Physics Buzz

In true nerd fashion, folks here celebrated the Large Hadron Collider's world premeire the only way we knew how, with a proton beam ignition party. After staying up all night and witnessing (in real-time) the first particle beam sucessfully make its way around the 17-mile loop of accelerator, there we sat as the sun came up, in our pjs, amid remnants of mimosas, donuts, bagels, waffles, chocolate chips and whipped cream, when we realized, hey, we weren't dead! Shortly followed by, hey, the LHC works! A few of us lost bets on that one. In any case, a night of sing-a-longs, gorging on food and drink, and sporadic chants of " CMS and Atlas are one of a kind, they're looking for whatever particles they can find" was fitting tribute to a historic and exciting event. CERN scientists shot two beams of protons in one direction around the LHC, a ring-like tunnel running under the French-Swiss border containing over 1,600 superconducting magnets. The magnets allo

Astronomers have for the first time developed a technique to view rapidly spinning disks of gas found near black holes . Their observations allowed them to confirm the that the electromagnetic spectra of these accretion disks match what astronomers have long predicted, giving a boost of hard evidence to current quasar formation theory. The team of researchers gazed into the night on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, looking through the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope . They were able to measure the spectrum of the accretion disk by getting rid of extra, interfering light, using a polarizing filter attached to the telescope. Why exactly are polarized filters so special? Well, they aren't. It is the way that accretion disks emit light that lets the filter do its job. Accretion disks emit non-polarized light that doesn't care how its electrical field is aligned, known as direct light. But a small amount of accretion disk light reflects off gas very close to the black hole- this light i

Everyone's favorite particle smasher, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has almost reached 1.9 Kelvin (-465F), colder than deep space. Never before has a physics experiment so enormous and complex been operated at such extremely low temperatures. It contains 7,000 magnets that will be maintained at colder than space temperatures using liquid helium , in order to make them superconducting . The magnets are arranged in a ring that runs through the underground tunnel. Cooling the Collider is a process that takes a couple of weeks, and that's only if everything goes as planned. If a sector has to be brought back up to room temperature for inspection and repairs and then recooled, the project is setback for months. Of the LHC's eight sectors, six are at temperatures between 4.5 and 1.9 kelvin. To put perspective on just how frigid these temperatures are, desolate regions of outer space are about 2.7 Kelvin. Two sectors are not cold enough to undergo electrical testing, and so th

Way back in 1984, when the Berlin Wall was still erect and everyone felt obliged to read George Orwell, a few astrogeologists came up with a theory to explain why the northern side of Mars is smooth and flat, while the southern side is marred with craters and highly elevated. T hey proposed that something really large slammed into Mars , creating a creating split almost down the middle of the planet. Their ideawas influenced by another theory circulating at the time; that the moon formed by a chunk of Mars breaking off after a massive impact. The major crash theory didn't develop much beyond that. After sitting on some dusty academic shelf for the past 25 years it has finally been revived, thanks to new evidence from recent research. Scientists now believe that something similar to an asteroid or a comet smacked into Mars about 4 billion years ago. Moreover, the giant crater left over from the impact may be the largest in our solar system , about the size of Asia, Europe, and Au

The chance of witnessing two dying stars explode almost at the same time: 1 in 10,000. The chance of witnessing a double dose of supernovae with the correct type of telescope: really, really, really unlikely. To top it off, there is no way to predict when and where deathly star explosions will happen, and only 1% of stars die in a supernova anyway. The rest fade away into white dwarfs , exhausted and completely out of nuclear fuel. Nonetheless, Alicia Soderberg, a researcher at Princeton University, managed to beat unbeatable odds when she witnessed a supernova explosion from start to finish, while viewing the leftovers of a supernova in a nearby galaxy. Soderberg happened to be gazing through NASA's Swift gamma-ray burst satellite ,and picked up x-ray signals. The swift satellite is special because it can view X-rays . This is important if you want to spot a supernova: they can only be viewed in the X-ray wavelength . Research

The sun seems to have an anger management problem. From time to time violent outbursts of gas occur in the outer surface of the sun. These "solar temper tantrums" are thought to be caused by the reconnection of magnetic fields with differently organized atoms ( opposite polarity ). The first 3D image of a jet of gas propelling out of the sun's surface (pictured) has recently been constructed. Researchers used NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft to view the sun from different perspectives. Turns out the jet has a helical shape, like a screw or a spiral staircase. Spirally jets are good news for theorists, who propose that the sun's violent outbursts are caused by twisted loops of magnetic fields that rise up from the sun's surface. These magnetic loops are thought to abruptly break apart and reconnect with nearby fields, kind of like how kids (or a good portion of adults) snap legos apart and reassemble them. The two identical observatories that make up STEREO are

Admit it, sometimes you think the world revolves around you. In fact, it's possible that the whole universe revolves around you, and a new analysis may be able to confirm your ultra specialness once and for all. Don't go getting all full of yourself, until you read the post below by our newest Physics Buzz blogger, who we call Uncalm . -Buzz Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus stated that the earth is not in a special, central place in the universe. As observers, humans on earth have no advantage over other places in the universe. But was he wrong? Is the earth actually located in the center of a matter-free bubble, a billion light years long, and enclosed by a massive dense shell of material? If so, dark energy , which is invisible (like dark matter ) and thought by physicists to pervade all of space while causing the universe to expand faster, may not exist. The force of gravity would cause galaxies inside the bubble to speed towards the earth, creating the illusion that th

Darkness is filled now Matter confounds Newtons grasp Lost within the void - Demick As "Demick" poetically phrased in the above haiku, calculations that demonstrate missing masses in galaxies and larger-than-expected gravitational forces point to a mysterious dark matter . It seems to concentrate in halos around galaxies. The Bullet Cluster , two colliding galaxies which provide the best evidence yet for dark matter. Its particles scarcely notice the matter in our everyday lives. In fact, they hardly interact with the matter that makes up everything that we can see in the universe. So how do we figure out what it is? Well, that’s rather a large problem. Luckily, theoretical physicists like Erik Lundström, Michael Gustafsson, Lars Bergstrom, and Joakim Edsjo of Stockholm University are on the case, tracking down the cause of the unexpected mass and gravity. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles ( WIMPs ) are a hypothetical form of dark matter that interacts only thro