Nearby Universe's 'Cosmic Fog' Measured

HESS collaboration has carried out the first measurement of the intensity of the diffuse extragalactic background light in the nearby Universe, a fog of photons that has filled the Universe ever since its formation. Using some of the brightest gamma-ray sources in the southern hemisphere, the study was carried out using measurements performed by the HESS telescope array, located in Namibia and involving CNRS and CEA. The study is complementary to that recently carried out by the Fermi-LAT space observatory. These findings provide new insight into the size of the Universe observable in gamma rays and shed light on the formation of stars and the evolution of galaxies.
Science Daily, Jan 19, 2013

A. Abramowski et al.

Measurement of the extragalactic background light imprint on the spectra of the brightest blazars observed with H.E.S.S..

Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2013; 550: A4 DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201220355

Biggest Structure in Universe: Large Quasar Group Is 4 Billion Light Years Across

An international team of astronomers, led by academics from the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan), has found the largest known structure in the universe. The large quasar group (LQG) is so large that it would take a vehicle travelling at the speed of light some 4 billion years to cross it.

Science Daily, Jan. 11, 2013 

Roger G. Clowes, et al.

A structure in the early Universe at z ∼ 1.3 that exceeds the homogeneity scale of the R-W concordance cosmology. 

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, January 11, 2013 DOI:10.1093/mnras/sts497

Nine-Year WMAP results announced

The model fit implies that the age of the universe is 13.772+/-0.059 Gyr, and the fit Hubble constant is H0 = 69.32+/-0.80 km/s/Mpc. Inflation is also supported: the fluctuations are adiabatic, with Gaussian random phases; the detection of a deviation of the scalar spectral index from unity reported earlier by WMAP now has high statistical significance (n_s = 0.9608+/-0.0080); and the universe is close to flat/Euclidean, Omega_k = -0.0027 (+0.0039/-0.0038).   Overall, the WMAP mission has resulted in a reduction of the cosmological parameter volume by a factor of 68,000 for the standard six-parameter LCDM model, based on CMB data alone. 

http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5225
http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.5226

New South Pole Telescope shows Omaga = 1.006 +- 0.004

The South Pole Telescope published the new results.
Omega_K=-0.003+0.014-0.018. Using the SPT+WMAP7 data, the spectral index of scalar fluctuations tis ns=0.9623+/-0.0097 in the LCDM model, a 3.9sigma preference for a scale-dependent spectrum with ns<1.