Along with John Mather of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Smoot won the 2006 Nobel Prize for physics for finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang theory, the idea that the universe was born in a rapid cosmic expansion some 14 billion years ago. The Florida native earned a PhD in particle physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970.
It sounds like something from the latest science fiction blockbuster. But scientists in Massachusetts have revealed the terrifyingly high odds a black hole will explode in the next 10 years. In a new paper, they say there's a 90 per cent chance of at least one black hole exploding by 2035. If and when it happens, telescopes positioned in space and here on Earth should be able to capture the event - which fortunately won't be dangerous for Earthlings.
When most of us think about science, we don't often think about something very fundamental to the enterprise: what the goal of it all actually is. Reality is a complicated place, and the only tools we have to guide us in understanding what it is and how it works is the combination of what we can observe, measure, and experiment on.
NASA explains the incredible shot captured by the Hubble Space Telescope of 3I/ATLAS shows a 'teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust' trailing behind the object, suggesting it's a sizable comet.