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(PhysOrg.com) -- In a resent paper posted at arXiv.org and submitted to Astrophysical Journal, Dan Hooper and Jason Steffen, physicists at Fermilab in Illinois, present the theory that cold and dark planets, not heated by a star, could be heated by dark matter. In theory, this dark matter could produce habitable planets outside of what is known as a habitable zone. While no one knows exactly what dark matter is, it is believed to make up about 83 percent of the universe. The most accepted theory is this dark matter is made up of what are called WIMPs, or weakly...

Our Universe is an enormous place; that’s no secret. What is up for discussion, however, is just how enormous it is. And new research suggests it’s a whopper – over 250 times the size of our observable universe. Currently, cosmologists believe the Universe takes one of three possible shapes: It is flat, like a Euclidean plane, and spatially infinite.It is open, or curved like a saddle, and spatially infinite.It is closed, or curved like a sphere, and spatially finite. While most current data favors a flat universe, cosmologists have yet to come to a consensus. In a paper recently submitted...

VISTA (AP) — To trim $9 million from their budget, Vista officials say they will shut off half of the city’s residential street lights in March unless property owners agree to pay higher lighting fees. Fees could cost residents of the north San Diego County city between $4 and $20 a year. In turn, Vista residents complained about bright lights at the new City Hall. City spokeswoman Andrea McCullough tells the North County Times that lights in the park behind the building have been shut off and lights in front of the Civic Center have been dimmed. Inside the building,...

After 16 years and $1.5 billion of other people’s money, it is almost showtime for NASA and Sam Ting. Sitting and being fussed over by technicians in a clean room at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for a February launching — and looking for all the world like a giant corrugated rain barrel — is an eight-ton assemblage of magnets, wires, iron, aluminum, silicon and electronics that is one of the most ambitious and complicated experiments ever to set out for space. The experiment, if it succeeds, could help NASA take a giant step toward answering the question of...

Town halls are plunging our streets into darkness as they try to cut energy bills, damning research reveals. Up to three-quarters of councils are planning to turn off street lamps or dim the lights in an attempt to save money and meet climate change targets, a poll has found. But police fear that darkened streets will act as a haven for burglars, muggers and vandals – and motoring experts warn that there may be more accidents on the roads. Evoking memories of 1970s-style blackouts, the poll found that 43 per cent of town hall bosses are already committed to switching...

Senator Phil Scott Announces His Candidacy for Lieutenant Governor

Mathematicians have proposed an alternative explanation for the accelerating expansion of the universe that does not rely on the mystifying idea of dark energy. According to the new proposition, the universe is not accelerating, as observations suggest. Instead, an expanding wave flowing through space-time has caused distant galaxies to appear to be accelerating away from us. This big wave, initiated after the Big Bang that is thought to have sparked the universe, could explain why objects today appear to be farther away from us than they should be according to the Standard Model of cosmology. "We're saying that maybe the...

Did dark matter destroy the universe? You might be looking around at the way things "exist" and thinking "No", but we're talking about ancient history. Three hundred million years after the start of the universe, things had finally cooled down enough to form hydrogen atoms out of all the protons and electrons that were zipping around - only to have them all ripped up again around the one billion year mark. Why? Most believe that the first quasars, active galaxies whose central black holes are the cosmic-ray equivalent of a firehose, provided the breakup energy, but some Fermilab scientists have...

Watch out when sipping the Obama kool-aid, The truth comes out!

The first stars to light the early universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to a new study. Researchers from the University of Michagan, Ann Arbor call these very first stars "Dark Stars," and propose that dark matter heating provided the energy for these stars instead of fusion. The researchers propose that with a high concentration of dark matter in the early Universe, the theoretical particles called Weakly Interacting Massive Particles(WIMPs), collected inside the first stars and annihilated themselves to produce a heat source to power the stars. "We studied the behavior of WIMPs in the first stars,"...

Dark Energy Survey AdvancesJune 25th, 2008 Figuring out what makes up 73 percent of the universe is no small matter. But the late 20th Century discovery that the rate of expansion of the universe is not slowing but accelerating makes the research all but imperative. The Dark Energy Survey is behind the construction of an extraordinarily sensitive camera that will be installed on the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIA) 4-meter telescope in Chile, with the aim of creating an unprecedented sky survey to probe these questions. I’m looking at the original proposal for the DES survey as submitted to...

Some had hoped it might be just an illusion. But it looks like dark energy is real and here to stay, as astronomers "image" the mysterious entity in action. In 1998, astronomers found that distant supernovae were dimmer, and thus farther away, than expected. This suggested that the expansion of the universe is accelerating – and "dark energy" was named as the culprit. Since then, astronomers have struggled to explain what dark energy actually is – leading some to speculate that it may not exist at all...

The first stars to appear in the Universe may have been powered by dark matter, according to US scientists. Normal stars are powered by nuclear fusion reactions, where hydrogen atoms meld to form heavier helium. But when the Universe was still young, there would have been abundant dark matter, made of particles called Wimps: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. These would have fused together and obliterated each other long before nuclear fusion had the chance to start. As a result, the first stars would have looked quite different from the ones we see today, and they may have changed the course...

A set of simple silicon filters could dramatically improve the quality of X-ray images produced in hospitals and at airport checkpoints. The technique provides a more detailed picture of fractured bone and could help airport security scanners distinguish plastic explosives from harmless substances. X-ray images normally reveal the way different materials, including body tissue, absorb X-ray radiation. Strongly absorbing areas are white and weakly absorbing ones black. But finer details are often lost in a fog caused by areas with intermediate radiation-absorbing ability.

You would think that a star anywhere from 400 to 200,000 times wider than the Sun would be fairly easy to detect. But not if it’s a ‘dark star,’ the name for a new, theoretical entity about to make its appearance in Physical Review Letters. Astrophysicist Paolo Gondolo (University of Utah) makes the case that dark matter would have affected the temperature and density of the gases that formed the first stars. Dark stars would mostly contain normal matter — hydrogen and helium — but they would have been much larger than the Sun, glowing largely in the infrared. Hypothetical...

A special effects technician working on the new Batman film was killed when a vehicle he was in crashed while on a stunt test run. The accident happened off-set and there was no filming taking place, movie company Warner Bros Pictures said. The victim was on a camera truck which was following a stunt vehicle, believed to have been the Batmobile. An ambulance spokeswoman said he was pronounced dead at a test track in Longcross, near Chertsey, in Surrey. Warner Bros said in a statement: "There was a fatal accident at a special effects facility for Batman: The Dark Knight....

Astronomers have discovered a chaotic scene unlike any witnessed before in a cosmic "train wrecK" between giant galaxy clusters. NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes revealed a dark matter core that was mostly devoid of galaxies, which may pose problems for current theories of dark matter behavior. Astronomers have discovered a chaotic scene unlike any witnessed before in a cosmic “train wreck” between giant galaxy clusters. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical telescopes revealed a dark matter core that was mostly devoid of galaxies, which may pose problems for current theories of dark matter behavior. "These results challenge our...

Enlightened Medicine Found in Dark Ages By Heather Whipps, Special to LiveScience posted: 23 July 2007 08:42 am ETThe way sick people are treated is a reflection of the prevalent cultural norms, and in the Dark Ages, being sick was much more common than today, so people accepted and dealt with ill people on a daily basis." People living in Europe during early Medieval times (400—1200 A.D.) actually had a progressive view of illness because disease was so common and out in the open, according to the research presented at a recent historical conference. Instead of being isolated or shunned,...

I have a few questions about living in Alaska...

Caption: Fig. 1: Image of the mass distribution over a patch of sky about one quarter of the area of the Full Moon. These images were made by PhD student Stefan Hilbert using the Millennium Simulation, the largest computer simulation of cosmic structure formation ever carried out. The left panel represents the kind of image which could be made by a low-frequency radio telescope with a diameter of 100 kilometres, using the gravitational distortion of images of pregalactic structure in the neutral hydrogen distribution. The right panel represents the kind of image which could be made for the same region...