Perhaps Stephen Hawking said it best: "Our image of the universe today is full of strange-sounding ideas and remarkable truths." Wrap your brain around National Geographic News editors' picks of some of the odder astrophysics concepts introduced in 2010.
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Every Black Hole Contains Another Universe?
Like part of a cosmic Russian doll, our universe may be nested inside a black hole that is itself part of a larger universe, astronomers announced in April. In turn, all the black holes found so far in our universe may be doorways into alternate realities.
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Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict
The theory of eternal inflation says our universe is just one of many—and it predicts time in our universe will end in just five billion years, physicists said in October.
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New Proof Unknown "Structures" Tug at Our Universe
"Dark flow" is no fluke, suggests a March study that strengthened the case for unknown, unseen "structures" lurking on the outskirts of creation.
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Einstein's Gravity Confirmed on a Cosmic Scale
The theory of gravity proposed by Albert Einstein nearly a century ago can explain the dance of galaxies around one another just as well as it can model the motion of planets around the sun, according to a study released in March.
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Big Bang Poured Out "Liquid" Universe, Atom Smasher Hints
In the immediate aftermath of the big bang, the universe behaved like a very dense, superhot liquid, according to data released in December from the Large Hadron Collider.
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Universe's Existence May Be Explained by New Material
About 13.7 billion years ago, the big bang created a big mess of matter that eventually gave rise to life, the universe, and everything. Now a new material, first described in August, may help scientists understand why.
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![http://bccp.lbl.gov/eunhwa_webpage_2/simulation.html Cosmic String Simulations performed by the Cambridge Cosmology Group. Cosmic strings interact with each other by commuting, reconnecting, and forming loops. Cosmic strings are expected to have huge tension so as to make their motion relativistic. Vibrating string loops evaporate by emitting gravitational waves. As time elapses, long strings tend to straighten (compare long patterns in two different eras). The simulation shows that tens of long strings with cosmological length survive up to matter dominated era. Figure 3. String network simulations [7]. Simulations are performed in two different eras. Evolution of strings in matter dominated era. Each case the size of box is ~2ct.](http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-live/photos/000/241/overrides/cosmic-strings_24163_160x120.jpg)
Space-Time "Wrinkles" Igniting Odd Gamma-Ray Bursts?
Unusually short but intense "fireballs" in the distant universe, dubbed gamma-ray bursts, might be created by the plucking of invisible cosmic strings—ultradense flaws in space-time—an August study suggested.
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Mysterious Structures Balloon From Milky Way's Core
Two huge, previously unseen bubbles that emit gamma rays are billowing from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, astronomers suggested in November.
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Einstein's Relativity Affects Aging on Earth (Slightly)
You'll age slightly faster standing on a staircase than you do on the floor below, according to research released in September. The finding is linked to the strange, time-bending effects of Albert Einstein's theories of relativity, which for the first time were shown to affect earthbound distances and time frames.
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Largest Space Molecules Found; Buckyball Mystery Solved
Buckyballs—molecules whose 60 carbon atoms form stable, hollow spheres—have been found for the first time in space, in the residue of a dead star, astronomers announced in July.
Published December 7, 2010
Did we miss anything? What blew your mind in 2010? Post your comments below.
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