A team of astronomers have obtained new data by studying quasars, which are very distant galaxies hosting an active black hole in their center. As the light emitted by quasars travels throughout the cosmos, part of it is absorbed by a variety of atoms present in interstellar clouds, providing astronomers with a natural laboratory to test the laws of physics billions of light-years away from the Earth. Credit: Dr. Julian Berengut, UNSW, 2010.From Space Daily:
New research suggests that the supposedly invariant fine-structure constant, which characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic
force, varies from place to place throughout the Universe. The finding could mean rethinking the fundaments of our current knowledge of physics.
These results will be presented tomorrow during the Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting in Lisbon, Portugal, and the scientific article has been submitted to the Physical Review Letters Journal.
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