Except Quantum physics is plagued with utter bullshit @Red Hadron Collider This seems like a book on philosophy and not science EDIT: having read your full post, baahahahaha.. bingo That's the problem with relativity and Quantum physics, philosophy has filled in our lack of understanding.. unfortunately physics demands we actually discover the physical, the mechanical, not the philosophical.
Evil is a theological concept that actually.. is nonsense. Evil is without mechanism or cause, it just is (for theological reasons) Every seemingly "evil" act, has actual real world causes that have nothing to do with morality, morality does not exist in the physical world, only the cooperation of the parts of the brain that give an appearance of consciousness. basically an idea, you cant be an idea It is inefficient, wasteful and pointless to kill for sport
To make a point, re this climate change bollocks, here is the prediction spread by the IPCC please log in to view this image This is like predicting you can be relegated or win the league, and expecting to be credited with knowing what you are talking about If you know what you are looking at... this is not a set of predictions, it a net cast so wide to catch almost any outcome, as to prove they don't understand climate. If you predict from 0.2 K cooling and 4.5 K warming by 2100, you have no ****ing clue what is going to happen and they call the science "settled"
Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368 @Red Hadron Collider I was amazed to find that is actually a thing, feminist glaciology, and even more amazing is that ^^ garbage actually got peer review and and published Bitter grievance culture mixed with scientific research Worse, the science is seen through the grievance filter, and you are top of the grievance pile, being an older white male scientist, which is "problematic" Science the institution today, is not what it was when you started out my friend.
Canadian assistant professor writes bogus paper, copying Mein Kempf and replacing all of the nouns in the Mein Kampf except with feminist nouns, and it GETS ACCEPTED BY A JOURNAL!!! accepted by this journal, https://journals.sagepub.com/home/aff same ****pile journal as above in previous post Duped academic journal publishes rewrite of ‘Mein Kampf’ as feminist manifesto https://www.timesofisrael.com/duped...-rewrite-of-mein-kampf-as-feminist-manifesto/ funny and disturbing.
Worse still, another of the papers accepted by that journal was a paper about how straight people should shove things up their arse so they would be less homophobic. One reviewer called it an amazing and important addition to knowledge and another was how analyzing dogs raping other dogs and show humans stop more gay dog rape than hetro dog rape can show how men can be trained, if it were morally acceptable Peer review is not working mate
There was a test done of peer review and journals by three academics, Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay, and Peter Boghossian, they made a load of junk papers and submitted them to see if their OBVIOUS BS junk papers would be accepted purely based on ideology of editors and reviewers, and they were correct.. the absolute **** was accepted, and some even published. I have always been interested in the political aspect of scientific sociology. That;s how I came to understand scientists can be even more dishonest and stupid than the average person, especially if their careers depend on them being dishonest and willfully stupid.
There is real fear in academia now, how long to do you think a scientist will last if he criticises the absolute bollocks produced in "critical theory" publications? about 5 minutes is how long. One of the above is an assistant professor, and is getting actual physical threats for exposing the journals and the junk that is critical theory feminist grievance study garbage, like feminist glaciology If you were to come out publicly and say it was bollox, if you were a professor at say Oxford, you'd be finished.
Indeed. It's harder to be objectively honest when you have a whole career riding on it. It's far easier if you dont, and that is the problem So say you are a principal scientist on a NASA project, and the project has spent 2 billion. Admitting outright that you wasted 2 billion is for the most part just not going to happen. What you do is massage data to "create" some progress, or in many cases, actual results. A perfect example is the NASA quartz gyroscope experiment, that cost vast sums, these gyroscopes, put on satellites, didn't work because the scientists ****ed up badly, and never foresaw interference from earth and the sun and other planets on the super sensitive gyroscopes that were meant to try detect earth's spin and and mass effect on space time So, instead of putting their hands up and admitting the objective truth, "hey we screwed up" they played with and adjusted data for 5 YEARS, creating excuse after excuse to adjust data and at the end, claimed success That is scientific fraud and NASA went along with it, because REPUTATION, because also administrators have to explain this to those who gave funding for the project. Also those scientists would never have got funding again, cos their **** up was a career ender for all intents and purposes
NEWS PHYSICS Physicists aim to outdo the LHC with this wish list of particle colliders If built, the accelerators could pump out oodles of Higgs bosons BY EMILY CONOVER 6:00AM, JANUARY 22, 2019 please log in to view this image ACCELERATOR ASPIRATIONS Scientists are aiming to build new particle colliders in China, Japan and Europe (such as this artist’s rendering of part of the proposed Future Circular Collider at CERN) that could help researchers understand puzzles of particle physics. CERN If particle physicists get their way, new accelerators could one day scrutinize the most tantalizing subatomic particle in physics — the Higgs boson. Six years after the particle's discovery at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists are planning enormous new machines that would stretch for tens of kilometers across Europe, Japan or China. The 2012 discovery of the subatomic particle, which reveals the origins of mass, put the finishing touch on the standard model, the overarching theory of particle physics (SN: 7/28/12, p. 5). And it was a landmark achievement for the LHC, currently the world’s biggest accelerator. Now, physicists want to delve further into the mysteries of the Higgs boson in the hope that it could be key to solving lingering puzzles of particle physics. “The Higgs is a very special particle,” says physicist Yifang Wang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing. “We believe the Higgs is the window to the future.” But the LHC — which consists of a ring 27 kilometers in circumference, inside which protons are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and smashed together a billion times a second — can take scientists only so far. That accelerator was great for discovering the Higgs, but not ideal for studying it in detail. So particle physicists are clamoring for a new particle collider, specifically designed to crank out oodles of Higgs bosons. Several blueprints for powerful new machines have been put forth, and researchers are hopeful these “Higgs factories” could help reveal solutions to glaring weak spots in the standard model. “The standard model is not a complete theory of the universe,” says experimental particle physicist Halina Abramowicz of Tel Aviv University. For example, the theory can’t explain dark matter, an unidentified substance whose mass is necessary to account for cosmic observations such as the motions of stars in galaxies. Nor can it explain why the universe is made up of matter, while antimatter is exceedingly rare. Carefully scrutinizing the Higgs boson might point scientists in the direction of solutions to those puzzles, proponents of the new colliders claim. But, among scientists, the desire for new, costly accelerators is not universal, especially since it’s unclear what exactly the machines might find. Leveling up Scientists have drawn up a variety of plans for new accelerators that would follow the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. Accelerator Style Location Particles collided Energy (eV) LHC 27 km circular Europe Protons 13 trillion ILC 20 km linear Japan Electrons and positrons 250 billion CLIC 11–50 km linear Europe Electrons and positrons 380 billion–3 trillion FCC 100 km circular Europe Electrons and positrons 90 billion–365 billion Protons 100 trillion CEPC 100 km circular China Electrons and positrons 240 billion Protons TBD Sources: CERN, L. Evans, IHEP and Y. Wang Next in line Closest to inception is the International Linear Collider in northern Japan. Unlike the LHC, in which particles zip around a ring, the ILC would accelerate two beams of particles along a straight line, directly at one another over its 20-kilometer length. And instead of crashing protons together, it would collide electrons and their antimatter partners, positrons. But, in an ominous sign, a multidisciplinary committee of the Science Council of Japan came down against the project in a December 2018 report, urging the government to be cautious with its support and questioning whether the expected scientific achievements justified the accelerator's cost, currently estimated at around $5 billion. Supporters argue that the ILC’s plan to smash together electrons and positrons, rather than protons, has some big advantages. Electrons and positrons are elementary particles, meaning they have no smaller constituents, while protons are made up of smaller particles called quarks. That means that proton collisions are messier, with more useless particle debris to sift through. please log in to view this image THIN LINE An accelerator planned for Japan, the International Linear Collider (design illustrated), would slam together electrons and positrons to better understand the Higgs boson. REY. HORI Additionally, in proton smashups, only a fraction of each proton’s energy actually goes into the collision, whereas in electron-positron colliders, particles bring the full brunt of the accelerator’s energy to bear. That means scientists can tune the energy of collisions to maximize the number of Higgs bosons produced. At the same time, the ILC would require only 250 billion electron volts to produce Higgs bosons, compared with the LHC’s 13 trillion electron volts. For the ILC, “the quality of the data coming out will be much higher, and there will be much more of it on the Higgs,” says particle physicist Lyn Evans of CERN in Geneva. One in every 100 ILC collisions would pump out a Higgs, whereas that happens only once in 10 billion collisions at the LHC. The Japanese government is expected to decide about the collider in March. If the ILC is approved, it should take about 12 years to build, Evans says. The accelerator could also be upgraded later to increase the energy it can reach. CERN has plans for a similar machine known as the Compact Linear Collider. It would also collide electrons and positrons, but at higher energies than the ILC. Its energy would start at 380 billion electron volts and increase to 3 trillion electron volts in a series of upgrades. But to reach those higher energies, new particle acceleration technology needs to be developed, meaning that CLIC is even further in the future than the ILC, says Evans, who leads a collaboration of researchers from both projects. Running in circles Two other planned colliders, in China and Europe, would be circular like the LHC, but would dwarf that already giant machine; both would be 100 kilometers around. That’s a circle big enough that the country of Liechtenstein could easily fit inside — twice. At a location yet to be determined in China, the Circular Electron Positron Collider, or CEPC, would collide electrons and positrons at 240 billion electron volts, according to a conceptual plan officially released in November and championed by Wang and the Institute of High Energy Physics. The accelerator could later be upgraded to collide protons at higher energies. Scientists say they could begin constructing the $5 billion to 6 billion machine by 2022 and have it ready to go by 2030. And at CERN, the proposed Future Circular Collider, or FCC, would likewise operate in stages, colliding electrons and positrons before moving on to protons. The ultimate goal would be to reach proton collisions with 100 trillion electron volts, more than seven times the LHC's energy, according to a Jan. 15 report from an international group of researchers. Mega-collider Scientists at CERN are planning a particle collider that would overshadow the LHC. The Future Circular Collider would be 100 kilometers around. please log in to view this image GOOGLE EARTH Meanwhile, scientists have shut down the LHC for two years, while they upgrade the machine to function at a slightly higher energy (SN Online: 12/3/18). Further down the line, a souped-up version known as the High-Luminosity LHC could come online in 2026 and would increase the proton collision rate by at least a factor of five (SN Online: 6/15/18). Portrait of the Higgs When the LHC was built, scientists were fairly confident they’d find the Higgs boson with it. But with the new facilities, there’s no promise of new particles. Instead, the machines will aim to catalog how strongly the Higgs interacts with other known particles; in physicist lingo, these are known as its “couplings.” Measurements of the Higgs’ couplings may simply confirm expectations of the standard model. But if the observations differ from expectations, the discrepancy could indirectly hint at the presence of something new, such as the particles that make up dark matter. Some scientists are hopeful that something unexpected might arise. That’s because the Higgs is an enigma: The particles condense into a kind of molasses-like fluid. “Why does this fluid do that? We have no clue,” says theoretical particle physicist Michael Peskin of Stanford University. That fluid pervades the universe, slowing particles down and giving them heft. Another puzzle is that the Higgs’ mass is a million billion times smaller than expected (SN Online: 10/22/13). Certain numbers in the standard model must be fine-tuned to extreme precision make the Higgs less hefty, a situation physicists find unnatural. The weirdness of the Higgs suggests other particles might be out there. Scientists previously thought they had an answer to the Higgs quandaries, via a theory called supersymmetry, which posits that each known particle has a heavier partner (SN: 10/1/16, p. 12). “Before the LHC started, there were huge expectations,” says Abramowicz: Some scientists claimed the LHC would quickly find supersymmetric particles. “Well, it didn’t happen,” she says. The upcoming colliders may yet find evidence of supersymmetry, or otherwise hint at new particles, but this time around, scientists aren’t making promises. please log in to view this image BIG SMASH In the new accelerators, collisions would produce showers of exotic particles (illustrated), including the Higgs boson, which explains how particles get mass. CERN “In the past, some people have clearly oversold what the LHC was expected to deliver,” says theoretical particle physicist Juan Rojo of Vrije University Amsterdam. When it comes to any new colliders, “we should avoid making the same mistake if we want to keep our field alive for decades to come,” he says. Researchers around the world are now hashing out priorities, making arguments for the new colliders and other particle physics experiments. European physicists, for example, will meet in May to discuss options, working toward a document called the European Particle Physics Strategy Update, to guide research there in 2020 and beyond. One thing is certain: The proposed accelerators would explore unknown territory, with unpredictable results. The unanswered questions surrounding the Higgs boson make it the most obvious place to look for hints of new physics, Peskin says. “It’s the place that we haven’t looked yet, so it’s really compelling.”
Who can tell me what the song lyrics below are referring to? Have you seen the memorabilia The rusty old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom Have you seen the memorabilia The dusty old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom Have you met that lovely creature The exceptional Ivy King She knows just what she's after She's got a jones for the real thing For that vintage atomic rush For the alien breeze The bright white flash From the island East of the Carolines Lovely island Have you seen the memorabilia The rusty old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom Have you seen the memorabilia The dusty old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom In the room right off the kitchen There's an old gas centrifuge Color film of Castle Bravo Girl you know that shot was huge There's a crateful of lead-lined pipes A photo of laughing Navy types On the island East of the Carolines Lovely island Have you seen the memorabilia The junky old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom Have you seen the memorabilia The funky old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom There was an island East of the Carolines Lovely island Have you seen the memorabilia The rusty old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom Have you seen the memorabilia The dusty old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom Have you seen the memorabilia The junky old memorabilia The souvenirs of perfect doom In the back of Louis Dakine's backroom
3 explanations for ‘Oumuamua that aren’t alien spaceships Possibilities for the interstellar object include a fluffy fractal and a comet skeleton BY LISA GROSSMAN 11:18AM, FEBRUARY 27, 2019 please log in to view this image HITTING THE GAS ‘Oumuamua had its foot on the accelerator as it left the solar system. Some astronomers think the object was spewing jets of gas, as shown in this artist’s illustration, although there’s no evidence of that. Others think it was pushed by radiation from the sun. NASA, ESA, STSCI Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE The first known interstellar visitor to the solar system is keeping astronomers guessing. Ever since it was spotted in October 2017, major mysteries have dogged the object, known as ‘Oumuamua (SN Online: 10/27/17). Astronomers don’t know where it came from in the galaxy. And they’ve disagreed over whether ‘Oumuamua is an asteroid, a comet or something else entirely. One of the strangest mysteries is how ‘Oumuamua sped up after it slung around the sun and fled the solar system, a motion that can’t be explained by the gravitational forces of the sun or other celestial bodies alone. The most natural explanation is that ‘Oumuamua spouts gas like a comet, which would have given the object an extra push away from the sun — except astronomers saw no signs of such outgassing. In November, Harvard University astronomers Shmuel Bialy and Avi Loeb sparked a firestorm of media coverage when they suggested that the acceleration could be explained if ‘Oumuamua is an alien spaceship, in a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters. In particular, the duo suggested, the object could be a solar sail: a large flat sheet less than 1 millimeter thick that uses pushes from starlight to navigate the galaxy (SN: 9/10/11, p. 18). Loeb is part of an organization called the Breakthrough Initiative that has suggested sending solar sails to visit a nearby planet orbiting the star Proxima Centauri (SN Online: 8/25/16). Maybe some other spacefaring civilization sent a similar sail to visit us, Loeb argues. Since then, astronomers have been kicking around other origin stories to explain ‘Oumuamua and its bizarre behavior. “Jumping to the conclusion that it has to be produced by extraterrestrial intelligence, I think we don’t have evidence for it yet,” says astronomer Amaya Moro-Martín of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “There are other natural explanations that can be explored.” Here are three such possibilities. 1. Fluffy ice fractal To get a push from starlight, an object needs to have a large surface area — to provide more surfaces for particles of light called photons to nudge — and a small mass, so that even tiny amounts of photon pressure can make a difference. A flat sheet, such as a solar sail, isn’t the only way to harness this radiation pressure, Moro-Martín says. A fluffy, porous structure that resembles a fractal, a geometric pattern that repeats itself on smaller and larger scales, could also be propelled by light, she argues. “Physically it would be the same idea, just the geometry would be different.” please log in to view this image FEELING FLUFFY ‘Oumuamua could have the same porous structure as this interplanetary dust particle, but on a larger scale, researchers say. H. VOLTEN ET AL/ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS 2007 Dust particles collected in Earth’s stratosphere can have this sort of fluffy fractal form, Moro-Martín says. She also sees similar structures in computer simulations of the way planets grow up in the dusty planet-forming disks astronomers see around other stars. As ice grains in the distant, frigid regions of those disks stick together, the particles develop into fractals. ‘Oumuamua could be one of those still-forming planets that got booted out of its star system before it finished forming, Moro-Martín proposes in a study published February 22 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “If ‘Oumuamua were to have such an origin, it will be very interesting because it will be the first time that we have evidence for what this intermediate stage is,” Moro-Martín says. “We don’t know how the planet formation process proceeds. All we can see are the smallest particles, the dust particles, or the very largest, planets.” But could a fluffy fractal survive the journey from another star’s planet-forming disk, all the way into the solar system and out again? To accelerate as much as ‘Oumuamua did, the object must have a density of just 0.00001 grams per cubic centimeter, Moro-Martín estimates. In comparison, graphene aerogel — the lowest-density artificially produced material — is at least 10 times as dense. “It tells you [the object] must be very fragile,” Moro-Martín says. “The idea that ‘Oumuamua is a fluffy fractal of ice, pushed by radiation pressure from sunlight, is an interesting scenario,” Loeb says. “But there are major challenges that it faces,” including how such a fragile object would survive, he says. 2. Comet skeleton Planetary scientist Zdenek Sekanina of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., agrees that a fluffy structure could account for ‘Oumuamua’s strange speedup. But he doesn’t think ‘Oumuamua was born with it. Instead, the object is a desiccated comet that lost most of its water and gases when it swooped close to the sun, he proposes in a paper posted January 30 at arXiv.org. “It’s like a skeleton of the original body, with all the ice out,” Sekanina says. please log in to view this image SKY SKELETON Maybe ‘Oumuamua was a comet that was destroyed as it approached the sun, like this image of comet LINEAR shattering into mini-comets in 2000. If that’s the case, only the skeleton of the original comet was left by the time astronomers spotted ‘Oumuamua. HAL WEAVER/JHU, NASA Comets that fly close to the sun often do not survive. But some of these doomed objects have left observable fragments behind, like comet LINEAR. That comet came within 0.7 times the Earth’s distance to the sun in 2000 and left a cloud of mini comets behind, which were observed with the Hubble Space Telescope. ‘Oumuamua faced a harsher situation: It swooped closer to the sun, about 0.25 times Earth’s distance. Like Loeb and Moro-Martín, Sekanina thinks solar radiation pressure is the best explanation for how ‘Oumuamua sped up. And a fluffy structure is the best way to accelerate with radiation pressure without invoking “little green men sending a sail,” he says. Although ‘Oumuamua is denser in Sekanina’s estimates than Moro-Martín’s, that’s still “just unbelievable,” he says. “It’s like a fairy castle type structure, or gossamer.” If ‘Oumuamua were a fully solid, icy comet when it approached the solar system, and developed that gossamer structure only after flying close to the sun, that could explain how the object survived a trip through interstellar space. 3. Weird comet or ice shard? When the Spitzer Space Telescope checked ‘Oumuamua for signs of a cometlike tail, the instrument saw none, meaning only minuscule amounts of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide gas would have been expelled, if any. And if you assume ‘Oumuamua’s composition is similar to comets in the solar system, Spitzer’s data suggest that the object must not have been spewing out much water, either. But if ‘Oumuamua is a strange sort of comet, it could spew water vapor or other noncarbonated gases that Spitzer didn’t detect, which could explain how the object sped up. “‘Oumuamua is made of still water, not Perrier,” quips astronomer Gregory Laughlin of Yale University. Laughlin and colleagues are working on a study that suggests that ‘Oumuamua releases a nozzlelike jet of gas whose source migrates across the object’s surface, following the warmth of the sun. That migration would let ‘Oumuamua tumble through space without spinning so fast that it breaks apart. Other comets, including one visited by the Rosetta spacecraft (SN: 11/11/17, p. 32), exhibit this sort of sun-tracking jet. “The weirdness is that [‘Oumuamua] would have to be made of pretty pure ice” to explain such outgassing, Laughlin says. It’s not clear if a comet, even a weird one, could be made of pure ice. So it’s possible that it ‘Oumuamua could be an ice shard of a larger body, such as if an icy planet came too close to a larger neighbor and was ripped apart, he says. Unfortunately, there’s no way to check how ‘Oumuamua is structured now — it’s too far away to make any more observations. The ultimate test will come when — and astronomers think it’s a matter of when, not if — another interstellar visitor comes calling. “If [‘Oumuamua] was representative of a population, there will be opportunities to get an up-close look at them,” Laughlin says.
Hidden ancient neutrinos may shape the patterns of galaxies Subatomic particles born in the universe’s first second may imprint their effects on the sky BY EMILY CONOVER 11:00AM, MARCH 4, 2019 please log in to view this image RUN IN CIRCLES Galaxies in the universe tend to cluster into rings (illustrated), and scientists have found signs that subatomic particles called neutrinos change the way matter is distributed in the circles. ZOSIA ROSTOMIAN/LAWRENCE BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE Shadowy messengers from the Big Bang have seemingly left their mark on ring-shaped patterns imprinted on the sky. Subatomic particles called neutrinos, released just one second after the universe’s birth 13.8 billion years ago, continually stream through the universe and are exceedingly hard to spot. But circular patterns of galaxies scattered across the sky reveal signs of the shy particles. Those data hint that the neutrinos’ gravity subtly alters the rings, researchers report February 25 in Nature Physics. Since these relic neutrinos were released so early in the universe’s history, scientists hope they can one day use these particles to better understand the cosmos in its first moments. The study “is certainly new and interesting in that it shows that we can derive the early universe physics” by observing the recent universe, says cosmologist Hee-Jong Seo of Ohio University in Athens, who wasn’t involved in the research. Spotting signs of the ancient particles is no easy feat. All neutrinos are notoriously difficult to detect. They have no electric charge and can pass straight through other matter. With large, highly sensitive detectors, scientists can spot neutrinos produced by everyday processes such as radioactive decay. But neutrinos released from the Big Bang, known collectively as the “cosmic neutrino background,” are much more elusive. Although these cosmic relics suffuse the universe, the particles have so little energy that they have never been directly spotted. So rather than trying to observe those relic neutrinos directly, scientists look for their influence on other cosmic signposts. For example: A pattern caused by sound waves in the early universe — known as baryon acoustic oscillations — should be distorted by the neutrinos. Those sound waves spread outward through the universe like circular ripples on a pond, compressing matter into denser pockets. Eventually, that process resulted in galaxies having a tendency to cluster in rings across the sky (SN: 5/5/12, p. 17). But neutrinos can shift that matter around due to the particles’ gravity, slightly changing the distribution of matter in the rings. “You’re seeing the pull of the neutrinos,” says cosmologist Daniel Green of the University of California, San Diego. Using data from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, or BOSS, Green and colleagues studied the circular patterns of galaxies and saw evidence that the neutrinos were, in fact, pulling matter around from the inner side of the ring band toward the outer side. Scientists have previously spotted signs of the ancient neutrinos in a glow leftover from the Big Bang. The cosmic microwave background, light that was released when the universe was just 380,000 years old, is also affected by the cosmic neutrino background. But this is the first time evidence of the particles’ fingerprints on galaxies has been spotted. “It’s another hallmark of the success of standard cosmology,” says cosmologist Kevork Abazajian, who was not involved with the research. Still, the current result is just scratching the surface of this phenomenon, making the measurement a proof of principle rather than a definitive detection, says Abazajian, of the University of California, Irvine. In the future, improved surveys of galaxies might be sensitive enough to reveal unexpected tweaks to the ring patterns, which could be caused by the existence of undiscovered phenomena, such as hypothetical new types of neutrinos called sterile neutrinos (SN: 6/23/18, p. 7).
