Cluster Abell News Today

The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid telescope captured its first science images, offering breathtaking views of the cosmos.

Researchers announce that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124 a trillion times longer than age of the Universe.

"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art." -Ambrose Bierce The most common emails I get about this blog are questions about physics, astronomy, and some very speculative theories. But second most common are questions asking where I get my pictures. Well, except in rare instances, I don't make them myself. Should you just make like Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and,

Let me give you a little back story. As many of you know, I'm new to scienceblogs, and one of the first things we get to do is join a message board full of all the bloggers (sciblings) here. Well, suffice it to say, a contentious discussion took place between me and another scibling, which resulted in my being called a total n00b in front of the entire world.

NASA scientists recently discovered that the universe is expanding faster than how we expected. Should we be worried?

Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get it right. -Oprah Welcome to 2010, everybody! I know that many of you have been following my writing for some time, and many of you have just started recently, so I'd like to start the New Year off right, and (re)introduce myself and this blog to you. With lots of pretty pictures.

The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what no body yet has thought about that which everyone sees. -Arthur Schopenhauer Most of you who've been reading Starts With A Bang for a while have seen this picture come up many, many times.

"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." -Randall of xkcd In January of 2008, I began writing this blog, Starts With A Bang, both for myself and for all of you, because we all have something in common.

"I've been noticing gravity since I was very young." -Cameron Diaz Yesterday, I told you about one of the simplest arguments for dark matter. We look out at the fluctuations in the microwave background on all the different angular scales we can measure -- from about 0.2 degrees all the way up to the whole sky -- and look at what the temperature fluctuations are doing.

    “We actually saw this decay happen. It’s the longest, slowest process that has ever been directly observed, and our dark matter detector was sensitive enough to measure it,” said Ethan Brown, an assistant professor of physics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute about a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe. “It’s amazing to have witnessed this process, and it says that our detector can measure the rarest thing ever recorded.” Detec...