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This list is great to share with Believing Mormons because most of these teachings have solid references or are still taught from the pulpit. It's a great conversation starter on the silly side of Mormonism. I'm sure you've heard most of these at one time or another. The list is divided into two sections - Mormon Church teachings that have documented citations, and those still missing. Cosmology - God says the correct name for our Sun is "Shinehah," which is the name He gave it. Also, the correct name of the moon is "Olea." See Abraham 3:13. - God lives...

University of Warwick astrophysicists have pinpointed four white dwarf stars surrounded by dust from shattered planetary bodies which once bore striking similarities to the composition of the Earth. The scientists publish their results in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. White dwarfs are the final stage of life of stars like our Sun, the residual cores of material left behind after their available fuel for nuclear reactions has been exhausted. Using the Hubble Space Telescope to carry out the biggest survey to date of the chemical composition of the atmospheres of white dwarf stars,...

Astronomers have discovered their "holy grail" - a planet capable of supporting life outside our solar system. The planet lies in what they describe as a 'habitable zone', neither too near its sun to dry out or too far away which freezes it. And the discovery could help answer the question of whether we are alone in the universe, which has been plagued astronomers and alien fanatics for years. Scientists found the planet, Gliese 667Cc, orbiting around a red dwarf star, 22 light years away from the earth. Red dwarf stars are the most common stars in the neighbourhood of...

Einstein is still the boss, say researchers with the BOSS project for measuring key properties of the universe. BOSS, for Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, has measured the distance to faraway galaxies more precisely than ever before, mapping the universe as it existed roughly 6 billion years ago, when it was only 63 percent of its current size. The findings suggest that the mysterious “dark energy” causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate was foreseen by Einstein, the researchers reported April 1 at the American Physical Society meeting. To keep the universe in a static state, Einstein added a...

Astronomers have measured the precise distance to over a quarter of a million galaxies to gain new insights into a key period in cosmic history. The 3D map of the sky allows scientists to probe the time six billion years ago when dark energy became the dominant influence on the Universe's expansion. No-one knows the true nature of this repulsive force, but the exquisite data in the international BOSS survey will help test various theories. The analysis appears in six papers. These have all been posted on the arXiv preprint server. "This is an incredibly exciting time to be working...

Life as we know it exists on a cozy planet in a stable orbit around a sun shining brightly in its sky. But a new study hints that the most common life in the universe might exist deep inside eternal-night worlds far from any star, adrift in the icy dark of interstellar space. Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University estimate that "nomad" planets, ejected from their home stellar system and now free-floating through the Milky Way, could outnumber stars by as many as 100,000 to 1. Earlier estimates were more like a...

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...

Enlarge Image Star power. Saul Perlmutter (left), Brian Schmidt (center), and Adam Riess share this year's Nobel Prize in physics. Credit: LBNL, ANU, JHU Thirteen years ago, two teams of astronomers and physicists independently made the same stark discovery: Not only is the universe expanding like a vast inflating balloon, but its expansion is speeding up. At the time, many scientists expected that the gravitational pull of the galaxies ought to slow down the expansion. Today, researchers from both teams shared the Nobel Prize in physics for that dramatic observation, which has changed the conceptual landscape in cosmology, astronomy,...

“What or who is God? The traveller upon the spiritual Way, the further he advances, becomes increasingly conscious of two contrasting facts—of the otherness and yet the nearness of the Eternal. In the first place, he realizes more and more that God is mystery. God is “the wholly Other”, invisible, inconceivable, radically transcendent, beyond all words, beyond all understanding. “Surely the babe just born”, writes the Roman Catholic George Tyrrell, “knows as much of the world and its ways as the wisest of us can know of the ways of God, whose sway stretches over heaven and earth, time and...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected the crossing of a solid planet in front of a star located at only 42 light-years in the constellation Cancer. Thanks to this detection, astronomers know that this "super-Earth" measures 2.1 times the size of our Earth. This is the smallest exoplanet detected in the neighborhood of our Sun. The discovery is based on data acquired by the Spitzer spacecraft last January. The data allowed astronomers to detect the "transit" of the planet, i.e. the tiny decrease of the star's brightness occurring when the planet passes in front of it. "So far, the exquisite...

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...

“Just as a fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims, so the microstructure of empty space could be far too complex for unaided human brains." -- Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, physicist, Cambridge University Our known Hubble length universe contains hundreds of millions of galaxies that have clumped together, forming super clusters and a series of massive walls of galaxies separated by vast voids of empty space. Great Wall: The most vast structure ever is a collection of superclusters a billion light years away extending for 5% the length of the entire observable...

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.

This talk by Professor Hawking is a unique opportunity to see him in person and be immersed in his mind’s world. Stephen Hawking will give a free talk entitled “My Brief History” on Tuesday, January 18, at 8:00 p.m. in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium. Stephen Hawking is the Director of Research in the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Professor Hawking has given the world insights into the birth of the universe, the deaths of black holes, and the future of the human race. His worldwide bestseller A Brief...

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...

Today physicists announced that they may have found the key to explaining dark matter in the universe. It all has to do with the potential discovery of a "sterile neutrino." According to a release about the new study: Neutrinos are neutral elementary particles born in the radioactive decay of other particles. The known "flavors" of neutrinos are the neutral counterparts of electrons and their heavier cousins, muons and taus. Regardless of a neutrino's original flavor, the particles constantly flip from one type to another in a phenomenon called "neutrino flavor oscillation." An electron neutrino might become a muon neutrino, and...

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...

The last few years have seen several books championing agnosticism or atheism making their way into the popular press. These books leave most informed readers quite baffled, because they ignore the vast majority (if not the entirety) of the considerable evidence for theism provided by physics and philosophy during the last few decades. This evidence is capable of grounding reasonable and responsible belief in a super-intelligent, transcendent, creative power that stands at the origins of our universe or any hypothetically postulated multiverse. The main purpose of this book is to give a brief synopsis of this evidence to readers who...

A radical reformulation of quantum mechanics suggests that the universe has a set destiny and its pre-existing fate reaches back in time to influence the past. It could explain the origin of life, dark energy and solve other cosmic conundrums.The universe has a destiny—and this set fate could be reaching backwards in time and combining with influences from the past to shape the present. It’s a mind-bending claim, but some cosmologists now believe that a radical reformulation of quantum mechanics in which the future can affect the past could solve some of the universe’s biggest mysteries, including how life arose....

PARIS (AFP) – Astronomers may have underestimated the tally of galaxies in some parts of the Universe by as much as 90 percent, according to a study reported on Wednesday in Nature, the weekly British science journal. Surveys of the cosmos are based on a signature of ultraviolet light that turns out to be a poor indicator of what's out there, its authors say. In the case of very distant, old galaxies, the telltale light may not reach Earth as it is blocked by interstellar clouds of dust and gas -- and, as a result, these galaxies are missed by...