A graphic designer in Rhode Island, Jason writes about space exploration on his blog Lights In The Dark, Discovery News, and, of course, here on Universe Today. Ad astra!
Unless you’ve been hiding under a chondrite for the past week you’ve heard the news from CERN regarding the discovery of a new particle that exhibits “Higgs-like” qualities. Particle physics isn’t the easiest discipline to wrap one’s head around, and while we’ve recently shared some simplified explanations of what exactly a Higgs boson is, well…here’s another.
Here, BBC’s Jonathan Amos attempts to demonstrate what the Higgs field does, and what part the boson plays. Some Ping-Pong balls, a little sugar, and a cafeteria tray is all it takes to give an idea of how essential this long-sought after subatomic particle is to the Universe. (If only finding it had been that easy!)
With the science world all abuzz in anticipation of tomorrow’s official announcement from CERN in regards to its hunt for the Higgs, some of you may be wondering, “what’s a Higgs?” And for that matter, what’s a boson?
The video above, released a couple of months ago by the talented Jorge Cham at PHDcomics, gives a entertaining run-down of subatomic particles, how they interact and how, if it exists — which, by now, many are sure it does — the Higgs relates to them.
It’s the 7-minutes course in particle physics you’ll wish you had taken in college (unless you’re a particle physicist in which case… well, you’d still probably have enjoyed it.)
On June 28 NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed by Tethys, a 1,062-kilometer (662-mile) -wide moon of Saturn that’s made almost entirely of ice. Tethys is covered in craters of all sizes but by far the most dramatic of all is the enormous Odysseus crater, which spans an impressive 450 kilometers (280 miles) of the moon’s northern hemisphere — nearly two-fifths of its entire diameter!
In fact, whatever struck Tethys in the distant past probably should have shattered it into pieces… but didn’t.
Tethys likely held itself together because when the impact occurred that formed Odysseus, the moon was still partially molten. It was able to absorb some of the energy of the impact and thus avoid disintegration — although it was left with a quite the battle scar as an eternal reminder.
The images below are raw images from Cassini’s latest pass of Tethys, showing the moon’s rugged terrain and portions of Odysseus from a distance of 68,521 kilometers (42,577 miles).
The central peak of Odysseus has collapsed, leaving a depression — another indication that the moon wasn’t entirely solid at the time of impact.
Tethys orbits Saturn at a distance of 294,660 kilometers (183,100 miles), about 62,000 miles closer than the Moon is from Earth. Such a close proximity to Saturn subjects Tethys to tidal forces, the frictional heating of which likely helped keep it from cooling and solidifying longer than more distant moons. As a result Tethys appears somewhat less cratered than sister moons Rhea and Dione, which still bear the marks of their earliest impacts… although looking at the region south of Odysseus it’s hard to image a more extensively-cratered place.
Tethys is just another reminder of the violent place our solar system can be. Find out more about Tethys on the Cassini mission site here.
Image credits: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Edited by J. Major. Images have not been calibrated or validated, and each has been level-adjusted and sharpened to bring out surface detail, and in some areas deinterlacing was used to remove linear raw image artifacts.
Today, researchers from Fermilab announced they have zeroed in further on the mass of the Higgs boson, the controversially-called “God particle”* that is thought to be the key to all mass in the Universe. This news comes just two days before a highly-anticipated announcement by CERN during the ICHEP physics conference in Melbourne, Australia (which is expected by many to confirm actual proof of the Higgs.)
Even after analyzing the data from 500 trillion collisions produced over the past decade at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider the Higgs particle has not been identified directly. But a narrower range for its mass has been established with some certainty: according to the research the Higgs, if it exists, has a mass between 115 and 135 GeV/c2.
“Our data strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson, but it will take results from the experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to establish a discovery,” said Fermilab’s Rob Roser, cospokesperson for the CDF experiment at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
Researchers hunt for the Higgs by looking for particles that it breaks down into. With the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, scientists look for energetic photons, while at Fermilab CDF and DZero collaborators have been searching for bottom quarks. Both are viable results expected from the decay of a Higgs particle, “just as a vending machine might return the same amount of change using different combinations of coins.”
Fermilab’s results have a statistical significance of 2.9 sigma, meaning that there’s a 1-in-550 chance that the data was the result of something else entirely. While a 5-sigma significance is required for an official “discovery”, these findings show that the Higgs is running out of places to hide.
“We have developed sophisticated simulation and analysis programs to identify Higgs-like patterns,” said Luciano Ristori, co-spokesperson of the CDF experiment. “Still, it is easier to look for a friend’s face in a sports stadium filled with 100,000 people than to search for a Higgs-like event among trillions of collisions.”
“We achieved a critical step in the search for the Higgs boson. Nobody expected the Tevatron to get this far when it was built in the 1980s.”
– Dmitri Denisov, DZero cospokesperson and physicist at Fermilab
Nearly 50 years since it was proposed, physicists may now be on the edge of exposing this elusive and essential ingredient of… well, everything.
Top image: The Tevatron typically produced about 10 million proton-antiproton collisions per second. Each collision produced hundreds of particles. The CDF and DZero experiments recorded about 200 collisions per second for further analysis. Sub-image: The three-story, 6,000-ton CDF detector recorded snapshots of the particles that emerge when protons and antiprotons collide.(Fermilab)
*And why is it often called the God particle? Because of this book.
As part of his ongoing (and always entertaining) “Science Off the Sphere” series, Expedition 31 flight engineer Don Pettit experiments in orbit with a classic bit of summertime fun: water balloons.
Captured in real-time and slow-motion, we get to see how water behaves when suddenly freed from the restraints of an inflated latex balloon… and gravity. With Don NASA doesn’t only get a flight engineer, it gets its very own Mr. Wizard in space — check it out!
A pulsar may have been spotted racing through space at over 6 million miles per hour (9.65 million km/h), setting a new speed record for these curious cosmic objects. If observations are what they appear to be, astronomers will have to recalculate the incredible forces created by supernova explosions.
Seen in observations made with 3 different telescopes — NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, ESA’s XMM-Newton, and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia — the x-ray-emitting object IGR J11014-6103 appears to be racing away from the remnants of a supernova in the constellation Carina, 30,000 light-years from Earth.
The comet-shaped object is thought to be a pulsar, the rapidly-spinning, superdense remains of a star. The facts that it’s dim in optical and infrared wavelengths and hasn’t changed in x-ray brightness between XMM-Newton observations in 2003 and Chandra measurements in 2011 support the claim.
IGR J11014’s comet-like shape may be the result of its breakneck speed through space as its pulsar wind nebula gets blown back by the high-energy bow shock created at the forefront of its passage.
Pulsar wind nebulae are the results of charged particles streaming out from the pulsar itself. The particles, traveling at nearly light-speed, are rapidly decelerated by the interstellar medium and create a visible shock wave. In the case of IGR J11014, the pulsar wind is formed into a “tail” by its bow shock — effectively a sonic boom in front of it.
Further observations will be needed to confirm that IGR J11014 is indeed a pulsar, especially considering that actual pulsations have not yet been detected. If it is a pulsar, and is really traveling at the record-breaking speeds it appears to be — between 5.4 and 6.5 million miles per hour, more than 12 times faster than the Sun travels around the center of the galaxy — a new model of supernova explosions may be required.
Wildfires continue to rage across the western United States, burning forests and property alike, and even the most remote have sent up enormous plumes of smoke that are plainly visible to astronauts aboard the Space Station.
The photo above was taken by an Expedition 31 crew member on June 27, showing thick smoke drifting northeast from the Fontenelle fire currently burning in Wyoming. More plumes can be seen to the north.
Utah’s Great Salt Lake can be seen at the bottom right of the image. Its two-tone coloration is due to different species of algae that live in the lake, which is split by the physical barrier of a railroad causeway.
You can watch a video of the wildfires in the west taken from the ISS here, and see more “fire and smoke” news and images from space here.
Londoners awoke this morning to news of a meteorite which struck a taxi in the heart of the city’s busy shopping district Covent Garden. Witnesses were left stunned by what looked like a scene straight out of a science fiction film. An incident team arrived almost immediately to cordon off the meteorite and keep the public at a safe distance.
No one was injured as a result of the incident, but it’s a cosmic harbinger of things to come…
Of course, the “things to come” turn out to be 4 weeks of science programs on Eden TV’s Science Month, which starts up in July.
The incident was in fact a well-orchestrated publicity stunt by the UK’s Eden TV (Sky 532 Virgin 208). Science Month will run all day every day during the month of July. Highlights in the first week include Wonders of the Universe (Monday 2 July at 9pm), Finding Life Beyond Earth (Monday 2 July at 10pm), The Code (Wednesday 4 July at 10pm) and Deadliest Volcano (Thursday 5 July at 7pm).
Sure, after all’s said and done it was a PR stunt. But it was a cool PR stunt (even if not quite scientifically accurate!)
Come on, we all know that meteorites aren’t steaming hot when they land. 😉
Saturn’s hazy Titan is now on the short list of moons that likely harbor a subsurface ocean of water, based on new findings from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
As Titan travels around Saturn during its 16-day elliptical orbits, it gets rhythmically squeezed by the gravitational pull of the giant planet — an effect known as tidal flexing (see video below.) If the moon were mostly composed of rock, the flexing would be in the neighborhood of around 3 feet (1 meter.) But based on measurements taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, Titan exhibits much more intense flexing — ten times more, in fact, as much as 30 feet (10 meters) — indicating that it’s not entirely solid at all.
Instead, Cassini scientists estimate that there’s a moon-wide ocean of liquid water beneath the frozen crust of Titan, possibly sandwiched between layers of ice or rock.
“Short of being able to drill on Titan’s surface, the gravity measurements provide the best data we have of Titan’s internal structure.”
– Sami Asmar, Cassini team member at JPL
“Cassini’s detection of large tides on Titan leads to the almost inescapable conclusion that there is a hidden ocean at depth,” said Luciano Iess, the paper’s lead author and a Cassini team member at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. “The search for water is an important goal in solar system exploration, and now we’ve spotted another place where it is abundant.”
Although liquid water is a necessity for the development of life, the presence of it alone does not guarantee that alien organisms are swimming around in a Titanic underground ocean. It’s thought that water must be in contact with rock in order to create the necessary building blocks of life, and as yet it’s not known what situations may exist around Titan’s inner sea. But the presence of such an ocean — possibly containing trace amounts of ammonia — would help explain how methane gets replenished into the moon’s thick atmosphere.
“The presence of a liquid water layer in Titan is important because we want to understand how methane is stored in Titan’s interior and how it may outgas to the surface,” said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini team member at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. “This is important because everything that is unique about Titan derives from the presence of abundant methane, yet the methane in the atmosphere is unstable and will be destroyed on geologically short timescales.”
The team’s paper appears in today’s edition of the journal Science. Read more on the Cassini mission site here.
Top image: artist’s concept showing a possible scenario for the internal structure of Titan. (A. Tavani). Side image: An RGB-composite color image of Titan and Dione in front of Saturn’s face and rings, made from Cassini images acquired on May 21, 2011. (NASA/JPL/SSI. Composite by J. Major.)
An international team of astronomers has figured out a way to determine details of an exoplanet’s atmosphere from 50 light-years away… even though the planet doesn’t transit the face of its star as seen from Earth.
Tau Boötis b is a “hot Jupiter” type of exoplanet, 6 times more massive than Jupiter. It was the first planet to be identified orbiting its parent star, Tau Boötis, located 50 light-years away. It’s also one of the first exoplanets we’ve known about, discovered in 1996 via the radial velocity method — that is, Tau Boötis b exerts a slight tug on its star, shifting its position enough to be detectable from Earth. But the exoplanet doesn’t pass in front of its star like some others do, which until now made measurements of its atmosphere impossible.
Today, an international team of scientists working with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile have announced the success of a “clever new trick” of examining such non-transiting exoplanet atmospheres. By gathering high-quality infrared observations of the Tau Boötis system with the VLT’s CRIRES instrument the researchers were able to differentiate the radiation coming from the planet versus that emitted by its star, allowing the velocity and mass of Tau Boötis b to be determined.
“Thanks to the high quality observations provided by the VLT and CRIRES we were able to study the spectrum of the system in much more detail than has been possible before,” said Ignas Snellen with Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, co-author of the research paper. “Only about 0.01% of the light we see comes from the planet, and the rest from the star, so this was not easy.”
Using this technique, the researchers determined that Tau Boötis b’s thick atmosphere contains carbon monoxide and, curiously, exhibits cooler temperatures at higher altitudes — the opposite of what’s been found on other hot Jupiter exoplanets.
“Maybe one day we may even find evidence for biological activity on Earth-like planets in this way.”
– Ignas Snellen, Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands
In addition to atmospheric details, the team was also able to use the new method to determine Tau Boötis b’s mass and orbital angle — 44 degrees, another detail not previously identifiable.
“The new technique also means that we can now study the atmospheres of exoplanets that don’t transit their stars, as well as measuring their masses accurately, which was impossible before,” said Snellen. “This is a big step forward.
“Maybe one day we may even find evidence for biological activity on Earth-like planets in this way.”
This research was presented in a paper “The signature of orbital motion from the dayside of the planet Tau Boötis b”, to appear in the journal Nature on June 28, 2012.
Added 6/27: The team’s paper can be found on arXiv here.
Top image: artist’s impression of the exoplanet Tau Boötis b. (ESO/L. Calçada). Side image: ESO’s VLT telescopes at the Paranal Observatory in Chile’s Atacama desert. (Iztok Boncina/ESO)
