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23 June 2010
Cosmologists Provide Closest Measure of Elusive Neutrino
Cosmologists – and not particle physicists — could be the ones who finally measure the mass of the elusive neutrino particle. A group of cosmologists have made their most accurate measurement yet of the mass of these mysterious so-called "ghost particles." They didn't use a giant particle detector but used data from the largest survey [...]
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14 April 2010
Magnetic Fields in Inter-cluster Space: Measured at Last
The strength of the magnetic fields here on Earth, on the Sun, in inter-planetary space, on stars in our galaxy (the Milky Way; some of them anyway), in the interstellar medium (ISM) in our galaxy, and in the ISM of other spiral galaxies (some of them anyway) have been measured. But there have been no [...]
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04 April 2010
Andromeda's Double Nucleus – Explained at Last?
In 1993, the Hubble Space Telescope snapped a close-up of the nucleus of the Andromeda galaxy, M31, and found that it is double. In the 15+ years since, dozens of papers have been written about it, with titles like The stellar population of the decoupled nucleus in M 31, Accretion Processes in the Nucleus of M31, [...]
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03 April 2010
Astronomy Without A Telescope – Is An Anomalous Anomaly A Normality?
The lack of any flyby anomaly effect when the Rosetta spacecraft passed Earth in November 2009 is what, an anomaly? No. Anomalies arise when there is a mismatch between a predicted and an observed value. When it happens our first thought shouldn't be that OMG there's something wrong with physics! We should probably start by [...]
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30 March 2010
LHC Sets Record for Particle Collisions, Marks "New Territory" in Physics
Physicists at the CERN research center collided sub-atomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider on Tuesday at the highest speeds ever achieved. “It’s a great day to be a particle physicist,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “A lot of people have waited a long time for this moment, but their patience and dedication [...]
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26 March 2010
Watch History Live from the Large Hadron Collider
CERN announced that on March 30 they will attempt to circulate beams in the Large Hadron Collider at 3.5 TeV, the highest energy yet achieved in a particle accelerator. A live webcast will be shown of the event, and will include live footage from the control rooms for the LHC accelerator and all four [...]
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18 March 2010
This is Getting Boring: General Relativity Passes Yet another Big Test!
Published in 1915, Einstein's theory of general relativity (GR) passed its first big test just a few years later, when the predicted gravitational deflection of light passing near the Sun was observed during the 1919 solar eclipse. In 1960, GR passed its first big test in a lab, here on Earth; the Pound-Rebka experiment. And over [...]
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13 March 2010
Astronomy Without A Telescope – Home Made Quark-Gluon Soup
The most powerful operational heavy-ion collider in the world, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recently recorded the highest ever temperature created in an Earth-based laboratory of 4 trillion Kelvin. Achieved at the almost speed of light collision of gold ions, this resulted in the temporary existence of quark-gluon soup – something first seen at [...]
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11 March 2010
World-wide Campaign Sheds New Light on Nature's "LHC"
In a manner somewhat like the formation of an alliance to defeat Darth Vader's Death Star, more than a decade ago astronomers formed the Whole Earth Blazar Telescope consortium to understand Nature's Death Ray Gun (a.k.a. blazars). And contrary to its at-death's-door sounding name, the GASP has proved crucial to unraveling the secrets of how [...]
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28 February 2010
Astronomy Without A Telescope – Gravity, Schmavity
The axiom that what goes up, must come down doesn’t apply to most places in the universe, which are largely empty space. For most places in the universe, what goes up, just goes up. On Earth, the tendency of upwardly-mobile objects to reverse course in mid-flight and return to the surface is, to say the least, remarkable.(...)Read [...]
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27 February 2010
Small Asteroids, Bread Flour, and a Dutch Physicist's 150-year Old Theory
No, it's not the Universe Puzzle No. 3; rather, it's an intriguing result from recent work into the strange shapes and composition of small asteroids. Images sent back from space missions suggest that smaller asteroids are not pristine chunks of rock, but are instead covered in rubble that ranges in size from meter-sized boulders to flour-like [...]
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20 February 2010
ESA's Tough Choice: Dark Matter, Sun Close Flyby, Exoplanets (Pick Two)
Key questions relevant to fundamental physics and cosmology, namely the nature of the mysterious dark energy and dark matter (Euclid); the frequency of exoplanets around other stars, including Earth-analogs (PLATO); take the closest look at our Sun yet possible, approaching to just 62 solar radii (Solar Orbiter) … but only two! What would be your [...]
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20 February 2010
Does Zonal Swishing Play a Part in Earth's Magnetic Field Reversals?
Why does the Earth's magnetic field 'flip' every million years or so? Whatever the reason, or reasons, the way the liquid iron of the Earth's outer core flows – its currents, its structure, its long-term cycles – is important, either as cause, effect, or a bit of both. The main component of the Earth's field – [...]
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19 February 2010
Einstein's General Relativity Tested Again, Much More Stringently
This time it was the gravitational redshift part of General Relativity; and the stringency? An astonishing better-than-one-part-in-100-million! How did Steven Chu (US Secretary of Energy, though this work was done while he was at the University of California Berkeley), Holger Müler (Berkeley), and Achim Peters (Humboldt University in Berlin) beat the previous best gravitational redshift test [...]
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15 February 2010
Supermassive Black Holes Spinning Backwards Create Death Ray Jets?
Why do some of the supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei create back-to-back jets that can vaporize entire solar systems, while others have no jets at all? Dan Evans, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) thinks he knows why; it's because the jet-producing supermassive black holes are spinning [...]
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