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Friday, March 18, 2011

The Milky Way Over Chile's 'Very Large Telescope' Yields a Secret Hidden Since the Big Bang

The Milky Way Over Chile's 'Very Large Telescope' Yields a Secret Hidden Since the Big Bang
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Billions of years ago the intensity of the electromagnetic interaction was different at opposite ends of universe. That's the fascinating conclusion of a group of physicists in Australia, who have studied light from ancient quasars and discovered that the fine-structure constant, known as α, has changed in both space and time since the Big Bang.

In 1998 John Webb, Victor Flambaum and colleagues at the University of New South Wales began looking for evidence of variations in α by studying light coming from distant quasars. Radiation from these extremely bright objects has traveled for billions of years before reaching Earth, passing en route through ancient clouds of gas along the way.

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