Stars ablaze in other skies

Fred Adams sees stars in the most unlikely places.

His calculations suggest that, contrary to some previous claims, stars are not only common in our cosmos but are also ablaze in myriad other universes, where the laws of physics may be drastically different. Even in a cosmos where balls of gas and dust never collapse and ignite to make conventional stars, radiation produced by black holes and clumps of invisible material called dark matter may play the same role as stars, says Adams, a theorist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.