Daniel Carney, Willy Fischler, Sonia Paban, Navin Sivanandam We explore the effect of initial conditions on the inflationary wavefunction and their consequences for the observed spectrum of primordial fluctuations. In a class of models with a sudden transition into inflation we find that, for a reasonable set of assumptions about the reheat temperature and the… [Read more…]
September 29, 2011
A fleet of spacecraft including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered unprecedented details in the surroundings of a supermassive black hole. Observations reveal huge bullets of gas being driven away from the gravitational monster and a corona of very hot gas hovering above the disk of matter that is falling into the black hole. A… [Read more…]
September 29, 2011
This chart shows how data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has led to revisions in the estimated population of near-Earth asteroids. The infrared-sensing telescope performed the most accurate survey to date of a slice of this population as part of project called NEOWISE. This allowed the science team to make new estimates… [Read more…]
September 29, 2011
Tiangong 1 (English: Heavenly Palace) is a Chinese space laboratory, intended as a test-bed to develop the rendezvous and docking capabilities needed to support a larger, inhabited space station complex. The launch of Tiangong 1, aboard a Long March 2F rocket, is planned for late September 2011. It is part of the Tiangong space station… [Read more…]
September 29, 2011
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running, but the lab is already planning an audacious upgrade using technology not yet invented, as Matthew Chalmers reports It is hard to imagine upgrading an instrument as big and complex as the SwFr6.5bn (€10bn) Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN particle-physics lab near Geneva. The… [Read more…]
September 29, 2011
Countdown begins to lift-off of Tiangong-1, the first step towards a permanent Chinese base in orbit China has started the countdown to launch a space station module, the Tiangong-1, that is the first step in establishing a permanent manned presence in orbit above the Earth. A Long March II 2F rocket is scheduled to take… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
This is pretty neat: an Apollo enthusiast who goes by the handle GoneToPlaid has created a video comparing the Apollo 11 footage of its descent to the Moon with images from Google Moon: http://youtu.be/G9Nh5qWzqMY That’s very cool. You can see the same features in the Apollo 11 film footage and in the newer view from Google Moon,… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
ROGER DIXON gestures, bringing his hand alarmingly close to the big red button that has the power to shut down one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators forever. “It’s already hooked up,” he says, in response to my nervous questions. We are standing in a room full of blinking displays and control panels at… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
All observations in astronomy are based on light emitted from stars and galaxies and, according to the general theory of relativity, the light will be affected by gravity. At the same time all interpretations in astronomy are based on the correctness of the theory of relatively, but it has never before been possible to test… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
Nothing can go faster than light, right? Einstein said so. But last week a group of researchers in Italy announced that they’d measured the speed of thousands of neutrinos (tiny, almost massless particles that were fired at their detector from the CERN particle physics lab 730 kilometers away) and found they were traveling slightly faster… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
Astronomers have calculated the likelihood of finding Earth-like planets around other stars using the latest data from the Kepler mission. The Kepler orbiting observatory is specifically designed to find Earth-like planets around nearby stars. Earlier this year, the Kepler team released the mission’s first 136 days of data and it has turned out to be… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
Basic scenarios of string theory Gordon has assured me that (almost) no non-expert has understood advanced basics of string phenomenology, despite dozens if not hundreds of blog entries about these topics that have been written on this blog during the years. So I would like to be a little bit (but not too much) more… [Read more…]
September 28, 2011
Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to image a colossal star that belongs to one of the rarest classes of stars in the Universe, the yellow hypergiants. The new picture is the best ever taken of a star in this class and shows for the first time a huge dusty double shell surrounding the… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
….NASA/International Study Shows At first glance, a weather forecaster for Venus would have either a really easy or a really boring job, depending on your point of view. The climate on Venus is widely known to be unpleasant – at the surface, the planet roasts at more than 800 degrees Fahrenheit under a suffocating blanket… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
NASA’s decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell back to Earth at 12:01 a.m. EDT (0401 GMT) on Saturday, Sept. 24. The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California has determined the satellite entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at 14.1 degrees south latitude and 189.8 degrees east longitude. This location… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
IT IS 30,000 years ago. A man enters a narrow cave in what is now the south of France. By the flickering light of a tallow lamp, he eases his way through to the furthest chamber. On one of the stone overhangs, he sketches in charcoal a picture of the head of a bison looming… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
In the endless search to develop newer and cooler ways to send messages between people without other’s intercepting them, chemists from Tufts University working together have figured out a way to use a strain of bacteria to encode a message on a paper-like material that can then later be de-coded by the receiver. Manuel Palacios… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
Inconsistence of super-luminal Opera neutrino speed with SN1987A neutrinos burst and with flavor neutrino mixing Recent news from Cern Opera experiment seem to hint for a muon neutrino faster than light, maybe tachyon in nature. If all neutrino are just tachyon their arrival (at 17 MeV) will be even much faster than 17 GeV Opera… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has gathered surprising new details about a supersized and superheated version of Earth called 55 Cancri e. According to Spitzer data, the exoplanet is less dense than previously thought, a finding which profoundly changes the portrait of this exotic world. Instead of a dense rock scorched dry by its sun, 55… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
F. Tamburini , Μ. Laveder From the data release of OPERA – CNGS experiment, and publicly announced on 23 Septem- ber 2011, we cast a phenomenological toy model based on a Majorana neutrino state carrying an imaginary mass term, already discussed by Majorana in 1932. This imaginary term can be a fictious term induced by… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
A review of the development of the concept of dark matter. The dark matter story passed through several stages from a minor observational puzzle to a major challenge for theory of elementary particles. Modern data suggest that dark matter is the dominant matter component in the Universe, and that it consists of some unknown non-baryonic… [Read more…]
September 27, 2011
High-Precision Timing of 5 Millisecond Pulsars We present high-precision timing of five millisecond pulsars (MSPs) carried out for more than seven years; four pulsars are in binary systems and one is isolated. We are able to measure the pulsars’ proper motions and derive an estimate for their space velocities. The measured two-dimensional velocities are in… [Read more…]
September 26, 2011
Using the Herschel Space Telescope, astronomers are set to obtain the first-ever images of asteroid 1999 RQ36 in far infrared light, a wavelength that the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will not be able to see once it approaches the charcoal-black chunk of rock floating in space. Peering through forest-fire smoke with the 61-inch telescope on Mt. Bigelow… [Read more…]
September 26, 2011
A way to measure the distance of active galactic nuclei could change the way astronomers think about the Universe and how it is expanding One of the trickiest problems in astronomy is the measure of distance. In theory, distance should be simple to work out. If you know the intrinsic brightness of an object, a… [Read more…]
September 26, 2011
A six-ton NASA science satellite crashed to Earth on Saturday, leaving a mystery about where a ton of space debris may have landed. The U.S. space agency said it believes the debris ended up in the Pacific Ocean, but the precise time of the bus-sized satellite’s re-entry and the location of its debris field have… [Read more…]
September 26, 2011
Researchers have designed a “cloak” that is invisible to magnetic fields both coming in and coming out. The idea of blocking magnetic fields has been proposed before, but the new design, in the New Journal of Physics, could even hide magnetic materials. It could thus find application in security or medical contexts, such as those surrounding… [Read more…]
September 26, 2011
The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for, or contact with, such civilizations. As Enrico Fermi asked if the Universe is conducive to intelligent life, “Where is everybody? A new answer proposed by Adrian Kent of the University… [Read more…]
September 25, 2011
1. Crete Center for Theoretical Physics A remarkable claim has been made by the OPERA experiment, that takes a neutrino beam from CERN and studies its interactions inside the Gran Sasso laboratory in central Italy. As described in their paper http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 submitted to the ArXiV, they have measured the velocity of the neutrinos and found… [Read more…]
September 25, 2011
Suppose that the result of the OPERA experiment is right and neutrinos travelling faster than light…. This is the end of Einstein’s theory of special relativity and the Lorentz transformations? Is it possible the special relativity without the second postulation; The answer is yes. Read for example: “Simple derivation of the special theory of relativity… [Read more…]
September 24, 2011
A British physicist even promised to eat his boxer shorts on live television if it turned out to be correct. Scientists at CERN, the world’s largest physics lab near Geneva, stunned the world of science on Thursday night by announcing they had observed tiny particles known as neutrinos travelling slightly faster than light. The claim… [Read more…]
September 24, 2011
Almost all theoretical oriented physicists including myself seem to feel almost certain that there is a mistake in the Opera paper and the claimed violation of the relativistic speed limit will go away. On the other hand, I think that many people who like technology etc. were impressed by the precision work that the Opera… [Read more…]
September 24, 2011
Those working in science are accustomed to receiving emails starting with “dear sir/madam, please look at the attached file where I’m proving einstein theory wrong”. This time it’s a tad more serious because the message comes from a genuine scientific collaboration… As everyone knows by now, the OPERA collaboration announced that muon neutrinos produced at… [Read more…]
September 24, 2011
UARS Updates NASA’s UARS Re-enters Earth’s Atmosphere NASA’s decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) fell back to Earth between 11:23 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 23 and 1:09 a.m. Sept. 24, 20 years and nine days after its launch on a 14-year mission that produced some of the first long-term records of chemicals in the atmosphere.… [Read more…]
September 23, 2011
Matt Strassler The OPERA experiment has now presented its results, suggesting that a high-energy neutrino beam has traveled 730 kilometers at a speed just a bit faster than the speed of light. It is clear the experiment was done very carefully. Many cross-checks were performed. No questions were asked for which the speaker did not… [Read more…]
September 23, 2011
EP Seminar “New results from OPERA on neutrino properties“ by Dario Autiero (Institut de Physique Nucleaire de Lyon) Friday, September 23, 2011 from 16:00 to 18:00 (Europe/Zurich)
September 23, 2011
Summary: Although stars closer to the galactic center are exposed to more radiation, new research finds that there are more chances to find habitable planets there than in the outer regions of our galaxy We know for certain that life exists in the Milky Way galaxy: that life is us. Scientists are continually looking to understand… [Read more…]
September 23, 2011
A CERN experiment claims to have caught neutrinos breaking the universe’s most fundamental speed limit. The ghostly subatomic particles seem to have zipped faster than light from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to a detector in Italy. Fish that physics textbook back out of the wastebasket, though: the new result contradicts previous measurements… [Read more…]
September 23, 2011
Orbital scientists say that the falling Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) will not impact the ground over US territory. According to the latest predictions, it will splash in the South Pacific Ocean, a little to the north of New Guinea. Over the past few days, experts have been hard at work in analyzing the trajectory… [Read more…]
September 23, 2011
Even if NASA’s 6-tonne UARS satellite does not cause any injury or damage when it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere today, there is more space junk headed our way next month. A defunct German space telescope called ROSAT is set to hit the planet at the end of October – and it even is more likely… [Read more…]
September 23, 2011
The OPERA neutrino experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km with much higher accuracy than previous studies conducted with accelerator neutrinos. The measurement is based on high-statistics data taken by OPERA in the years 2009, 2010 and… [Read more…]
September 22, 2011
On Monday, Sweden’s Minister for Education and Research, Jan Bjorklund, will open Onsala Space Observatory’s newest telescope. Part of Lofar, the world’s largest radio telescope, it is the biggest telescope built in Sweden in the last 35 years. Lofar will map radio signals which have travelled across the universe for billions of years. Scientists expect… [Read more…]
September 22, 2011
Read also: A Six-Sigma Signal Of Superluminal Neutrinos From Opera! If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of… [Read more…]
September 22, 2011
Strong long-scale gravitational waves can explain cosmic acceleration within the context of general relativity without resorting to the assumption of exotic forms of matter such as quintessence. The existence of these gravitational waves in sufficient strength to cause observed acceleration can be compatible with the cosmic microwave background under reasonable physical circumstances. An instance of… [Read more…]
September 22, 2011
We consider the problem of measurement using the Lindblad equation, which allows the introduction of time in the interaction between the measured system and the measurement apparatus. We used analytic results, valid for weak system-environment coupling, obtained for a two-level system in contact with a measurer (Markovian interaction) and a thermal bath (non-Markovian interaction), where… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
… in Physics Alain Aspect CNRS Distinguished Scientist and Head of the Atom Optics Group, Laboratoire Charles Fabry, Institut d’Optique, Palaiseau France WHY: with John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger, for their tests of Bell’s inequalities and research on quantum entanglement John F. Clauser Research Physicist, J.F. Clauser & Associates, Walnut Creek, CA USA WHY: with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger, for their… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
Yes, the universe itself will eventually outpace the speed of light. Just how this will happen is a bit complicated, so let’s begin at the very beginning: the big bang. Around 14 billion years ago, all matter in the universe was thrown in every direction. That first explosion is still pushing galaxies outward. Scientists know… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
A team of scientists at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, have drawn attention to a couple of small mineral-rich depressions on Mars that, perhaps relatively recently in the red planet’s history, could have been places for life. The troughs were discovered at Noctis Labyrintus, also known as ‘the labyrinth of the night’ –… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
The Universe wouldn’t be the same without the Higgs boson. This legendary particle plays a role in cosmology and reveals the possible existence of another closely related particle. The race to identify the Higgs boson is on at CERN. This Holy Grail of particle physics would help explain why the majority of elementary particles possess… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
“We know that about 25% of the matter in the universe is dark matter, but we don’t know what it is,” Michael Kesden tellsPhysOrg.com. “There are a number of different theories about what dark matter could be, but we think one alternative might be very small primordial black holes.” When many of us think about black… [Read more…]
September 21, 2011
Computer scientists have built a superconducting number cruncher with a Von Neumann architecture that paves the way for a new era of quantum computation Back in 1946, the world’s first general purpose electronic computer was switched on at the University of Pennsylvania. The huge processing power of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) stunned the… [Read more…]
September 20, 2011
Matt Strassler Supernovas are some of nature’s most common and powerful nuclear bombs. They are also among the most useful for particle physicists and astrophysicists alike. In “core-collapse” supernovas, a huge number of protons are converted, by the absorption of electrons, into neutrons, with the consequent emission of neutrinos. [Powering this process is one of… [Read more…]
September 20, 2011
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: From Lisa Randall (Theoretical Physics/Harvard Univ.; Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions, 2006), a whip-smart inquiry into the scientific work being conducted in particle physics. The author examines some fairly recondite material—the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of the study of elementary particles (with a brief foray into cosmology)—and renders it comprehensible… [Read more…]
September 20, 2011
Next week, the Ig Nobel awards recognise the most weirdest science around, says Victoria Lambert. Showered with paper aeroplanes, garlanded by admiring Nobel laureates, some of the world’s quirkiest scientistswill be honoured at a sell-out ceremony at Harvard University next week. The 21st annual Ig Nobel Prizes, conferred by Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), have become… [Read more…]
September 19, 2011
Scientists think that a giant asteroid, which broke up long ago in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, eventually made its way to Earth and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Data from NASA’s WISE mission likely rules out the leading suspect,a family of asteroids called Baptistina, so the search for the… [Read more…]
September 19, 2011
By Tommaso Dorigo The news is all in the title. A unconfirmed rumor from the Opera experiment (see picture below), the neutrino underground detector in the Gran Sasso cavern in central Italy, tells that a measurement has been performed on the time that muon neutrinos take to travel from their production point at CERN to… [Read more…]
September 19, 2011
Sebastian Elser, Prof. Ben Moore and Dr. Joachim Stadel of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in cooperation with Ryuji Morishima of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, tried to estimate how common Earth-Moon planetary systems are. They have found that 1 in 12 Earth-like planets probably hosts a Moon-like satellite. Since the Moon might have played an… [Read more…]
September 18, 2011
Amsterdam astronomers have discovered a neutron star that confounds existing models for thermonuclear explosions in such extreme objects. In the case of the accreting pulsar IGR J17480-2446, it seems to be a strong magnetic field that causes some parts of the star to burn more brightly than the rest. The results of the study, by… [Read more…]
September 17, 2011
The kilogram is currently defined by a lump of metal in Paris – but now researchers in the UK, France and Sweden have confirmed a key assumption of a new method of defining the standard based on fundamental constants. Specifically, they have shown that the quantum Hall resistances measured in a semiconductor and in graphene… [Read more…]
September 17, 2011
Scientists’ predictions about the mysterious dark matter purported to make up most of the mass of the Universe may have to be revised. Research on dwarf galaxies suggests they cannot form in the way they do if dark matter exists in the form that the most common model requires it to. That may mean that… [Read more…]
September 17, 2011
Introduction During a lunch in the summer of 1950, physicists Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller and Herbert York were chatting about a recent New Yorker cartoon depicting aliens abducting trash cans in flying saucers. Suddenly, Fermi suddenly blurted out, “Where is everybody?” Behind Fermi’s question was this line of reasoning: Since there are likely many other technological civilizations… [Read more…]
September 16, 2011
AN ELECTRON takes just billionths of a billionth of a second to escape its host molecule – mere attoseconds. Now we have the first snapshots of what is the initial step in almost every chemical reaction. “We can watch not only the atoms and the nuclei in a chemical reaction. Now we can even watch… [Read more…]
September 16, 2011
When NASA announced the discovery of over 1,200 new potential planets spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope, almost a quarter of them were thought to be Super-Earths. Now, new research suggests that these massive rocky planets may be the result of the failed creation of Jupiter-sized gas giants…….. Read more: http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-09-rocky-planets-born-gas-giants.html
September 16, 2011
PLUTO could hide a liquid ocean beneath its icy shell. Indeed, other bodies on the solar system’s frigid fringe could also harbour subsurface oceans, and these could provide the conditions to sustain life. Temperatures on Pluto’s surface hover around -230 °C, but researchers have long wondered whether the dwarf planet might boast enough internal heat… [Read more…]
September 16, 2011
Signals reported in July seemed to indicate that the Higgs boson – a long-theorised particle seen as a missing link in our current understanding of physics – might have been detected among data the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva. But since then, those signals – hinting that the theoretical ‘God’ particle might have… [Read more…]
September 16, 2011
Expedition 28 Commander Andrey Borisenko and Flight Engineers Alexander Samokutyaev and Ron Garan land their Soyuz TMA-21 spacecraft in Kazakhstan. Russian recovery teams were on hand to help the crew exit the Soyuz vehicle and adjust to gravity after 164 days in space.
September 15, 2011
Not all stars are loners. In our home galaxy, the Milky Way, about half of all stars have a companion and travel through space in a binary system. But explaining why some stars are in double or even triple systems while others are single has been something of a mystery. Now a team of astronomers… [Read more…]
September 15, 2011
Τhe supermassive black hole at the centre of a massive galaxy or galaxy cluster acts as a furnace, pumping heat into its surroundings. But astronomers have struggled to understand how a steady temperature is maintained throughout the whole galaxy when the black hole only appears to interact with nearby gas. Now, researchers in Canada and… [Read more…]
September 14, 2011
The Large Hadron Collider fired mankind into a “new era of science” in March last year producing the world’s first highenergy particle collision. After years of setbacks, the £4.4billion machine has been smashing together protons using three times the speed and energy of previous experiments. The collider, which is housed at the European Centre for… [Read more…]
September 14, 2011
by NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE On the grounds of a science laboratory near Chicago, a physicist named Dmitri Denisov walks up wooden steps to the top of something that looks sort of like an abandoned railroad bed. “Wow, look, it’s beautiful,” says Denisov, gazing out at a pond. “I didn’t even know about these flowers.” The tall mound… [Read more…]
September 13, 2011
A team led by astronomers from the University of Toronto have observed noticeable changes in brightness of a nearby brown dwarf, roughly 40 light years away, indicating the presence of a gigantic storm. Since brown dwarfs and giant gaseous planets have similar atmospheres, the team believe that this finding could lead us into understanding more… [Read more…]
September 13, 2011
Alternatives to Einstein’s general theory of relativity can be investigated by studying the Sun. That is the claim of a group of physicists in Portugal who have found that a variation of a theory put forward nearly a century ago by Arthur Eddington is constrained but not ruled out by observations of solar neutrinos and… [Read more…]
September 13, 2011
This blog entry is somewhat analogous to the text about Ten new things modern physics has learned about time. Matter is made of atoms. This is the proposition that Richard Feynman would have chosen as the single most important insight of the scientific research. The atomic theory, confirming guesses of some ancient Greek philosophers, explains why… [Read more…]
September 13, 2011
SETI@Home volunteers have found 4.2 billion signals of interest since the project began in 1999. What happens to them? SETI@Home is a distributed computing initiative that analyses radio signals for signs of extra terrestrial intelligence. It relies on volunteers who use their own computers to download and crunch data from the Arecibo Radio telescope in… [Read more…]
September 13, 2011
Before life existed on Earth, there were just atoms and molecules…inorganic “dead stuff.” How improbable is it that life arose? Could it use a different type of chemistry than our familiar carbon-based chemistry? Before life existed on Earth, there were just atoms and molecules…inorganic “dead stuff.” How improbable is it that life arose? Could it… [Read more…]
September 13, 2011
By finding a clever way to use the Earth itself as a scientific instrument, members of a SLAC-led research team turned the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope into a positron detector – and confirmed a startling discovery from 2009 that found an excess of these antimatter particles in cosmic rays, a possible sign of dark matter…..… [Read more…]
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September 30, 2011
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