Black Holes May All Contain Other Universes [The Universe]

It's mind blowin' time! According to a new theory, every black hole contains a smaller alternate universe. And our universe might just exist inside a black hole in a much larger universe. Ah-whaaaaaa?

According to Indiana University physicist Nikodem Poplawski, the matter that black holes absorb don't condense into singularities. Instead, they pop out the other side and become the building blocks for whole other universes in another reality.

This would explain what happened before our Big Bang: it popped out of a black hole from another, much larger universe. Everything came out of a 'white hole,' if you will.

Gamma ray bursts occur at the fringes of the known universe. They appear to be associated with supernovae, or star explosions, in faraway galaxies, but their exact sources are a mystery. (Related: 'Gamma-Ray Burst Caused Mass Extinction?')

Poplawski proposes that the bursts may be discharges of matter from alternate universes. The matter, he says, might be escaping into our universe through supermassive black holes-wormholes-at the hearts of those galaxies, though it's not clear how that would be possible.

'It's kind of a crazy idea, but who knows?' he said.

Yeah, kind of!

[Gizmodo via National Geographic via The Daily What]

Hubble confirms the accelerated expansion of the universe [Hubble]

Astronomers have been studying the results of the biggest survey ever conducted by the Hubble space telescope with an international team of scientists, led by Tim Schrabback of the Leiden Observatory and Ludovic Van Waerbeke of the University of British Columbia. The team has been poring over data covering more than 446,000 galaxies in the hopes to better understand cosmic expansion, using ground-based telescopes to compliment the data. What did they find? Not only is the universe getting larger, but it's getting larger at an accelerated rate.

The technique being used is called weak lensing, whereby astronomers study distortions to find out more about the characteristics of distant galaxies. The heart of the study has been on dark matter: 'Dark energy affects our measurements for two reasons,' the University of Bonn's Benjamin Joachimi said. "First, when it is present, galaxy clusters grow more slowly, and secondly, it changes the way the Universe expands, leading to more distant — and more efficiently lensed — galaxies. Our analysis is sensitive to both effects."

The study also calls back to Einstein, according to Martin Kilbinger from the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris: 'Our study also provides an additional confirmation for Einstein's theory of general relativity, which predicts how the lensing signal depends on redshift.'

As for the Hubble, its survey saw it circle the Earth 600 times, photograph the same area of the universe with a slight overlap 575 times, requiring 1,000 man hours of observation.

This clearer map, according to Harvard's William High, made all the difference: 'Before, most of the studies were done in 2D, like taking a chest X-ray. Our study is more like a 3D reconstruction of the skeleton from a CT scan. On top of that, we are able to watch the skeleton of dark matter mature from the Universe's youth to the present.'

[DVICE via spacetelescope.org via EurekAlert!]

The latest Stargate Universe trailer clearly shows someone watched BSG

Oh man, Stargate Universe launches on October 2nd. I can’t wait even though the latest trailer shows that the show has clearly taken a more edgy stance, which in my mind at least, isn’t what a Stargate show be. But that’s not new info. The creators have stated that SGU will be different for a while, but this trailer confirms it. The show is going to be darker, full of mystery, and shot to look like Battlestar Galactica. But the simple Star Wars reference at the end of the trailer shows some hope that the show might actually maintain some of its Stargate identity. Hopefully.