Mars (probably) has a lake of liquid water A lake beneath the Red Planet’s southern ice sheets may be the best place to find life BY LISA GROSSMAN 10:00AM, JULY 25, 2018 please log in to view this image WHAT LIES BENEATH There may be a 20-kilometer-wide lake hidden under Mars’ southern polar ice sheets, shown here in images from NASA’s Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft. A Mars orbiter has detected a wide lake of liquid water hidden below the planet’s southern ice sheets. There have been much-debated hints of tiny, ephemeral amounts of water on Mars before. But if confirmed, this lake marks the first discovery of a long-lasting cache of the liquid. “This is potentially a really big deal,” says planetary scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “It’s another type of habitat in which life could be living on Mars today.” The lake is about 20 kilometers across, planetary scientist Roberto Orosei of the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy and his colleagues report online July 25 in Science — but the water is buried beneath 1.5 kilometers of solid ice. Orosei and colleagues spotted the lake by combining more than three years of observations from the European Space Agency’s orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. The craft’s MARSIS instrument, which stands for Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding, aimed radar waves at the planet to probe beneath its surface. Radar runs Repeated passes by ice-penetrating radar beamed down from the Mars Express orbiter reveal a hidden lake on Mars. The bluer the colors, the brighter the radar reflection from the material it bounced off. The blue triangle outlined in black in the middle is the purported lake. please log in to view this image R. OROSEI ET AL/SCIENCE 2018 Other lakes too small for Mars Express to see may also exist, perhaps forming a network of interconnected channels beneath the ice. As those waves passed through the ice, they bounced off different materials embedded in the glaciers. The brightness of the reflection tells scientists about the material doing the reflecting — liquid water makes a brighter echo than either ice or rock. Combining 29 radar observations taken from May 2012 to December 2015, MARSIS revealed a bright spot in the ice layers near Mars’ south pole, surrounded by much less reflective areas. Orosei and colleagues considered other explanations for the bright spot, such as radar bouncing off a hypothetical layer of carbon dioxide ice at the top of the sheet, but decided those options either wouldn’t produce the same radar signal or were too contrived to be physically likely. That left one option: A lake of liquid water. Similar lakes beneath the ice in Antarctica and Greenland have been discovered in the same way (SN: 9/7/13, p. 26). “On Earth, nobody would have been surprised to conclude that this was water,” Orosei says. “But to demonstrate the same on Mars was much more complicated.” The lake is probably not pure water — temperatures at the bottom of the ice sheet are around –68° Celsius, and pure water would freeze there, even under the pressure of so much ice. But a lot of salt dissolved in the water could lower the freezing point. Salts of sodium, magnesium and calcium have been found elsewhere on Mars, and may be helping to keep this lake liquid (SN: 4/11/09, p. 12). The pool could also be more mud than water, but that could still be a habitable environment, Horgan says. Previously, scientists have discovered extensive solid water ice sheets under the Martian dirt (SN Online: 1/11/18). There were also hints that liquid water flowed down cliff walls (SN: 10/31/15, p. 17), but those may turn out to be tiny dry avalanches. The Phoenix lander saw what looked like frozen water droplets at its site near the north pole in 2008, but that water may have been melted by the lander itself (SN Online: 9/9/10). “If this [lake] is confirmed, it’s a substantial change in our understanding of the present-day habitability of Mars,” says Lisa Pratt, NASA’s planetary protection officer. Though the newly discovered lake’s depth is unclear, its volume still dwarfs any previous signs of liquid water on Mars, Orosei says. The lake has to be at least 10 centimeters deep for MARSIS to have noticed it. That means it could contain at least 10 billion liters of liquid water. “That’s big,” Horgan says. “When we’ve talked about water in other places, it’s in dribs and drabs.” Under-ice lakes on Mars were first suggested in 1987, and the MARSIS team has been searching since Mars Express began orbiting the Red Planet in 2003. It took the team more than a decade to collect enough data to convince themselves the lake was real. For the first several years of observations, limitations in the spacecraft’s onboard computer forced the team to average hundreds of radar pulses together before sending the data back to Earth. That strategy sometimes cancelled out the lake’s reflections, Orosei says — on some orbits, the bright spot was visible, on others, it wasn’t. In the early 2010s, the team switched to a new technique that let them store the data and send it back to Earth more slowly. Then in August 2015, months before the end of the observing campaign, the experiment’s principal investigator, Giovanni Picardi of the University of Rome Sapienza, died unexpectedly. “It was incredibly sad,” Orosei says. “We had all the data, but we had no leadership. The team was in disarray.” Finally discovering the lake is “a testament to perseverance and longevity,” says planetary scientist Isaac Smith of the Planetary Science Institute, who is based in Lakewood, Colo. “Long after everyone else gave up looking, this team kept looking.” But there is still room for doubt, says Smith, who works on a different radar experiment on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that has seen no sign of the lake, even in CT scan–like 3-D views of the poles. It could be that MRO’s radar is scattering off the ice in a different way, or that the wavelengths it uses don’t penetrate as deep into the ice. The MRO team will look again, and will also try to create a 3-D view from the MARSIS data. Having a specific spot to aim for is helpful, he says. “I expect there will be debate,” Smith says. “They’ve done their homework. This paper is well earned. But we should do some more follow-up.”
In a first, physicists accelerate atoms in the Large Hadron Collider The successful test may mean the particle accelerator could be used as a gamma-ray factory BY EMILY CONOVER 1:42PM, JULY 31, 2018 please log in to view this image A NEW FRONTIER Before the Large Hadron Collider accelerated lead atoms, only protons and atomic nuclei had zipped through the particle accelerator. MAXIMILIEN BRICE AND JULIEN ORDAN/CERN Not content with protons and atomic nuclei, physicists took a new kind of particle for a spin around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator. On July 25, the Large Hadron Collider, located at the laboratory CERN in Geneva, accelerated ionized lead atoms, each containing a single electron buddied up with a lead nucleus. Each lead atom normally has 82 electrons, but researchers stripped away all but one in the experiment, giving the particles an electric charge. Previously, the LHC had accelerated only protons and the nuclei of atoms, without any electron hangers-on. Scientists hope the successful test means that the LHC could one day be used as a gamma-ray factory. Gamma rays, a type of high-energy light, could be produced by zapping beams of ionized atoms with laser light. That light would jostle the atoms’ electrons into higher energy states, and the accelerated atoms would emit gamma rays when the electrons later returned to lower energy states. Existing facilities make gamma rays from beams of electrons, but the LHC might be able to produce gamma rays at greater intensities. More powerful beams of gamma rays would be useful for various scientific purposes, including searching for certain types of dark matter — mysterious particles that scientists believe exist in the universe but have yet to detect (SN: 11/12/16, p. 14). The gamma rays could also be used to produce beams of other particles, such as heavy, electron-like particles called muons, for use in new kinds of experiments. Nice to see the big boy firing before the start of the season, and atoms now, no less
Did you add the (probably) bit ? it's possible, maybe even probable, we now know there is water everywhere in the universe, stars that shoot water bullets and rocky bodies with no atmosphere can react with solar wind to create HO2 as the solar wind hits the rock, and high energy particles bonding molecules to create HO2 in atmospheres, including our own.
Great discovery indeed, though it's a pity the scientists who hypothesised on what she found were not nearly as talented. We now know pretty much for a fact, that the hypothesis that it is a spinning Newton star is not true, Neutron stars cant exist by the laws of physics and they don't spin 1.5 times as fast as a dentists drill, The flashes have been observed to slow in rate then speed up again ..and the star's emissions type changes, two things that completely rule out the hypothesis. (even if we ignore the totally mythical "strange matter" that in fact does not exist It took them long enough to recognise her! 60 years!
@astro Seems I am not the only one who thinks we don't have a grip on solar effects on climate ""Compared to other stars, our Sun is a remarkably steady source of light and heat, but its output does vary. Solar light, heat, and particle streams drive weather and atmospheric chemistry, but how (and how much) does the Sun’s variability affect the climate here on Earth? The role of solar variability in recent global warming is not just a bone of contention; it is also a question of overriding importance for the scientific understanding of our Sun and of climate change."" So much for "fossil fuel shill" and climate models, certitude and consensus I guess the Guardian and BBC won't be interested in reporting on such things lest the brainwashing of clowns like you might not go so well https://eos.org/project-updates/better-data-for-modeling-the-suns-influence-on-climate You're a science denier it seems
NASA Finding: Jupiter has an extra magnetic pole Unique in the solar system, scientists consider the possibility that we are catching Jupiter in the middle of a magnetic reversal NASA’s Juno spacecraft has discovered something extraordinary about Jupiter. There is an extra magnetic pole near the giant planet’s equator, dubbed “The Great Blue Spot” by researchers who identified it. Jupiter’s unexpected magnetic morphology is a sign that strange things may be happening deep beneath the cloudtops. When NASA’s Juno spacecraft reached Jupiter in 2016, planetary scientists were eager to learn more about the giant planet’s magnetic field. Juno would fly over both of Jupiter’s poles, skimming just 4000 km above the cloudtops for measurements at point-blank range. Today in the journal Nature, a team of researchers led by Kimberly Moore of Harvard University announced new results from Juno–and they are weird. Among the findings: Jupiter has an extra magnetic pole. please log in to view this image Above: Jupiter’s magnetic field lines. (a) north polar view; (b) south polar view; (c) equatorial view “We find that Jupiter’s magnetic field is different from all other known planetary magnetic fields,” the researchers wrote in the introduction to their paper. The best way to appreciate the strangeness of Jupiter’s magnetic field is by comparison to Earth. Our planet has two well-defined magnetic poles–one in each hemisphere. This is normal. Jupiter’s southern hemisphere looks normal, too. It has a single magnetic pole located near the planet’s spin axis. Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, however, is something else. The north magnetic pole is smeared into a swirl, which some writers have likened to a “ponytail.” And there is a second south pole located near the equator. The researchers have dubbed this extra pole “The Great Blue Spot” because it appears blue in their false-color images of magnetic polarity.. In their Nature article, the scientists consider the possibility that we are catching Jupiter in the middle of a magnetic reversal–an unsettled situation with temporary poles popping up in strange places. However, they favor the idea that Jupiter’s inner magnetic dynamo is simply unlike that of other planets. Deep within Jupiter, they posit, liquid metallic hydrogen mixes with partially dissolved rock and ice to create strange electrical currents, giving rise to an equally strange magnetic field. More clues could be in the offing as Juno continues to orbit Jupiter until 2021. Changes to Jupiter’s magnetic structure, for instance, might reveal that a reversal is underway or, conversely, that the extra pole is stable.
A new geological Age.. "Meghalayan Age" of the late Holocene, started 4200 years ago Collapse of civilizations worldwide defines youngest unit of the Geologic Time Scale The Late Holocene Meghalayan Age, newly-ratified as the most recent unit of the Geologic Time Scale, began at the time when agricultural societies around the world experienced an abrupt and critical mega-drought and cooling 4,200 years ago. This key decision follows many years of research by Quaternary scientists, scrutinized and tested by the subcommissions of the International Commission on Stratigraphy under the chairmanship of Professor David Harper, Durham University, UK. Agricultural-based societies that developed in several regions after the end of the last Ice Age were impacted severely by the 200-year climatic event that resulted in the collapse of civilizations and human migrations in Egypt, Greece, Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Yangtze River Valley. Evidence of the 4.2 kiloyear climatic event has been found on all seven continents. The Meghalayan Age is unique among the many intervals of the Geologic Time Scale in that its beginning coincides with a global cultural event produced by a global climatic event, said Dr. Stanley Finney, Professor of Geological Sciences at Long Beach State University and Secretary General of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). The convergence of stratigraphy and human cultural evolution is extraordinary, according to Professor Martin Head, a geologist at Brock University in Canada and Chair of the International Commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. Yale University's Harvey Weiss, Professor of Environmental Studies and Near Eastern Archaeology, considers this decision to be a significant moment in the history of Holocene climate and archaeology science. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is responsible for standardizing the Geologic Time Scale, approved the definition of the beginning of the youngest unit of the Geologic Time Scale based on the timing of this event. Furthermore, it approved proposals for two other ages: the Middle Holocene Northgrippian Age and the Early Holocene Greenlandian Age with beginnings defined at climatic events that happened about 8,300 years and 11,700 years ago, respectively. The three ages comprise the Holocene Epoch, which represents the time since the end of the last Ice Age. The Commission then forwarded these proposals to its parent body, the IUGS, for consideration, and the executive committee of IUGS voted unanimously to ratify them. Units of the Geologic Time Scale are based on sedimentary strata that have accumulated over time and contain within them sediment types, fossils and chemical isotopes that record the passage of time as well as the physical and biological events that produced them. The three new ages of the Holocene Epoch are represented by a wealth of sediment that accumulated worldwide on the sea floor, on lake bottoms, as glacial ice, and as calcite layers in stalactites and stalagmites. Those intervals of sedimentary strata on which the ages are based are referred to as stages, and together the strata of three new stages comprise the Holocene Series. The lower boundary of the Greenlandian and Northgripppian stages are defined at specific levels in Greenland ice cores. The lower boundary of the Meghalayan Stage is defined at a specific level in a stalagmite from a cave in northeast India. The ice cores and the stalagmite are now identified as international geostandards, and have been placed in protected archives accessible for further study. The decision to define these new stages of the Holocene Series and thus the three new corresponding ages of the Holocene Epoch allows for an update to the International Chronostratigraphic Chart (www.stratigraphy.org), which depicts the timeline for the earth’s full geologic history. This is a key achievement for the International Union of Geological Sciences and particularly for its Commission on Stratigraphy. The proposals were developed by a dedicated, international team of Holocene scientists led by Professor Mike Walker of the University of Wales. They were subsequently approved by the International Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy and the International Commission on Stratigraphy before being forward to IUGS for ratification. According to Professor David Harper, the many years of scientific research and international collaboration followed by intense scrutiny of the proposals as they were evaluated at several levels in the IUGS organization give legitimacy to the new units as global standards. please log in to view this image Caption: Portion of the Indian stalagmite that was sectioned and analyzed layer by layer, and contains the layers chosen to define the beginning of the Late Holocene Meghalayan Age, 4200 years ago. http://www.stratigraphy.org/index.p...ines-youngest-unit-of-the-geologic-time-scale
22 years left, **** all in the scheme of things, certainly with the number of 'lives' I've had so far
Three new physics experiments could revamp the standard model Physicists build giant machines to study tiny particles BY EMILY CONOVER 9:30AM, SEPTEMBER 19, 2018 please log in to view this image MASSIVE MACHINES A researcher stands in the cavernous spectrometer of KATRIN, an experiment in Germany to measure the mass of particles called neutrinos. MICHAEL ZACHER Magazine issue: Vol. 194, No. 6, September 29, 2018, p. 18 Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE Diana Parno’s head swam when she first stepped inside the enormous, metallic vessel of the experiment KATRIN. Within the house-sized, oblong structure, everything was symmetrical, clean and blindingly shiny, says Parno, a physicist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “It was incredibly disorienting.” Now, electrons — thankfully immune to bouts of dizziness — traverse the inside of this zeppelin-shaped monstrosity located in Karlsruhe, Germany. Building the experiment took years and tens of millions of dollars. Why create such an extreme apparatus? It’s all part of a bid to measure the mass of itty-bitty subatomic particles known as neutrinos. KATRIN, which is short for Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino Experiment, started test runs in May. The experiment is part of a multipronged approach to the study of particle physics, one of dozens of detectors built in an assortment of odd-looking shapes and sizes. Their mission: dive deep into the standard model, particle physicists’ theory of the subatomic building blocks of matter — and maybe overthrow it. Developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the standard model has some sizable holes: It can’t explain dark matter — an ethereal substance so far detected only by its gravitational effects — or dark energy, a mysterious oomph that causes the cosmos to expand at an increasing rate. The theory also can’t explain why the universe is made mostly of matter, while antimatter is rare (SN: 9/2/17, p. 15). So physicists are on a quest to revamp particle physics by probing the standard model’s weak points. Major facilities like the Large Hadron Collider — the gargantuan accelerator located at CERN near Geneva — haven’t yet found where the standard model goes wrong (SN: 10/1/16, p. 12). Instead, particle physics experiments have confirmed standard model predictions again and again. “In some sense we are victims of our own success,” says Juan Rojo, a theoretical physicist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “We don’t have hints about what is the next step.” New experiments like KATRIN might be able to ferret out answers. Also joining the ranks are Muon g-2 (pronounced “gee minus two”) at Fermilab in Batavia, Ill., and Belle II in Tsukuba, Japan. A behind-the-scenes look at these experiments reveals the sweat, joy and sacrifice that goes into each of these difficult enterprises. These efforts involve hundreds of researchers, sport price tags in the tens of millions of dollars and require major technological undertakings: intricate electronics, powerful magnets and ultraclean conditions. Researchers have built complex apparatuses with their own hands, lugged tons of equipment across continents and cleaned the insides of detectors until they gleam. Here’s a glimpse at three of the latest standard model challengers. Belle II KEK High Energy Accelerator Research Organization Tsukuba, Japan Approximate cost: $50 million please log in to view this image CLEAR AS A BELLE The Belle-II experiment, pictured, aims to understand the behavior of unusual particles known as B mesons. SHOTA TAKAHASHI/KEK How it works Electrons and their antimatter partners, positrons, take laps around a 3-kilometer long, ring-shaped accelerator and collide at the center of the Belle II detector, producing a class of particles called B mesons. These particles contain a bottom quark, an exotic particle not found in run-of-the-mill matter. Scientists sift through the data produced when B mesons decay inside the 8-meter-tall detector to learn about the particles’ weird ways. please log in to view this image T. TIBBITTS, HIGH ENERGY ACCELERATOR RESEARCH ORGANIZATION, INSTITUTE OF PARTICLE AND NUCLEAR STUDIES 1. An accelerator sends electrons from one end and positrons from the other into Belle II. 2. Tracking detectors follow particles’ paths after collision, pinpointing B mesons. 3. Quartz sensors distinguish between similar types of particles. 4. A calorimeter measures energies of particles. 5. Outer layers spot particles that get past inner sections. OK, but why? Certain B mesons seem to prefer to decay into electrons, rather than their heavier cousins, muons (SN: 5/13/17, p. 16). That goes against the standard model, which says electrons and muons should appear in equal amounts. If this unexpected behavior holds up to scrutiny, something big must be wrong with the theory. B mesons also partake in a process called CP violation, in which antimatter and matter don’t behave like perfect mirror images. Studying CP violation might help scientists understand why the universe is composed of matter and not antimatter. In the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were produced in equal measure and should have annihilated into nothingness, but somehow matter gained an upper hand. It’s “the most fundamental question human beings can ask ... ‘Why are we here?’ ” says physics graduate student Robert Seddon. please log in to view this image NARROW FOCUS Scientists insert superconducting magnets into the center of Belle II. The magnets focus the beams of electrons and positrons that collide inside the detector. KEK IPNS Like an onion Each layer of the detector has a different purpose. The innermost layers spot the tracks that particles take through the detector. Farther out, sensors tell one particle from another and measure particles’ energies. The outermost section spots muons and other particles that can travel that far. When the accelerator is running, it creates a high-radiation environment in the lab that Seddon, of McGill University in Montreal, calls “completely off-limits. You go in there, you die.” Parsing the particles Pristine, lab-grown quartz makes up the sensors that discern between different types of particles. Creating the sensors required gluing together bars of quartz over a meter long, precisely aligning them to within about 10 microns — close in size to a human red blood cell. Scratching or smudging the quartz damages it, so handling the bars took a soft touch. Physicists who had arrived recently from overseas were banned from the work, says physicist Saurabh Sandilya of the University of Cincinnati; there’s no room for jet lag–induced clumsiness. please log in to view this image STEADY HANDS Physicist Saurabh Sandilya prepares the quartz bars that help identify particles in Belle-II. BELLE II Let’s get it started On April 26, the first electrons and positrons collided in the new detector. Running the experiment was thrilling but tense. “Somebody brought me some whiskey because I was really scared,” says physicist Tom Browder of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He worried there might be a failure of a system called the trigger, which identifies interesting collisions from the deluge of boring events that the detector sees. After several hours, when the first events began rolling in around 1 a.m., the team finally took a breath. Belle ringers Like a baby, a new particle detector can interfere with its creators’ sleep. The detectors run all night; if a malfunction occurs, experts might get an after-hours phone call. Physics graduate student Laura Zani of the University of Pisa in Italy certainly did. But the newborn detector, a piece of which she helped build, also inspired pride. When Zani saw the first particle tracks appear on computer screens, she thought, “We did it.” KATRIN Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany Approximate cost: $70 million please log in to view this image MASS MEASUREMENT The KATRIN experiment aims to measure the mass of the neutrino using a huge device called a spectrometer (interior shown). KARLSRUHE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY How it works Physicists aim to measure the mass of neutrinos, wily subatomic particles that are nearly impossible to detect. At one end of the 70-meter-long KATRIN, radioactive decays of tritium produce electrons and the antimatter twins of neutrinos. Those antineutrinos escape while the electrons cruise through KATRIN’s blimp-shaped tank and are detected at the other end (SN Online: 10/18/16). The tank, a spectrometer, divvies up the particles according to their energies. Some energy from each tritium decay goes to generating the antineutrino’s mass. That limits how much energy the electron gets. So measuring the electrons’ energies can reveal the mass of neutrinos. KATRIN should officially start taking data next spring. please log in to view this image KATRIN 1. Tritium decays, releasing electrons and antineutrinos, which escape. 2. Electrons travel along beamline to spectrometer. 3. The spectrometer sorts electrons by their energies. please log in to view this image T. TIBBITTS, M. ARENZ ET AL/J. OF INSTRUMENTATION 2016 4. A magnetic field (dotted lines) shepherds high-energy electrons to a detector at the other end. 5. An electric field turns low-energy electrons back. 6. Magnets focus electrons onto the detector. OK, but why? A neutrino’s mass is a tiny fraction of an electron’s. “Why is it so light?” Parno asks. “That’s mysterious.” The standard model initially predicted that neutrinos have no mass at all. But measurements indicate that the particles must have mass, though how much is still a question. Neutrinos barely interact with matter and are incredibly numerous: Billions of neutrinos sail through your thumbnail each second. These particles are so quirky that scientists want to know more. Radioactive rules It all starts with tritium. This radioactive version of hydrogen, pumped through the experiment in a gaseous form, emits 100 billion antineutrino and electron pairs each second. In the tritium lab, special rules are in place because of the radioactivity — scientists enter via an air lock and must wash their hands when they leave. The place has a spaceship vibe, says Larisa Thorne, a physics graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. “I did feel quite like I was on Star Trek.” please log in to view this image ELECTRON CATCHER Physicists Larisa Thorne of Carnegie Mellon University and Florian Fränkle of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology work on KATRIN’s detector system, which spots electrons produced in tritium decays. FLORIAN FRÄNKLE End of the line At the opposite end from the tritium lab, powerful magnets focus high-energy electrons on a detector, which counts the electrons that arrive. Credit cards must be stashed in a locker or they’ll be wiped by the magnetic field. The big bake The entire spectrometer is kept under ultrahigh vacuum, eliminating molecules of air or other substances that could interfere with the electrons’ journeys. It’s the largest ultrahigh vacuum vessel ever created. To get that extreme vacuum, the researchers temporarily heat the whole shebang to more than 200° Celsius, baking off water and other contaminants on the vessel’s surface. Metal expands when heated, so the spectrometer bulges by about 12 centimeters during the process. “It’s pretty strange to think that this large tank, which is filled with nothing … actually expands,” Thorne says. COMING HOME KATRIN’s spectrometer was built off-site and had to be carefully transported to the lab in Germany, just squeezing between nearby houses. Muon g-2 Fermilab, Batavia, Ill. Approximate cost: $46 million please log in to view this image MOVING DAY A crane lifts the 50-ton apparatus containing Muon g-2’s magnetic ring, at the start of a cross-country journey to move the ring from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to Fermilab in Illinois. BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY How it works Muons, heavier relatives of electrons, behave like tiny magnets with a north and south pole. Muon g-2, which started up in February, studies the properties of those minimagnets. Researchers beam thousands of muons into a doughnut-shaped electromagnet about as wide as the width of a basketball court. As muons circulate inside the electromagnet, their poles pivot like wobbling tops. Muons are unstable, so as they circulate, they decay into lighter particles known as positrons. The angles at which those positrons fly off can reveal the rate of the muons’ magnetic gyrations and, therefore, the strength of the muons’ magnets. The researchers will compare the measurement to predictions based on the standard model. please log in to view this image FERMILAB 1. Muons enter the magnet. 2. Muons circle in the same direction repeatedly. 3. Muons decay into positrons, which are picked up by detectors that measure energy and particle tracks. OK, but why? Transient particles blip in and out of existence everywhere in space. Those particles tweak the rate at which the muons gyrate. If undetected particles are out there, Muon g-2’s measurement might not square with predictions. A similar experiment performed at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., in the 1990s hinted at a mismatch (SN: 2/17/01, p. 102). Muon g-2 will make a more precise measurement to follow up on that lead. One ring Muon g-2’s magnetic field is about 30,000 times as strong as Earth’s magnetic field. Such strength is useful only if the magnetic field is ultrauniform. So physicists strategically placed thousands of tiny metal shims — many just a fraction of the thickness of notebook paper — to adjust the magnetic field. Hours of “shimming” left physicists’ hands “covered in dirt and oil and grease,” says physics graduate student Rachel Osofsky of the University of Washington in Seattle. The dirty job was worth it: The magnetic field is now uniform to within 0.0015 percent. please log in to view this image MAKING ADJUSTMENTS Physicists cozy up to muon g-2’s magnet while installing shims to make the magnetic field more uniform. COURTESY OF RACHEL OSOFSKY Long trek The electromagnet, a hand-me-down from the Brookhaven Lab, had to be shipped from Upton to Fermilab in Illinois. But how to transport an enormous, fragile doughnut? In 2013, the magnet took a boat trip down the East Coast and cruised up the Mississippi and other rivers to Lemont, Ill. A truck carried the cargo the rest of the way, going about 8 kilometers per hour on closed-off highways in the middle of the night. The magnet barely squeaked through the tight passages of electronic tolling arches. No word on whether the magnet had to pay. please log in to view this image PERFECT FIT The Muon g-2 experiment’s 50-foot electromagnetic ring had to be transported across Illinois in the middle of the night. It barely squeaked through an electronic tolling arch, shown here. REIDAR HAHN/FERMILAB Tiny tubes Building a particle detector takes lots of painstaking work, much of it done by graduate students. For Muon g-2, building the tracking detectors, which observe the trajectories of the emitted positrons, required threading wires 25 microns thick through 100-micron-wide holes. Imagine trying to stick a piece of spaghetti through a straw, both small enough for a Lego figurine to use. “That was like a year of our lives just getting wires down tiny holes,” says Saskia Charity, a physics graduate student at the University of Liverpool in England.
Here’s why we care about attempts to prove the Riemann hypothesis The latest effort shines a spotlight on an enduring prime numbers mystery BY EMILY CONOVER 11:46AM, SEPTEMBER 25, 2018 please log in to view this image LINED UP The Riemann zeta function has an infinite number of points where the function’s value is zero, located at the whirls of color in this plot. The Riemann hypothesis predicts that certain zeros lie along a single line, which is horizontal in this image, where the colorful bands meet the red. EMPETRISOR/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0) Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE A famed mathematical enigma is once again in the spotlight. The Riemann hypothesis, posited in 1859 by German mathematician Bernhard Riemann, is one of the biggest unsolved puzzles in mathematics. The hypothesis, which could unlock the mysteries of prime numbers, has never been proved. But mathematicians are buzzing about a new attempt. Esteemed mathematician Michael Atiyah took a crack at proving the hypothesis in a lecture at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany on September 24. Despite the stature of Atiyah — who has won the two most prestigious honors in mathematics, the Fields Medal and the Abel Prize — many researchers have expressed skepticism about the proof. So the Riemann hypothesis remains up for grabs. Let's break down what the Riemann hypothesis is, and what a confirmed proof — if one is ever found — would mean for mathematics. What is the Riemann hypothesis? The Riemann hypothesis is a statement about a mathematical curiosity known as the Riemann zeta function. That function is closely entwined with prime numbers — whole numbers that are evenly divisible only by 1 and themselves. Prime numbers are mysterious: They are scattered in an inscrutable pattern across the number line, making it difficult to predict where each prime number will fall (SN Online: 4/2/08). But if the Riemann zeta function meets a certain condition, Riemann realized, it would reveal secrets of the prime numbers, such as how many primes exist below a given number. That required condition is the Riemann hypothesis. It conjectures that certain zeros of the function — the points where the function’s value equals zero — all lie along a particular line when plotted (SN: 9/27/08, p. 14). If the hypothesis is confirmed, it could help expose a method to the primes’ madness. Why is it so important? Prime numbers are mathematical VIPs: Like atoms of the periodic table, they are the building blocks for larger numbers. Primes matter for practical purposes, too, as they are important for securing encrypted transmissions sent over the internet. And importantly, a multitude of mathematical papers take the Riemann hypothesis as a given. If this foundational assumption were proved correct, “many results that are believed to be true will be known to be true,” says mathematician Ken Ono of Emory University in Atlanta. “It’s a kind of mathematical oracle.” Haven’t people tried to prove this before? Yep. It’s difficult to count the number of attempts, but probably hundreds of researchers have tried their hands at a proof. So far none of the proofs have stood up to scrutiny. The problem is so stubborn that it now has a bounty on its head: The Clay Mathematics Institute has offered up $1 million to anyone who can prove the Riemann hypothesis. Why is it so difficult to prove? The Riemann zeta function is a difficult beast to work with. Even defining it is a challenge, Ono says. Furthermore, the function has an infinite number of zeros. If any one of those zeros is not on its expected line, the Riemann hypothesis is wrong. And since there are infinite zeros, manually checking each one won’t work. Instead, a proof must show without a doubt that no zero can be an outlier. For difficult mathematical quandaries like the Riemann hypothesis, the bar for acceptance of a proof is extremely high. Verification of such a proof typically requires months or even years of double-checking by other mathematicians before either everyone is convinced, or the proof is deemed flawed. What will it take to prove the Riemann hypothesis? Various mathematicians have made some amount of headway toward a proof. Ono likens it to attempting to climb Mount Everest and making it to base camp. While some clever mathematician may eventually be able to finish that climb, Ono says, “there is this belief that the ultimate proof … if one ever is made, will require a different level of mathematics.”
Play Video “We have no idea what it is – it’s nothing we’ve known before.” Scientists hope solving the Muon anomaly puzzle will shed light on the biggest prize in physics – the problem of Dark Matter and its associated Dark Energy. Ms Shears said: “That is the next step in this adventure. “Many people thought we would find evidence of dark matter and our testing is still very hopeful “This is bigger than the Higgs Bosun, it is Nobel Prize winning stuff, it tells us what the universe is made of “We are desperate to find answers to these questions – but we are just seeing measurements that don’t fit.”
Three gas clouds nearly grazed the edge of the Milky Way’s black hole The observations confirm that the supermassive object really is a black hole BY EMILY CONOVER 2:18PM, OCTOBER 31, 2018 please log in to view this image LIVING DANGEROUSLY Scientists spotted flaring gas swirling close to the edge of a black hole, illustrated in this visualization based on a computer simulation. L. CALÇADA/ GRAVITY CONSORTIUM/ESO Email Twitter Facebook Reddit Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE As far as close shaves with a black hole go, it doesn’t get much closer than this. Scientists have spotted clouds of gas hurtling around the monster black hole at the center of the Milky Way, not far from the behemoth’s edge. Observed on three separate occasions, the gas clouds careened along at unimaginably fast speeds — 30 percent of the speed of light, researchers report October 31 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The gas seemed to be near a boundary known as the innermost stable circular orbit — the closest matter can circle the black hole without falling in. The clumps, which researchers observed when the gas caused flares of infrared light, orbited at a distance just a few times the radius of the black hole’s event horizon, the boundary from beyond which nothing, not even light, can return (SN: 5/31/14, p. 16). That’s equivalent to about a quarter of the distance from Earth to the sun. Previously, scientists had tracked the motion of a star orbiting close to the black hole (SN: 8/18/18, p. 12). But that star was hundreds of times farther away than the gas. “What’s exciting now is that we can get closer to the black hole,” says study coauthor Jason Dexter, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany. The researchers observed the clouds using the Very Large Telescope array in the Atacama Desert of Chile. These up-close encounters strengthen scientists’ belief that the Milky Way has a bona fide black hole lurking at its center. Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb helped predict the existence of such flares 13 years ago, and the results match expectations. Such measurements could also help physicists test Einstein’s theory of gravity, general relativity, Loeb says. Why do they keep wanting to test general relativity. It's passed every ****ing test thrown at it
cos they don't understand it nor the nature of black holes. general and specific relativity are two different things as well.
