What came before the big bang?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/...story.html
EXCERPT: [...] a “small platoon of physicists” who focus on figuring out such things as what happened at the very first moment of the big bang, whether time or anything else existed before it, and exactly how we distinguish the future from the past. And they expect, sometime in the next 50 years or so, to have some real answers....
Mysterious radio signals from space test Einstein's General Relativity theory
http://news.psu.edu/story/386147/2016/01...relativity
EXCERPT: A new way to test one of the basic principles underlying Einstein's theory of General Relativity using brief blasts of rare radio signals from space called Fast Radio Bursts is 10 times to 100 times better than previous testing methods that used gamma-ray bursts [...] Fast Radio Bursts are super-brief blasts of energy -- lasting just a few milliseconds. Until now, only about a dozen Fast Radio Bursts have been detected on Earth. They appear to be caused by mysterious events beyond our Milky Way Galaxy, and possibly even beyond the Local Group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way. The new technique will be important for analyzing the abundance of observations of Fast Radio Bursts that advanced radio-signal observatories, now being planned, are expected to detect....
Stellar revelations
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...010416.php
EXCERPT: Using a recently developed technique to detect magnetic fields inside stars, a group of astronomers -- including Matteo Cantiello and Lars Bildsten from UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) -- has discovered that strong magnetic fields are very common in stars. The group's findings appear in the journal Nature. [...] Previously, only a very small percentage of stars were known to have strong magnetic fields. Therefore, current scientific models of how stars evolve do not include magnetic fields as a fundamental component....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/...story.html
EXCERPT: [...] a “small platoon of physicists” who focus on figuring out such things as what happened at the very first moment of the big bang, whether time or anything else existed before it, and exactly how we distinguish the future from the past. And they expect, sometime in the next 50 years or so, to have some real answers....
Mysterious radio signals from space test Einstein's General Relativity theory
http://news.psu.edu/story/386147/2016/01...relativity
EXCERPT: A new way to test one of the basic principles underlying Einstein's theory of General Relativity using brief blasts of rare radio signals from space called Fast Radio Bursts is 10 times to 100 times better than previous testing methods that used gamma-ray bursts [...] Fast Radio Bursts are super-brief blasts of energy -- lasting just a few milliseconds. Until now, only about a dozen Fast Radio Bursts have been detected on Earth. They appear to be caused by mysterious events beyond our Milky Way Galaxy, and possibly even beyond the Local Group of galaxies that includes the Milky Way. The new technique will be important for analyzing the abundance of observations of Fast Radio Bursts that advanced radio-signal observatories, now being planned, are expected to detect....
Stellar revelations
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2...010416.php
EXCERPT: Using a recently developed technique to detect magnetic fields inside stars, a group of astronomers -- including Matteo Cantiello and Lars Bildsten from UC Santa Barbara's Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) -- has discovered that strong magnetic fields are very common in stars. The group's findings appear in the journal Nature. [...] Previously, only a very small percentage of stars were known to have strong magnetic fields. Therefore, current scientific models of how stars evolve do not include magnetic fields as a fundamental component....