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If you want to get your mind around the research that won three astronomers the Nobel Prize in physics last week, it helps to think of the universe as a lump of dough - raisin-bread dough, to be precise - mixed, kneaded and ready to rise. Hold that thought.

They won the Nobel Prize for changing our understanding of the universe, but their discovery left an even larger mystery -- what is this dark energy that is propelling the universe to expand so fast?

Three U.S.-born scientists won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for overturning a fundamental assumption in their field by showing that the expansion of the universe is constantly accelerating.

(PhysOrg.com) -- “We know that about 25% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but we don’t know what it is,” Michael Kesden tells PhysOrg.com. “There are a number of different theories about what dark matter could be, but we think one alternative might be very small primordial black holes.”

Scientists looking to capture evidence of dark matter -- the invisible substance thought to constitute much of the universe -- may find a helpful tool in the recent work of researchers from Princeton University and New York University.

Intense magnetic fields were probably generated in the universe shortly after the Big Bang, according to an international team led by Christoph Federrath and Gilles Chabrier of the CRAL (Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, France). The project offers the first explanation for the presence of intergalactic and interstellar magnetized gas

(PhysOrg.com) -- According to the cosmological principle, there is no special place or direction in the universe when viewed on the cosmic scale. The assumption enabled Copernicus to propose that Earth was not the center of the universe and modern scientists to assume that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. Due to the cosmological principle, scientists also assume that the universe is “homogeneous” - having a uniform structure throughout - and “isotropic” - having uniform properties throughout.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Neutrons, those particles that reside here on Earth inside the nucleus of atoms, along with protons, collectively called nucleons, are thought to exist in the far reaches of the universe inside of so-named neutron stars, which are the remnants of stars that have exploded. In a paper published on the preprint server arXiv, Spanish physicists Felipe Llanes-Estrada, and Gaspar Moreno Navarro, suggest that the densities in the cores of certain sizes of such neutron stars might be so great as to squash the neutrons down from their normal spherical shape, into cubes.

A collection of atoms in the basement of Small Hall is a million times colder than outer space. It’s one of the coldest spots in the universe, but it’s not cold enough.

(PhysOrg.com) -- Suppose at some point the universe ceases to expand, and instead begins collapsing in on itself (as in the “Big Crunch” scenario), and eventually becomes a supermassive black hole. The black hole’s extreme mass produces an extremely strong gravitational field. Through a gravitational version of the so-called Schwinger mechanism, this gravitational field converts virtual particle-antiparticle pairs from the surrounding quantum vacuum into real particle-antiparticle pairs

Ohio State University researchers are leveraging powerful supercomputers to investigate one of the key observational probes of "dark energy," the mysterious energy form that is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate over time.

Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe, why nature favored matter over antimatter at the universe's creation.

Peering far across space and time, astronomers have located a luminous beacon aglow when the universe was still in its infancy. That beacon, a bright astrophysical object known as a quasar, shines with the luminosity of 63 trillion suns as gas falling into a supermassive black holes compresses, heats up and radiates brightly. It is farther from Earth than any other known quasar--so distant that its light, emitted 13 billion years ago, is only now reaching Earth

Between the laws of the universe and the rules of life lies a bridge. That bridge, said Nobel laureate Jean-Marie Lehn today, is chemistry

(PhysOrg.com) -- The simplest, most sensible "Big Bang" universe, theoretical physicists believe, would be one in which equal numbers of particles and antiparticles are formed in pairs. As the universe cools, most of these particles would encounter their antiparticles, and they would annihilate.