A metastable or 'false' vacuum is a hypothetical state that seems stable but hasn't actually reached its most stable state yet, posing a potential doomsday threat.
Star-formation will eventually end, and then the last shining stars will burn out. Galaxies will dissociate due to gravitational interactions, ejecting all masses and leaving only supermassive black holes behind. And then those black holes will decay via Hawking radiation, leaving only cold, stable, isolated bodies, from which no further energy can be extracted, all accelerating away from us within our dark energy-dominated Universe.
Okay, first thing first: the universe is in fact expanding. We've known this for more than a century now, and it's the basis for modern cosmology. This idea is called the big bang modelwhich is an unfortunate name because it brings to mind a cosmos expanding like an explosion, with galaxies moving away from each other through space like shrapnel. But in fact space itself is expanding, and that's different.
A key goal, writes the author, Bobby Azarian,is to argue against the view that life is an unlikely accident that may have emerged only once on one tiny speck in a vast universe, and that it is certain to disappear as the universe's free energy dissipates in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics. He argues that while such a conclusion had for several generations seemed to be the destination to which clear-headed scientific exploration had brought mankind,
Every day, we have a choice whether we take our lives, our existence, our freedoms, and our moments for granted, or whether we express appreciation and gratitude for the good things that exist. The biggest unifier that all human beings have in common, that we all exist on the same world and in the same Universe, never gets the due it deserves. Here and now, it's possible for us to exist, and to exist as long as our natural lifespans will allow us.
By observing the brightness of distant dying stars, astronomers have long come to believe that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. In fact, that apparent reality is deeply built into cosmological models: a mysterious force that influences the universe on the largest scales, dubbed dark energy, is believed to explain the acceleration. However, not everybody agrees with this widely accepted scientific consensus.
Along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was born in a rapid cosmic expansion some 14 billion years ago. The Florida native earned a PhD in particle physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970.
It sounds like something from the latest science fiction blockbuster. But scientists in Massachusetts have revealed the terrifyingly high odds a black hole will explode in the next 10 years. In a new paper, they say there's a 90 per cent chance of at least one black hole exploding by 2035. If and when it happens, telescopes positioned in space and here on Earth should be able to capture the event - which fortunately won't be dangerous for Earthlings.
When most of us think about science, we don't often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all actually is. Reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding what it is and how it works is the combination of what we can observe, measure, and experiment on.
NASA explains the incredible shot captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of 3I/ATLAS shows a 'teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust' trailing behind the object, suggesting it's a sizable comet.
