big bang

News from high in the Chilean Andes this morning: the ALMA observatory in Chile, the largest, most ambitious ground-based astronomy tool ever created, made its first measurements today from its overlook 17,400 above sea level. The interferometric measurements of radio signals, or "fringes," from a distant quasar at sub-millimeter wavelengths prove that ALMA isn't just hype, boasting unprecedented sensitivity and resolution.

And that's using just two of the eventual 66 antennas making up the array.

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For all the visualizations, artist's renderings and animations of the birth of our universe, it is still exceedingly hard to imagine the Big Bang: from nothing emerges everything.

But what if you could create a big bang on a lab bench -- make a model of the universe's emergence. University of Maryland engineering professor Igor Smolyaninov has proposed just that, describing the opportunity to create a "toy big bang" using precisely designed metamaterials that are mathematically analogous to certain conditions of the real-world big bang.

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Of all the subatomic particles that make up matter, neutrinos are the smallest. So small, in fact, that a billion neutrinos pass through your body every second without hitting a single atom. However, a new study postulates that some ancient neutrinos, born shortly after the Big Bang, may now be as large as some galaxies.

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For centuries, the creation of the universe has loomed large in human thought, cropping up in everything from ancient folklore to modern scientific theories. A newly-developed nano-sized device, 100 times smaller than the thickness of human hair and capable of detecting infrared light that dates back to the "big bang," could soon give us more food for thought concerning the galaxy's formation 14 billion years ago.

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The device is a cylinder a bit smaller than a pinky finger, filled with helium and cooled to just above absolute zero. Inside, a young universe—or something very much like one—evolves. As the helium sloshes about, it mimics a process that may have powered our own universe a few moments after the big bang. And once the fluid settles down, the little whirlpools that remain may be akin to the defects in early spacetime that ultimately gave rise to galaxies, stars and planets.

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