All articles tagged with #expanding universe
MCG+01-02-015 is the loneliest galaxy in the Universe, located in a particularly sparse, underdense "void" region. Our best telescopes identify no other substantial galaxies within ~100 million light-years. Despite the visual appearance of other galaxies near MCG+01-02-015, none of these galaxies are actually located in the same region of space. This isolated perspective would have made discovering our cosmic origins far more challenging.
Researchers from Kyoto University are exploring 'de Sitter space' to explain gravity in the expanding early universe by invoking a higher dimension. They have developed a method to compute correlation functions among fluctuations on the expanding universe by making use of holography. The team's calculations only considered a three-dimensional universe as a test case, but the analysis may easily be extended to a four-dimensional universe, allowing for the extraction of information from our real world. The approach possibly contributes to validating superstring theory and allows for practical calculations about the subtle changes that rippled across the fabric of our early universe.
Researchers at Heidelberg University have used a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) to simulate an expanding universe and certain quantum fields within it, allowing for the study of important cosmological scenarios. The BEC was used as the "universe" part of the simulator, and phonons, quantized packets of sound energy moving through the fluid, served as analogues to photons and other quantum fields fluctuating in the actual universe. The researchers hope to use these tools to peer back into the earliest moments of the universe and probe the hypothesis that the universe’s large-scale structure has a quantum origin.