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In its infancy, when the universe was a few millionths of a second old, the elemental constituents of matter moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded, this quark–gluon plasma quickly cooled, and protons and neutrons and other forms of normal matter "froze out": the quarks became bound together by the exchange of gluons, the carriers of the color force.

Dark matter, inferred to exist from its gravitational effects on the universe, is still a mystery to scientists. But a new study says that dark matter could help life evolve and survive on distant worlds outside of our solar system.

Dark matter, inferred to exist from its gravitational effects on the universe, is still a mystery to scientists. But a new study says that dark matter could help life evolve and survive on distant worlds outside of our solar system.

By shooting a beam of neutrinos through a small slice of the Earth under Japan, physicists say they've caught the particles changing their stripes in new ways. These observations may one day help explain why the universe is made of matter rather than anti-matter.

From the outlook of a planet that resides next to a quiet, relatively predictable star, the circumstances that lead to dramatic stellar explosions elsewhere in the universe can sound somewhat improbable. Some such blasts, known as type Ia supernovae, occur when a small, dense star known as a white dwarf--roughly the diameter of Earth, but hundreds of thousands of times more massive--grows too large by siphoning material off a neighboring star, igniting a thermonuclear explosion.

For all we understand about the universe, 96 percent of what’s out there still has scientists in the dark. Astronomical observations have established that familiar matter--atoms--accounts for only 4 percent of the weight of the cosmos.

BALTIMORE--Dark matter pervades the universe, giving shape to the cosmos on the grandest scales. So perhaps it is fitting that physicists are turning to a large-scale physics experiment to uncover what dark matter is made of. [More]

(PhysOrg.com) -- Cosmologists Alan Coley from Canada's Dalhousie University and Bernard Carr from Queen Mary University in London, have published a paper on arXiv, where they suggest that some so-called primordial black holes might have been created in the Big Crunch that came before the Big Bang, which lends support to the theory that the Big Bang was not a single event, but one that occurs over and over again as the universe crunches down to a single point, then blows up again, over and over.

As children, we all learn about numbers. We start with counting, followed by addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. But mathematicians know that the number system we study in school is but one of many possibilities

(PhysOrg.com) -- Dark matter, the mysterious substance that may account for nearly 25 percent of the universe, has so far evaded direct observation. But researchers from UCLA, Columbia University and other institutions participating in the international XENON collaboration say they are now closer than ever before.

A major dark matter experiment has taken a swipe with its technological net in the hopes of catching some of the elusive particles that make up the universe's missing mass, and once again that net has come up empty. But in swiping and missing, the Xenon100 experiment has closed in a bit tighter on where dark matter--the invisible stuff theorized to outweigh the ordinary matter in the universe by a factor of five--might be hiding. [More]

Using data from experiments performed in 2010 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists are studying rare particle decays that could explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter.

You might think it’s hard to have a conversation with theoretical physicist Brian Greene. His research specialty is superstring theory, the hypothesis that everything in the universe is made up of miniscule, vibrating strands of energy. Luckily for an interviewer, Greene has a knack for explaining difficult concepts to non-scientists.