By Ron Cowen
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.
“In fact, all universes can support the existence of stars, provided that the definition of star is interpreted broadly,” notes Adams in the August online Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
Adams embarked on his study because he wanted to find out if other possible universes, in which the constants of nature might have different values, could support the existence of stars. Multiple universes, or the idea of a multiverse, is envisioned by some modern versions of the Big Bang theory.