BiotechMashup

(University of California - Berkeley) While general relativity describes well the behavior of the solar system, Einstein's theory of gravity and spacetime has not been tested on cosmological scales. Now, a team that includes UC Berkeley physicist Uros Seljak has analyzed data on 70,000 galaxies to show that the theory is so far the best description of the universe, at least out to 3.5 billion light years from Earth. Specifically, theories without dark matter do not fit the observations.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists and their colleagues in Sloan Digital Sky Survey III used visual data from nearly a million luminous galaxies for the most accurate calculation yet of how matter clumps together in the universe. By deriving cosmic rulers from an immense volume of sky, from a time when the universe was half its present age until now, the study establishes how much dark matter, dark energy, and even hard-to-detect neutrinos it contains.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Xiang Zhang, a faculty scientist with the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor at the University of California Berkeley, lead a study in which it was determined that the interactions of light and matter with spacetime, as predicted by general relativity, can be studied using the new breed of artificial optical materials that feature extraordinary abilities to bend light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

While general relativity describes well the behavior of the solar system, Einstein's theory of gravity and spacetime has not been tested on cosmological scales. Now, a team has analyzed data on 70,000 galaxies to show that the theory is so far the best description of the universe, at least out to 3.5 billion light years from Earth. Specifically, theories without dark matter do not fit the observations.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) The biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, using light from 14,000 quasars over 10 billion light years away to show the distribution of intergalactic clouds of gas, has been announced by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) based at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, part of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The result proves that the technique, never attempted before, can be used to study dark energy in the early universe.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) An international team led by a cosmologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has extended the relationship between the x-ray luminosity and the mass of galaxy clusters as measured by gravitational lensing, improving the reliability of mass measurements of much older, more distant, and smaller galactic structures. These refined measurements will benefit both the understanding of dark matter and the nature of dark energy as well.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, is the most ambitious attempt yet to map the expansion history of the Universe using the technique known as baryon acoustic oscillation. Part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III, BOSS achieved "first light" on the night of Sept. 14-15, when it acquired data with its upgraded spectrographic system across the entire focal plane of the Sloan Foundation telescope at Apache Point Observatory.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) Warm dense matter exists in the cores of gas giant planets and the preliminary stages of nuclear fusion, among other inaccessible places. With an accelerator being built at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as part of the Heavy Ion Fusion Science Virtual National Laboratory, a collaboration among Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, scientists will soon be able to study warm dense matter in the laboratory.

(DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) The Supernova Cosmology Project's Union2 compilation and reanalysis of decades of supernova surveys from the world's leading researchers, with the addition of six high-redshift supernovae, puts new bounds on possible values for the nature of dark energy. Einstein's cosmological constant comfortably fits the data, but there's still plenty of room at the top for dynamical theories.