After yesterday’s alarming news that world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking had been hospitalized and was “very ill” with a respiratory infection, reports from the hospital today come as a relief. According to Cambridge University, Hawking is now on the road to recovery. “He is comfortable and his family is looking forward to him making a full recovery,” the university, where Hawking is a professor of mathematics, said in a short statement [CNN].
Hawking’s ex-wife, Jane Hawking, also reassured the public. “I have been to see him and he’s fine – he’s doing well. I don’t think his condition is life-threatening” [Telegraph], she said. Others expressed their admiration for the man who hasn’t let his paralysis from Lou Gehrig’s disease slow him down. “He is amazingly resilient,” said Andrew Fabian, the head of the Royal Astronomical Society and a professor of astronomy at Cambridge. “He goes around the world — he does more traveling than most of us. … And he just seems unstoppable. It’s truly amazing” [AP].
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Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist and author, is reportedly “very ill” and being treated at the hospital. Says University of Cambridge spokesman Greg Hayman: “Professor Hawking is very ill…. He has been suffering from a chest infection for a number of weeks which has meant he has had to cancel a number of appointments.” Hawking was flown back to the U.K. from the U.S. at the weekend, Hayman said. He was taken to hospital at lunch time today [Bloomberg].
Hawking has remained active despite being diagnosed at 21 with ALS, (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. For some years, Hawking has been almost entirely paralyzed, and he communicates through an electronic voice synthesizer activated by his fingers [AP].
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The mysterious force known as dark energy that is causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate is also preventing galaxy clusters from getting too big for their britches, a new study suggests. The existence of dark energy was first proposed a decade ago but the stuff has never been directly detected, and there’s much we don’t know about it. However, all the indirect studies have agreed that it acts like a kind of anti-gravity: A repulsive force that permeates empty space and, bizarrely, grows stronger with distance, precisely the opposite of what happens with gravity [Washington Post].
In the new study, researchers used NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray observatory to examine the growth patterns of galaxy clusters. After bulking up rapidly in the first 10 billion years of cosmic time, clusters of galaxies, the cloudlike swarms that are the largest conglomerations of matter in the universe, have grown anemically or not at all during the last five billion years, like sullen teenagers who suddenly refuse to eat. “This result could be explained as arrested development of the universe” [The New York Times], said lead researcher Alexey Vikhlinin. He says the findings support the idea that the gravity of the clusters drew in more and more matter for billions of years during their growth spurts. But gravity’s alter ego, dark energy, was tugging at the edges of the clusters, pulling matter away from the galaxies and stalling growth.
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The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope may have just gotten a hint in its hunt for the mysterious dark matter that is thought to make up the bulk of the universe’s mass. A group of astrophysicists has run a simulation of the distribution of dark matter in a galaxy like our Milky Way, and say that if the telescope scans the right region of space it may be able to detect gamma rays given off by collisions between the particles that are thought to make up dark matter (which have never been directly detected, and are still speculative).
Previously, some cosmologists have proposed that the best chance of a detection lies in nearby dwarf galaxies, since they should contain dense nuggets of dark matter that could be relatively easy to pinpoint. But a new study argues that a diffuse dark matter ‘halo’ surrounding the Milky Way offers an even better shot at glimpsing the mysterious stuff. “I would bet on it,” says lead author Volker Springel…. “And I’d be willing to risk a bit of money as well” [New Scientist].
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In a bizarre finding that has disrupted the current understanding of the universe, astronomers have detected evidence of a massive gravitational force beyond the horizon of the observable universe. What’s being called a dark flow appears to be pulling vast clusters of galaxies toward a 20-degree-wide patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela. “It does fly in the face of everything we know,” said astronomer Dale Kocevski…. “I’m sure it’s going to be controversial” [Discovery News].
When scientists talk about the observable universe, they don’t just mean as far out as the eye, or even the most powerful telescope, can see. In fact there’s a fundamental limit to how much of the universe we could ever observe, no matter how advanced our visual instruments. The universe is thought to have formed about 13.7 billion years ago. So even if light started travelling toward us immediately after the Big Bang, the farthest it could ever get is 13.7 billion light-years in distance. There may be parts of the universe that are farther away (we can’t know how big the whole universe is), but we can’t see farther than light could travel over the entire age of the universe [SPACE.com].
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Ever since researchers first hypothesized the existence of a mysterious force known as dark energy in the mid-1990s, they’ve scrambled for proof that the force exists, and that it is indeed gradually causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate. Now, Hawaiian astronomers say they have found evidence of dark energy’s work by looking at microwave radiation left over from the Big Bang, and how it acts as it traverses strange regions of the universe.
The findings, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters [subscription required], focus on regions of space called superclusters, which are dense with galaxies, and supervoids, which are unusually empty of galaxies. “When a microwave enters a supercluster, it gains some gravitational energy and therefore vibrates slightly faster,” [lead researcher Istvan] Szapudi said. As it leaves the supercluster, he said, “it should lose exactly the amount of energy. “But if dark energy causes the universe to stretch out at a faster rate, the supercluster flattens out in the half-billion years it takes the microwave to cross it,” Szapudi said. “Thus, the wave gets to keep some of the energy as it entered the supercluster” [Honolulu Star-Bulletin].
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A new study of a pair of neutron stars has proven that Albert Einstein got the details right on his theory of general relativity, which describes the interactions of gravity, space, and time in our universe. A team of astrophysicists examined two newly discovered neutron stars, the small and dense stellar bodies formed after a supernova collapses, and found that Einstein accurately predicted their movements more than 90 years before the unusual star system was first sighted.
In Einstein’s relativistic universe, matter curves space and slows down time, and the speed of light remains the only constant. But those are the big effects. The theory of relativity also includes some more esoteric details, one of which is called spin precession. The idea goes like this: Two massive bodies orbiting near each other will warp space enough to disturb the central axis around which both are moving, causing them to begin wobbling just like spinning tops. Strong gravity creates this so-called precession, and the more massive the objects, the easier the precession is to observe [ScienceNow Daily News].
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