What the Higgs Boson Reveals About the Universe to Is There Evidence for a Universe Before the Big Bang?

Today’s news stories include There is no evidence for a Universe before the Big Bang to At Jupiter, JUICE and Clipper Will Work Together in Hunt for Life, and more.

What the Higgs boson tells us about the universe What the Higgs boson tells us about the universe--"The Higgs boson is the only fundamental particle known to be scalar, meaning it has no quantum spin. This fact answers questions about our universe, but it also raises new ones. “The properties of a particle are essentially properties of the field,” says Peter Onyisi, associate professor of physics for the University of Texas at Austin. Like waves in the ocean, “Higgs bosons are vibrations in a Higgs field,”  reports Symmetry.

The CERN particle accelerator that will breathe new life into physics--A new breed of collider, called plasma wakefield accelerators, can study fundamental physics in new ways by doing something the Large Hadron Collider cannot do: colliding electrons, reports New Scientist.

There is no evidence for a Universe before the Big Bang--Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, famed for his work on black holes, claims we've seen evidence from a prior Universe, reports Big Think. "When inflation ends, the hot Big Bang ensues, and we can see evidence from the final tiny fraction-of-a-second of inflation imprinted on our observable Universe. However, we can't see anything from before that time."

Mars rover sensors may not be sensitive enough to find signs of life--While testing Mars rover sensors in the Atacama desert, researchers inadvertently found a variety of unclassifiable microorganisms called “the dark biome,” reports New Scientist.

Huge young galaxies seen by JWST may upend our models of the universe--Galaxies spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope seem far too massive to have formed so early on in the universe’s history, which could be a problem for our ideas of galaxy formation, reports Leah Crane and Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. “I would have guessed that galaxies like this would not exist this early in the universe,” says Pieter van Dokkum at Yale University in Connecticut, part of the research team.

We may have discovered alien life already but rejected the evidence too quickly because it seemed false at first glance, reports Big Think. "The Viking Life Detection experiments and Martian meteorite ALH84001 were both thought to prove the existence of life on Mars, but these were also false positives. Once a claim is judged to be a false positive, it’s difficult to change people’s minds, even if new evidence comes along," reports Big Think.

At Jupiter, JUICE and Clipper Will Work Together in Hunt for Life--A soon-to-launch European mission is the first of two spacecraft—with the other coming from NASA—that will hunt for signs of habitability on Jupiter’s icy moons, reports Jonathan O'Callaghan for Scientific American.

How Do We Find Aliens? Maybe Unlearn What We Know About 'Life' First, reports Clara Moskowitz and Sarah Scoles for Scientific American. "Life...is something that is biological but does not necessarily rely on the same elements, and compounds are ways of transferring information. It's just something that's not ... it's not physics, chemistry, but it's biology, but we don't know anything about it, really.

Inside the Hunt for U.F.O.s at the End of the World, reports The New York Times. As quickly as the national craziness over downed objects began, the United States called off the search, leaving answers encased in Arctic ice and under the whitecaps of Lake Huron.

Entropy: The Unifying the Narrative of Science--"In Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, Niels Bohr wrote that initial attempts to unite the scientific story failed because scientists lacked a broad narrative for the history of science. He believed that quantum physics could unite with biology for a more comprehensive theory of scientific understanding," reports Chris Edwards for The Skeptic. 

'Runaway' black hole the size of 20 million suns was found speeding through space with a trail of newborn stars behind it, reports Robert Lea for Live Science. Astronomers have discovered a "runaway" black hole, potentially the first observational evidence that supermassive black holes can be ejected from their host galaxies.

New Space Radar Will Hunt Planet-Threatening Asteroids--The new ngRADAR at the Green Bank Telescope offers unprecedented Earth-based views of the solar system, reports Briley Lewis for Scientific American.

The early universe was crammed with stars 10,000 times the size of our sun, new study suggests reports Paul Sutter for Live Science.