UK physics scoops extra money
The JIF scheme was set up in 1998 by the UK government and the Wellcome Trust – the world’s largest biomedical research charity – to provide much-needed funding for university labora...
Read article: Quintessence
Quintessence
Cosmologists have proposed that a mysterious substance called quintessence can explain why our universe is accelerating. But what is it made of?
Milky Way’s central black hole located
Ghez and colleagues collected infrared images of the nucleus of the Milky Way over a four-year period using the 10-metre Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The positions of the stars nearest Sagit...
Old galaxies, new problems
The expansion of the universe means that the light from distant galaxies is red-shifted when observed on Earth. The larger the red shift, the greater the distance to the galaxy. Moreover, when we view...
Sandage and Peebles win cosmology prize
Sandage is best known for his efforts to pin down the values of the Hubble constant, the age of the Universe and its deceleration parameter through observations. Peebles is a theoretical cosmologist w...
Read article: Boomerang backs flat universe
Boomerang backs flat universe
The geometry of the universe is Euclidean and space is flat. This has now been confirmed from detailed measurements of the cosmic microwave background – the radiation left over from the big bang...
Read article: The universe is flat – official
The universe is flat – official
All the matter and radiation in the universe was created by the big bang. The radiation stopped interacting with the matter about 300,000 years later – when the universe had cooled down enough f...
The hard X-ray background comes into view
The CXB covers a range of photon energies, with a peak around 40 kiloelectron volts (keV). The soft X-ray part of the background – photon energies between about 0.5 and 2 keV – was extensi...
Astronomy and physics dominate Science top ten
Confirmation that the universe is flat – expanding at just the right rate not to collapse – came from measurements of ripples in the cosmic background radiation left over from the big bang...
Read article: Astrophysics and cosmology: the golden age
Astrophysics and cosmology: the golden age
Our understanding of the universe has advanced immeasurably in the last century, and there seems no end to the wealth of new discoveries as we approach the next millennium
