Sunday 28 December 2008

Two interesting ideas from astrophysics

I came across two interesting ideas from astrophysics in recent weeks. The first is that pressure affects gravity. Apparently it is a well known result from a century ago, but I didn't know it.

The second idea is that it could be possible to view what things looked like before the Big Bang created the current universe. The idea was implemented in an experiment, and is appealing in its directness: measure the distribution of the universe's distant energy and since the energy was generated shortly after the universe started, it may reflect the universe's condition at that time. The original paper is available here if you are interested.

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