Leonardo Hsua, Jong-Ping Hsua Abstract: The natural unit system, in which the value of fundamental constants such as c and h-bar are set equal to one and all quantities are expressed in terms of a single unit, is usually introduced as a calculational convenience. However, we demonstrate that this system of natural units has aphysical… [Read more…]
December 31, 2011
PASADENA, Calif. – NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL)-A spacecraft is within 24 hours of its insertion burn that will place it into lunar orbit. At the time the spacecraft crossed the milestone at 1:21 p.m. PST today (4:21 p.m. EST), the spacecraft was 30,758 miles (49,500 kilometers) from the moon. Launched aboard the… [Read more…]
December 30, 2011
Graduate Assistant to Stephen Hawking The above post is expected to become available shortly, with a starting date around 20th-27th February 2012. The salary is expected to be in the region of £25k; the exact value will be confirmed in the near future. Disclaimer: This is not an official job applications page, however similar it may look! The… [Read more…]
December 30, 2011
Roland M. Crocker The Galactic centre – as the closest galactic nucleus – holds both intrinsic interest and possibly represents a useful analogue to star-burst nuclei which we can observe with orders of magnitude finer detail than these external systems. The environmental conditions in the GC – here taken to mean the inner 200 pc… [Read more…]
December 29, 2011
By Jonathan Amos Five days after a failed launch, the Russian Soyuz rocket system has been pressed back into service. The vehicle successfully put six spacecraft in orbit for US satellite phone and data company, Globalstar. The Soyuz lifted away from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 1709 GMT, ejecting the last of the six… [Read more…]
December 27, 2011
… to electron diffraction for one and two slits, analytical results Mathieu Beau (STP-DIAS) In this article we present an analytic solution of the famous problem of diffraction and interference of electrons through one and two slits (for simplicity, only the one-dimensional case is considered). It can thus be considered a complement to a recent… [Read more…]
December 27, 2011
M M J French A Faraday cage is an interesting physics phenomena where an electromagnetic wave can be excluded from a volume of space by enclosure with an electrically conducting material. The practical application of this in the classroom is to block the signal to a mobile phone by enclosing it in a metal can!… [Read more…]
December 27, 2011
… around a Super Massive Black Hole Makoto Inoue, Hiromitsu Yokoo We describe a new system for a society of highly advanced civilizations around a super massive black hole (SMBH), as an advanced Type III “Dyson Sphere“, pointing out an efficient usage of energy for the advanced civilizations. SMBH also works as a sink for… [Read more…]
December 26, 2011
As night was falling over ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile on 20 December 2009, the sky was not yet dark enough for the telescopes to start observations. But conditions were perfect to perform a clever trick with the dome of the Swiss 1.2-metre Leonhard Euler Telescope: allowing us to peer inside with this photograph… [Read more…]
December 26, 2011
E. Bozzo, J. W. den Herder, M. Feroci, L. Stella, on the behalf of the LOFT consortium The Large Observatory For X-ray Timing, LOFT, was selected by the European Space Agency as one of the four Cosmic Vision M3 candidate missions to compete for a launch opportunity at the start of the 2020s. Thanks to… [Read more…]
December 25, 2011
089:32:50 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston. [No answer.] 089:33:38 Mattingly: Apollo 8, Houston. 089:34:16 Lovell: Houston, Apollo 8, over. 089:34:19 Mattingly: Hello, Apollo 8. Loud and clear. 089:34:25 Lovell: Roger. Please be informed there is a Santa Claus. 089:34:31 Mattingly: That’s affirmative. You’re the best ones to know. -NASA The world is an awfully big place… [Read more…]
December 24, 2011
According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Census Bureau, the world’s population is approximately 7 billion (6,979,978,073+) people. Santa Claus has had to adapt over the years to having less and less time to deliver gifts to more people. To better assure prompt deliveries and safe flights, higher technology systems are increasingly being used by… [Read more…]
December 23, 2011
Luke A. Barnes The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life has received a great deal of attention in recent years, both in the philosophical and scientific literature. The claim is that in the space of possible physical laws, parameters and initial conditions, the set that permits the evolution of intelligent life is very small.… [Read more…]
December 23, 2011
W.-D. Schlatter (CERN), P. M. Zerwas (DESY) After a brief introduction to the theoretical basis of the Higgs mechanism for generating the masses of elementary particles, the experimental searches for Higgs particles will be summarized, from bounds at LEP to inferences for LHC. The report will focus on the Standard Model, though some central results… [Read more…]
December 22, 2011
Space Station Commander Captures Unprecedented View of Comet Ιnternational Space Station Commander Dan Burbank captured spectacular imagery of Comet Lovejoy as seen from about 240 miles above the Earth’s horizon on Wednesday, Dec. 21. Today Burbank described seeing the comet two nights ago as “the most amazing thing I have ever seen in space,” in… [Read more…]
December 22, 2011
NASA has released a video that highlights where snow graced the Earth every month for over the past ten years. http://youtu.be/WfHvujaE2hI Read more: dailygalaxy.com
December 22, 2011
Explanation: What’s large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above, the gravity of a luminous red galaxy (LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More typically, such light bending results in two discernible images of the distant galaxy, but here… [Read more…]
December 22, 2011
This image shows one of the most distant galaxies known, called GN-108036, dating back to 750 million years after the Big Bang that created our universe. The galaxy’s light took 12.9 billion years to reach us. The galaxy was discovered and confirmed using the Subaru telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, respectively, both located atop… [Read more…]
December 22, 2011
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Franco-Swiss border has made its first clear observation of a new particle since opening in 2009. Known as Chi-b (3P), it is a boson – the label given to particles that can carry the forces of nature. The as-yet unpublished discovery isreported on the Arxiv pre-print server. The… [Read more…]
December 21, 2011
RECENT hints of a featherweight Higgs boson don’t just take us nearer to a complete standard model of physics. The results affect a possible link between the Higgs and dark matter, the invisible stuff making up 80 per cent of the universe’s matter. The Higgs is the last remaining hole in the standard model, the… [Read more…]
December 21, 2011
With the holiday season in full swing, a new image from an assembly of telescopes has revealed an unusual cosmic ornament. Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton have been combined to discover a young pulsar in the remains of a supernova located in the Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC. This would be… [Read more…]
December 20, 2011
The composition of the Earth’s core remains a mystery. Scientists know that the liquid outer core consists mainly of iron, but it is believed that small amounts of some other elements are present as well. Oxygen is the most abundant element in the planet, so it is not unreasonable to expect oxygen might be one… [Read more…]
December 20, 2011
space.com NASA Discovers First Earth-size Planets Beyond Our Solar System NASA’s Kepler mission has discovered the first Earth-size planets orbiting a sun-like star outside our solar system. The planets, called Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are too close to their star to be in the so-called habitable zone where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface,… [Read more…]
December 20, 2011
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) The new and highly sensitive Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a strong ultraviolet-wavelength absorber on Pluto’s surface, providing new evidence that points to the possibility of complex hydrocarbon and/or nitrile molecules lying on the surface, according to a paper recently published in the Astronomical Journal by… [Read more…]
December 20, 2011
This graphical representation from the SOFIA Science Center compares two infrared images of the heart of the Orion nebula captured by the FORCAST camera on the SOFIA airborne observatory’s telescope with a wider image of the same area from the Spitzer space telescope. (SOFIA image — James De Buizer / NASA / DLR / USRA… [Read more…]
December 20, 2011
K. Zioutas, M. Tsagri, Y. Semertzidis, T. Papaevangelou, E. Georgiopoulou, A. Gardikiotis, T. Dafni This work provides additional evidence on the involvement of exotic particles like axions and/or other WISPs, following recent measurements during the quietest Sun and flaring Sun. Thus, SPHINX mission observed a minimum basal soft X-rays emission in the extreme solar minimum… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
The Moon and two bright companions line up across the southeast before dawn tomorrow. The closer of the Moon’s companions is Spica, the leading light of the constellation Virgo. It’s to the left or lower left of the Moon. The other is the planet Saturn, which is to the left of Spica. Saturn is the… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
Lars Vegard and X-ray spectroscopy Helge Kragh The Norwegian physicist Lars Vegard may have been the first to propose electron configurations for all the chemical elements, from hydrogen to uranium, on the basis of quantum atomic theory. This he did in papers of 1918-1919 in which he argued that the principal quantum number corresponded to… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
Chemists have solved the 150 year-old mystery of what gives the lead-acid battery, found under the bonnet of most cars, its unique ability to deliver a surge of current. Lead-acid batteries are able to deliver the very large currents needed to start a car engine because of the exceptionally high electrical conductivity of the battery… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
http://youtu.be/YlHS-JlkYPI This animation compares the X-ray ‘heartbeats’ of GRS 1915 and IGR J17091, two black holes that ingest gas from companion stars. GRS 1915 has nearly five times the mass of IGR J17091, which at three solar masses may be the smallest black hole known. A fly-through relates the heartbeats to hypothesized changes in the… [Read more…]
December 19, 2011
Are there parallel universes? And how will we know? Researchers from the universities of Calgary and Waterloo in Canada and the University of Geneva in Switzerland have published a paper this week in Physical Review Letters explaining why we don’t usually see the physical effects of quantum mechanics and why it may be impossible to… [Read more…]
December 18, 2011
This magnificent 360-degree panoramic image, covering the entire southern and northern celestial sphere, reveals the cosmic landscape that surrounds our tiny blue planet. This gorgeous starscape serves as the first of three extremely high-resolution images featured in the GigaGalaxy Zoom project, launched by ESO within the framework of the International Year of Astronomy 2009 (IYA2009). The… [Read more…]
December 18, 2011
Poincaré and Special Relativity Emily Adlam Henri Poincare’s work on mathematical features of the Lorentz transformations was an important precursor to the development of special relativity. In this paper I compare the approaches taken by Poincare and Einstein, aiming to come to an understanding of the philosophical ideas underlying their methods. In section (1) I… [Read more…]
December 18, 2011
…. One trillion frames per second MIT Media Lab researchers have created a new imaging system that can acquire visual data at a rate of one trillion frames per second. That’s fast enough to produce a slow-motion video of light traveling through objects. Video: Melanie Gonick. http://youtu.be/EtsXgODHMWk Read also: How to make the Slowest Slow-Motion Video… [Read more…]
December 17, 2011
…. according to physicsworld.com 1st place: Shifting the morals of quantum measurement 2nd place: Measuring the wavefunction 3rd place: Cloaking in space and time 4th place: Measuring the universe using black holes 5th place: Turning darkness into light 6th place: Taking the temperature of the early universe 7th place: Catching the flavour of a neutrino… [Read more…]
December 16, 2011
…. and Falsify Dark Energy Carl H. Gibson (University of California at San Diego), N. Chandra Wickramasinghe (Cardiff University and Buckingham University, UK), Rudolph E. Schild (Harvard University) Hydrogravitional-dynamics (HGD) cosmology of Gibson/Schild 1996 predicts proto-globular-star-cluster PGC clumps of Earth-mass planets fragmented from plasma at ~0.3 Myr. Protogalaxies retained the ~0.03 Myr baryonic density existing… [Read more…]
December 15, 2011
Danny Hillis, Rob Seaman, Steve Allen, Jon Giorgini The Long Now Foundation is building a mechanical clock that is designed to keep time for the next 10,000 years. The clock maintains its long-term accuracy by synchronizing to the Sun. The 10,000-Year Clock keeps track of five different types of time: Pendulum Time, Uncorrected Solar Time,… [Read more…]
December 14, 2011
Researchers have spotted a giant gas cloud spiralling into the supermassive black hole at our galaxy’s centre. Though it is known that black holes draw in everything nearby, it will be the first chance to see one consume such a cloud. As it is torn apart, the turbulent area around the black hole will become… [Read more…]
December 14, 2011
Early close-ups of a Type Ia supernova allow Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues to picture its progenitor and infer how it exploded Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia’s) are the extraordinarily bright and remarkably similar “standard candles” astronomers use to measure cosmic growth, a technique that in 1998 led to the discovery of dark energy… [Read more…]
December 14, 2011
The second-biggest structure in human history will seek to answer deep cosmic mysteries Neutrinos may or may not move faster than light, but regardless, they’re special little things. They speed through the planet, and through you, and through everything; but, chargeless and puny, they interact with their surroundings so minimally that other particles hardly take… [Read more…]
December 14, 2011
Carl H. Gibson (University of California at San Diego), Rudolph E. Schild (Harvard University) Is the accelerating expansion of the Universe true, inferred through observations of distant supernovae, and is the implied existence of an enormous amount of anti-gravitational dark energy material driving the accelerating expansion of the universe also true? To be physically useful… [Read more…]
December 13, 2011
The main conclusion is that the Standard Model Higgs boson, if it exists, is most likely to have a mass constrained to the range 115.5-131 GeV by the ATLAS experiment, and 115-127 GeV by CMS 13 December 2011. In a seminar held at CERN today, the ATLAS and CMS experiments presented the status of their… [Read more…]
December 13, 2011
Data analysis and simulation H. De Raedt, K. Michielsen, F. Jin Data produced by laboratory Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-Bohm (EPRB) experiments is tested against the hypothesis that the statistics of this data is given by quantum theory of this thought experiment. Statistical evidence is presented that the experimental data, while violating Bell inequalities, does not support this hypothesis.… [Read more…]
December 13, 2011
Predicting exactly where to stand to have the moon strike the top of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco. Each second of video translates into 2 minutes of time, so the 5 seconds of video represents 10 minutes of moon movement. Using eclipse predictions, lunar elevation angle and compass direction, I used the height of… [Read more…]
December 12, 2011
Teach your teacher: the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge WASN’T resonance. And I defer all arguments to the elocution of Profs. Billah and Scanlon:http://www.ketchum.org/billah/Billah-Scanlan.pdf Vortex shedding video: http://youtu.be/JI0M1gVNhbw?t=2m12s Tacoma Bridge video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mclp9QmCGs http://youtu.be/6ai2QFxStxo
December 12, 2011
PITTSBURGH — Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Bruce and Astrid McWilliams Center for Cosmology have discovered what caused the rapid growth of early supermassive black holes – a steady diet of cold, fast food. Computer simulations, completed using supercomputers at the National Institute for Computational Sciences and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and viewed using GigaPan… [Read more…]
December 12, 2011
The latest computer model of the cosmos involves 400 billion particles in a box about two thirds of the volume of the universe Back in 1970, Jim Peebles at Princeton University carried out a ground-breaking experiment. He used the new-fangled technology of computing to simulate the behaviour of a cluster of galaxies under the force… [Read more…]
December 12, 2011
More than 4,000 pages of scientist’s works uploaded Includes seminal Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica Cambridge Digital Library Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk
December 11, 2011
by Matt Strassler 1. Production of the Standard Model Higgs Particle 2. Decays of the Standard Model Higgs 3. Seeking and Studying the Standard Model Higgs Particle
December 10, 2011
Our galaxy could be filled with asteroid-size black holes that presumably formed shortly after the big bang. If they exist in large numbers, these so-called primordial black holes would serve as the dark matter that keeps stars gravitationally glued inside galaxies. None of these primordial black holes have been detected so far, but a new… [Read more…]
December 9, 2011
Christoph Adami Information theory is a statistical theory dealing with the relative state of detectors and physical systems. Because of this physicality of information, the classical framework of Shannon needs to be extended to deal with quantum detectors, perhaps moving at relativistic speeds, or even within curved space-time. Considerable progress toward such a theory has… [Read more…]
December 8, 2011
RadioAstron, effectively the largest radio telescope ever built, is up and running. The telescope’s main component, a 10-metre radio dish aboard the spacecraft Spectr-R, launched in July to an oblong orbit that extends between 10,000 and more than 300,000 kilometres from Earth. By coordinating observations with radio telescopes on Earth in a technique called interferometry,… [Read more…]
December 8, 2011
Scientists have made a new discovery about how old stars called ‘red giants’ rotate, giving an insight into what our sun will look like in five billion years. An international team of astronomers led by PhD student Paul Beck from Leuven University in Belgium have managed to look deep inside some old stars and discovered… [Read more…]
December 8, 2011
Read also: Kepler 22-b: Earth-like planet confirmed William J. Borucki et al A search of the time-series photometry from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft reveals a transiting planet candidate orbiting the 11th magnitude G5 dwarf KIC 10593626 with a period of 290 days. The characteristics of the host star are well constrained by high-resolution spectroscopy combined with… [Read more…]
December 7, 2011
An international group of astronomers led by Tom Scott at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía in Granada, Spain, has discovered extraordinarily long one-sided gaseous tails in two groups of galaxies that are amongst the longest structures ever observed in such environments. They emanate from CGCG 097-026 and FGC1287, two spiral galaxies in small groups… [Read more…]
December 7, 2011
http://youtu.be/iTIeUYKll2o http://youtu.be/B5J3hyvzmkY (update) Lunar eclipse 10-12-2011, Video and photos Lunar Eclipse Over The Pacific Ocean San Diego http://youtu.be/Wqm4lZ4Wnhk www.dailymail.co.uk
December 7, 2011
… and its Implications Branislav Vlahovic The cosmological redshifts z in the frequencies of spectral lines from distant galaxies as compared with their values observed in terrestrial laboratories, which are due to the scale factor a(t), frequently are interpret as a special-relativistic Doppler shift alone. We will demonstrate that this interpretation is not correct and… [Read more…]
December 7, 2011
http://vimeo.com/19568852 The Known Universe takes viewers from the Himalayas through our atmosphere and the inky black of space to the afterglow of the Big Bang. Every star, planet, and quasar seen in the film is possible because of the world’s most complete four-dimensional map of the universe, the Digital Universe Atlas that is maintained and… [Read more…]
December 7, 2011
Dmitry Lyapustin The Axion is a particle arising from the Peccei-Quinn solution to the strong CP problem. Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking in the early universe could produce a large number of axions which would still be present today, making the axion a compelling dark matter candidate. The goal of the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX) is… [Read more…]
December 6, 2011
Read also: Cern scientist expects ‘first glimpse’ of Higgs boson (8-12-2011) by Ian Sample – guardian.co.uk Rumours abound that Cern scientists have finally glimpsed the long-sought Higgs boson. We asked physicists to share their thoughts on the elusive entity…. …… I asked some physicists to share, in a couple of simple sentences, their hunches on what gives… [Read more…]
December 6, 2011
Researchers in Japan have developed what may be the first string-theory model with a natural mechanism for explaining why our universe would seem to exist in three spatial dimensions if it actually has six more. According to their model, only three of the nine dimensions started to grow at the beginning of the universe, accounting… [Read more…]
December 6, 2011
Five scientists speaking at a workshop at the 2011 Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 6 at 10 AM PST will discuss the complex — and relatively new — research area of space weather. The term refers to a host of disturbances that can alter the vast electromagnetic system stretching from the… [Read more…]
December 5, 2011
Astronomers have confirmed the existence of an Earth-like planet in the “habitable zone” around a star not unlike our own. The planet, Kepler 22-b, lies about 600 light-years away and is about 2.4 times the size of Earth, and has a temperature of about 22C. It is the closest confirmed planet yet to one like… [Read more…]
December 5, 2011
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region between our solar system and interstellar space. Data obtained from Voyager over the last year reveal this new region to be a kind of cosmic purgatory. In it, the wind of charged particles streaming out from our sun has calmed, our solar system’s… [Read more…]
December 5, 2011
This table summarizes in eighteen thermal-mass categories most of the current known exoplanets (as of October 2011). Planets are divided in six mass classes as mercurians, subterrans, terrans, superterrans, neptunians, and jovians. Planets in the hot zone (first row) are too close to the stars to support liquid water. Planets in the habitable zone (second row)… [Read more…]
December 5, 2011
“…..Suppose you are given two measurements of the same physical quantity. Make it something easy to visualize, such as the length of a stick. They tell you that when measured with method 1 the result was x1=10 cm, with a estimated uncertainty s1=0.1 cm, and when measured with method 2 the result was x2=11 cm,… [Read more…]
December 4, 2011
MICE can survive a dose of radiation that should have killed them when given a double-drug therapy – even if they get the drug cocktail 24 hours after exposure. Radiation damages rapidly dividing cells in the intestine, allowing harmful bacteria to leak into the bloodstream. Eva Guinan at Harvard Medical School found that boosting levels of a… [Read more…]
December 4, 2011
(update 9-12-2011) Higgs mass: 124.6 GeV CMS, 126 GeV ATLAS Higgs rumors (from here): 126 GeV – 3.5 sigma in ATLAS and 2.5 sigma at 124 GeV for CMS … …. read also: Higgs Expectations , by Tommaso Dorigo Higgs Boson Mass predicted by the Four Color Theorem Ashay Dharwadker, Vladimir Khachatryan 28 Dec 2009 Abstract: We show… [Read more…]
December 3, 2011
Roberto B. Salgado We present visual calculations in special relativity using spacetime diagrams drawn on graph paper that has been rotated by 45 degrees. The rotated lines represent lightlike directions in Minkowski spacetime, and the boxes in the grid (called “light-clock diamonds”) represent units of measurement modeled on the ticks of an inertial observer’s lightclock.… [Read more…]
December 3, 2011
Philosophy and problems of the definition of Extraterrestrial Life Jean Schneider Abstract When we try to search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence, we have to follow some guidelines. The first step is to clarify what is to be meant by “Life” and “intelligence”, i.e. an attempt to define these words. The word “definition” refers to… [Read more…]
December 3, 2011
Jonas Mureika, Piero Nicolini, Euro Spallucci We introduce analytical quantum gravity modifications of the production cross section for terascale black holes by employing an effective ultraviolet cut off ℓ. We find the new cross sections approach the usual “black disk” form at high energy, while they differ significantly near the fundamental scale from the standard… [Read more…]
December 2, 2011
http://youtu.be/BwcJXUWXMTI Read also: Voyager – The interstellar mission
physicsworld newscientist.com NASA dailygalaxy technologyreview science2.0
December 31, 2011
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