The Search for a Dark Big Bang to New, Stranger Quantum Theory

It’s been a wild news week, from the Pentagon’s UFO chief saying an alien mothership in our solar system is possible to CalTech announcing that an object larger than Pluto was been discovered.

A new version of quantum theory is even stranger than the original--An idea called almost quantum theory predicts particles could have stronger correlations than we've ever observed. If tests show it to be true, it would be a huge scientific upset, reports New Scientist.

Physicists Are Searching for Signs of a Second 'Dark' Big Bang to Solve a Major Mystery--Dark matter in the universe might be so mysterious because it has a completely different origin to the rest of the cosmos, a new theory proposes, reports Becky Ferreira for Vice Science.

Military Times: Pentagon UFO chief says alien mothership in our solar system possible. "“[A]n artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions,” Sean Kirkpatrick, director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, wrote in a research report co-authored by Abraham Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department."

How are the atoms that form us forged across the universe?--For decades researchers have studied how heavy elements are produced in the cosmos – but there is still so much mystery to unravel, says astrophysicist Artemis Spyrou for New Scientist.

Rare galaxy with three black holes leads astronomers to the most massive objects in the universe. reports Robert Lea at Live Science. Scientists watched as a three-quasar system merged in a supercomputer simulation of the universe to birth a black hole 300 billion times as massive as the sun.

AI Hunt For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Finds 8 Promising Signals--Machine intelligence is helping astronomers analyze vast datasets from radio telescopes — and finding previously unseen signals of interest. reports the Physics arXiv Blog.

James Webb Space Telescope spots galaxy from the early universe rich in star formation, reports Samantha Mathewson for Space.com. 'We found this galaxy to be super-chemically abundant, something none of us expected.'

Object Bigger than Pluto Discovered, Called 10th Planet, reports Robert Roy Britt for Space.com. "It's definitely bigger than Pluto," said Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at CalTech. The object is round and could be up to twice as large as Pluto, Brown told reporters in a hastily called NASA-run teleconference Friday evening.