http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/old-problems-new-techniques/559724/ Breaking science news from around the world Wed, 02 Oct 2013 00:42:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/old-problems-new-techniques/559724/comment-page-1/#comment-1029 Dark Energy and Dark Matter « Space « Science Today: Breaking science news from around the world Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:52:02 +0000 http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/?p=9724#comment-1029 [...] Computational cosmologist Tom Abel, who works at Stanford’s Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (and who contributed a scene to the Academy’s Life: A Cosmic Story planetarium show), described how his computer models of the early Universe reconstruct the evolution of stars and galaxies during its first billion years. Dark matter interacts with ordinary matter (like us) only through the force of gravity, and it drives the formation of much of the structure (such as those stars and galaxies) in the early Universe. Indeed, the very first structures that appear in Abel’s simulations are dark matter lumps approximately the size of Earth. Ordinary matter follows the gravitational tug from dark matter, abetted by the low, low temperatures (just a few tens of Kelvins above absolute zero) during the “Cosmic Dark Ages,” which ended in the “Cosmic Dawn” I described in my first post from this week’s AAS meeting. [...]

]]> http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/old-problems-new-techniques/559724/comment-page-1/#comment-985 Exoplanets and Award Winners « Space « Science Today: Breaking science news from around the world Thu, 10 Jan 2013 20:07:16 +0000 http://www.calacademy.org/sciencetoday/?p=9724#comment-985 [...] avoiding exoplanets in my first post from this meeting, I’ll take a stab at the topic today, but I hope to put some of the [...]

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