without cause or explanation, the origin of life, the origin...

Why Evolutionary-Based Science Is A Menace To Scientific Research, Discovery, and Progress Evolutionary-based research always begins with the inaccurate and unscientific presupposition that the Theory of Evolution, i.e. the Big Bang, the spontaneous generation of life, and common descent, is true. Due to this systemic problem, scientific discovery and progress is severely hampered, not to mention the hundreds of millions of research dollars that are squandered every year. In a time in which almost ANY alternative thought is given a platform, the evolution industry is silencing dissenting scientific evidence, even when it’s from fellow evolutionists! See the growing list of...

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

PARIS (AFP) – It took 13 billion years to reach Earth, but astronomers have seen the light of an exploding mega-star that is the most distant object ever detected, two studies published Thursday reported. The stunning gamma-ray burst (GRB) was observed by two teams of researchers in April, and opens a window onto a poorly known period when the Universe was in its infancy.

Oct 19, 2009 — Science news outlets have put out some bizarre headlines recently.  Readers can judge whether they should be blessed with the label “science” or belong instead at supermarket checkouts. Women are evolving fatter:  New Scientist and PhysOrg said that natural selection is making women shorter, plumper and more fertile.  “The take-home message is that humans are currently evolving,” said Stephen Stearns of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina.  “Natural selection is still operating.” Killer algae heading north:  Science Daily said that toxic algae was a key player in mass extinctions in the past, and...

Denver, Colo., Sep 30, 2009 / 03:35 pm (CNA).- Contemporary astrophysics hold the scientific key to prove the existence of God, but unfortunately very few know the scientific facts, said Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J, PhD, during a conference delivered on Sunday at the John Paul II Center for the New Evangelization in Denver, Colorado. The Honolulu-born Jesuit is the past president of Gonzaga University and is also well-known philosopher and physicist who is involved in bringing science and theology together. Fr. Spitzer is currently engaged in an ambitious project to explain the metaphysical consequences of the latest astrophysical discoveries,...

I came across a news item in the USA Today website, dated August 18, that got my attention. It concerns "Dark Energy", the mysterious force that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, that no one can find or explain. Two scientists say is doesn't exist now because of a "mathematical solution they have produced, that suggests it is a natural result of the Big Bang. Part of the article is reproduced here. "What's the answer? It doesn't exist, suggest mathematicians Blake Temple and Joel Smoller, in a study released Monday by the Proceedings of the National...

Scientists have peered further back in time than ever before using instruments designed to search for a phenomenon predicted by Albert Einstein almost a century ago but not yet proven to exist. An American observatory hunting for ripples in space and time called gravitational waves has produced its most significant results yet, despite not having directly detected any. Tycho's Supernova The “non-discovery” offers insights into the state of the Universe just 60 seconds into its existence. Previous research has been unable to look back in time further than about 380,000 years after the big bang. The new window on the...

Biological Big Bang: Another Explosion at the Dawn of Life July 23, 2009 — Eugene Koonin and two friends from the NIH went tree-hunting. They examined almost 7,000 genomes of prokaryotes. They found trees all right – a whole forest of them. They even found 102 NUTs (nearly universal trees) in the forest. Unfortunately, it’s not what they wanted to find: a single universal tree of life that Darwin’s theory requires. They had to seriously consider the question: was there a biological big bang? Publishing in an open-access article in the Journal of Biology,[1] they began with the founding father’s...

Not surprising or unknown to readers on the Free Republic, but this article illustrates the bias existing in the "scientific" community. Empirical data are merely observations and numbers - meaningless without interpretation. In the interpretation we see bias. Bias could be circumvented by a plurality of research from other sources, most especially those from dissenting views. However, the mainstream, or "majority rules," mentality has corrupted scientific objectivity and squelched meritorious dissent. Hence we have horribly fallacious THEORIES masquerading as established fact: Anthropogenic global warming, evolution, big bang, etc. Having abandoned scientific principles and objectivity, we are now living in an...

rom Richard Dawkin’s God Delusion to Bill Maher’s Religulous, the media is filled with half-truths and whole lies about what it means to be a believer in God, and more often than not, Christian. Dawkin’s argues that there is contradictory evidence to the existence of God while Maher pokes fun at the members of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, while simultaneously asking the usual theological questions. For example: Do you think that, if when you were a kid, they transposed the Bible stories with fairy tales, that you would know the difference as an adult? Yes Mr. Maher, I would. It...

String theory “philosophy” challenged --snip-- The big bang is fundamental to cosmic evolution or the idea that somehow the universe made itself. The article majored on the varying ideas that emanate from big bang philosophy, such as dark energy and dark matter etc. that are used to solve some of the “science” problems of the big bang. It then went on to say that string theory is just another one of these ideas with no basis in experimental science...

Re-Analysis of the Marinov Light-Speed Anisotropy Experiment Reginald T. Cahill School of Chemistry, Physics and Earth Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5001, Australia E-mail: Reg.Cahill@flinders.edu.au The anisotropy of the speed of light at 1 part in 10^3 has been detected by Michelson and Morley (1887), Miller (1925/26), Illingworth (1927), Joos (1930), Jaseja et al. (1964), Torr and Kolen (1984), DeWitte (1991) and Cahill (2006) using a variety of experimental techniques, from gas-mode Michelson interferometers (with the relativistic theory for these only determined in 2002) to one-way RF coaxial cable propagation timing. All agree on the speed, right ascension and declination of...

Does Dark Energy Really Exist? Or does Earth occupy a very unusual place in the universe? Scientific American, March 2009 By Timothy Clifton and Pedro G. Ferreira ... Most of us are very familiar with the idea that our planet is nothing more than a tiny speck orbiting a typical star, somewhere near the edge of an otherwise unnoteworthy galaxy. In the midst of a universe populated by billions of galaxies that stretch out to our cosmic horizon, we are led to believe that there is nothing special or unique about our location. But what is the evidence for this...

Shedding Light on the Protein Big Bang Theory March 13, 2009 — The precise three-dimensional structure of a typical protein molecule is so complex, its origin would seem hopeless by chance. What if evolutionary biologists were to discover a whole host of proteins literally exploded into existence at the beginning of complex life? We can find out what they would think by looking at an article on the “protein big bang” found on Astrobiology Magazine...

WMAP ‘proof’ of big bang fails normal radiological standards by John Hartnett Satellite maps of the big bang? The WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) satellite1 was launched with the intention of mapping the very small anisotropies (temperature fluctuations) in the cosmic microwave radiation (CMB) (figure 1). After the successful mission of the COBE (COsmic Background Explorer) satellite2 George Smoot as team leader built WMAP for NASA and the data obtained resulted in him being awarded the Nobel prize in Physics last year.3,4 The anisotropies in the 2.7 K CMB temperature maps contain information regarding the radiation from the fireball 380,000...

In January 2009, ICR received a copy of a recent ministry letter published by television personality Dr. John Ankerberg. For many years, Dr. Ankerberg has skillfully tackled tough issues related to the church, society, the Middle East, and other topics of interest to believers. Christians everywhere need to be informed, challenged, and also taught sound doctrine—there is no substitute for the Bible. However, the January letter from Dr. Ankerberg’s television ministry reveals a dangerous trend toward subjugating the accuracy, understandability, and authority of the Bible to the foolish musings of men—namely, scientists who deny that God’s revelation in the book...

Since the Big Bang story of the origin of the universe has been refuted by a host of external observations and internal contradictions,1 secular science has been forced to postulate additional, exceedingly improbable events to keep it afloat. One of these is “inflation,” which attempts to explain the apparent uniformity of the universe.2 But new observations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe are forcing cosmologists to revamp inflation, at the cost of inventing yet another miraculous event to prop it up...

A Brief History of Intolerance in Modern Cosmology by Dr. Jerry Bergman January 21, 2009 Abstract A review of some recent well-documented cases of intolerance in the cosmology field illustrates a common problem in science. Many relate to the Big Bang theory, such as the case of Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge and Halton Arp. None of the accounts involved Intelligent Design advocates or creationists. This selection removes this compounding factor from the evaluation, but the cases have direct relevance to both Intelligent Design and creationism because both groups face the same resistance. It was concluded that it is critical for...

When I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens recently, one of the eight arguments I offered for God’s existence was the creation of this supremely fine-tuned universe out of nothing. I spoke of the five main lines of scientific evidence—denoted by the acronym SURGE—that point to the definite beginning of the space-time continuum. They are: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Expanding Universe, the Radiation Afterglow from the Big Bang Explosion, the Great galaxy seeds in the Radiation Afterglow, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. While I don’t have space to unpack this evidence here (see I Don’t Have Enough Faith to...

ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening? Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory...

BIG BANG Recreated!!! That's fantastic!!! Someone recreated the big bang, or a model, rather. But hey, ya can't have a recreation without an original creation. Perhaps scientist will realize, if their INTELLIGENCE has brought them to this point of modeling a big bang, then there must exists an INTELLIGENCE, who many years ago gave ignition to the original, and could only endow it with life to boot!

Three different trends in physics each suggest that our universe is just one of many.We usually think of the universe as being “everything there is.” But many astronomers and physicists now suspect that the universe we observe is just a small part of an unbelievably larger and richer cosmic structure, often called the “multiverse.” This mind-bending notion – that our universe may be just one of many, perhaps an infinite number, of real, physical universes – was front and center at a three-day conference entitled "A Debate in Cosmology — The Multiverse," held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics...

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed—inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, the observations made by astronomers fatally contradict the ‘predictions’ of big bang theory.11,12 Such continual appeal to new fudge factors to bridge the gap between theory and observation would not be tolerated in any other branch of physics. Rather, physicists would question the underlying theory...

Forget the superfast electrons or bosons or whateverinos and 17 miles of magnets. Just get yourself two cats at 10 pm; let them know that you are phenomenally tired, and go to bed. The only trick is to arrange their trajectories so that they are on a collision course. You’ll get your Big Bang. I guess you could call them mewons.