I found a great gallery of images showing stuff at all scales, from “Quarks to Quasars”.

Excerpt from 10²¹: Given an estimated age for our solar system of 4.5 thousand million years, the Sun has made about 15 to 18 orbits around the galactic core.

Bruce Bryson writes: “This is a visual journey consisting of 42 images — 42 powers of ten. At one end of the journey is the immensity of the known universe, 13.7 billion years old with a radius of at least 12 billion light years (and probably much larger). At the other end of the journey is a depiction of the three quarks within a proton.”

* Quarks to Quasars, Powers of Ten

geekman writes “NASA is paying Rice University $11 million to build a prototype quantum wire that can conduct electricity 10 times better than traditional copper cables at one-sixth the weight. Rice has four years to build a one-meter-long quantum wire, which will be made out of carbon nanotubes. Seems like a lot of money for a little wire, but then again, all the rocket scientists at Los Alamos have only ever been able to put together a four-centimeter nanotube.”

Slashdot | Rice Contracted to Provide NASA’s Quantum Wire

New research suggests that the early universe was a hot, dense liquid made of basic atomic particles, overturning the widely held belief that fiery gas existed immediately after the “big bang” that created the cosmos.

Related:
* CNN: Scientists: Early universe didn’t blow so much as flow
* USAToday.com: Picking apart the ‘Big Bang’ brings a big mystery
* Slashdot.org: Data Suggests Early Universe was Superfluid

Science News : Early universe may have been fluid

[/.] SpaceAdmiral writes “Nature reports that, according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, ‘It’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist.’

George Chapline argues that the collapse of massive stars is more likely to lead to dark energy stars. These dark energy stars behave somewhat like a black hole outside of the surface, but the negative gravity inside could cause matter to ‘bounce back out again.’”

Slashdot | Black Holes ‘Do Not Exist,’ Contends Physicist

Italian, US cosmologists present alternate explanation for accelerating expansion of the universe: Was Einstein right when he said he was wrong?

[/.] “A Fermilab press release reports that the expansion of the universe may be explainable without the need for dark energy or a cosmological constant. Apparently, ripples from inflation in the early universe may account for the observed expansion rate of the universe.”

Slashdot | Fermilab Reports Dark Energy Not Needed