No. I said what I said deliberately referring to the discovered planet with water there. It is both nearest star and nearest plant we know of.
FINDING PROXIMA Known as Proxima b, the planet was discovered by a team of scientists working on the Pale Red Dot project—a twist on Carl Sagan’s description of Earth, which looks like a pale blue dot from afar.
Isn't Proxima in a binary system with Centurian? (CBA checking). I ask because it's one of the first stars my dad showed me through binoculars when I was a kid. Does this plant (s) have orbits around both or just one?
CERN’s Large Hadron Collider Wraps Up 2016 Run Avaneesh Pandey International Business TimesDec 7, 2016, 7:37 AM It’s a wrap for the Large Hadron Collider’s latest run. On Monday, the LHC — the world’s largest particle accelerator, housed underground near the France-Switzerland border near Geneva — circulated lead ions and protons for the last time this year. In its 2016 run, which began in May, the LHC surpassed its targets by a wide margin. The number of collisions recorded by the ATLAS and CMS detectors — two of LHC’s four largest detectors — during the proton run from April to the end of October was 60 percent higher than expected. Overall, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) — the organization that built and operates the LHC — observed over 6.5 million billion collisions, which adds up to more data than what has been collected in the collider’s past three runs combined. please log in to view this image lumi-proj-2016-final-v2 More The integrated luminosity of the LHC with proton-proton collisions in 2016 compared to previous years. Luminosity is a measure of a collider’s efficiency and is proportional to the number of collisions. The integrated luminosity achieved by the LHC in 2016 far surpassed expectations and is double that achieved at a lower energy in 2012. Photo: CERN “One of the key factors contributing to this success was the remarkable availability of the LHC and its injectors,” CERN physicist Mike Lamont, who leads the team that operates the accelerators, said in a statement released Tuesday. “It’s the result of an ongoing programme of work over the last few years to consolidate and upgrade the machines and procedures.” While the latest run of the LHC yielded more precise measurements of processes falling within the ambit of the Standard Model — a framework that describes three of the four known fundamental forces — and provided observations of the famous Higgs boson at the unprecedented energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV), it drew a blank insofar as the search for new particles is concerned. In particular, a tantalizing “bump” in 2015 data at 750 gigaelectronvolts, which had been previously detected by the ATLAS and CMS detectors, did not resurface in the much larger 2016 dataset, suggesting that it was, in all probability, the result of a statistical fluctuation. “We're just at the beginning of the journey,” CERN Director-General Fabiola Gianotti said in a statement released in August. “The superb performance of the LHC accelerator, experiments and computing bode extremely well for a detailed and comprehensive exploration of the several TeV energy scale, and significant progress in our understanding of fundamental physics.” Over the past few weeks, the LHC had been carrying out experiments that involved smashing lead ions against protons at a record energy of 8.16 TeV. These collisions were aimed at creating and studying something known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP), which, as the name suggests, is a mixture of quarks — the fundamental particles that make up protons and neutrons, and gluons — the force carriers that bind quarks together. In order to recreate the conditions in the universe, when QGP existed for a fraction of a second, massive ions — in this case, lead — were made to collide head-on, creating a miniscule fireball in which everything melted to form the plasma. The next LHC run is scheduled to begin in March 2017, and until then, particle physicists would analyze the staggering amount of data that has been collected during the collisions carried out this year. Just in time for the run in to the end of the season
or thank god its off so we get less injurys but we will be ****ed as soon as this yoke gets fired up again
you were legendary for posting this on old 606 and almost immediately torres or gerrard would get injured.
Brian Cox was on Steve Wright on R2 on Monday. He said that on his recent speaking tour some bloke had asked him, and apparently genuinely believed, if it was possible to survive going into a black hole if you were in a lead container. When Cox said no, he was evidently felt crestfallen. I bet it was Sisu.
Shadows of two failed searches loom over physics There were no detections of dark matter particles this year and no signs of supersymmetry BY TOM SIEGFRIED 5:30AM, DECEMBER 13, 2016 please log in to view this image DOUBLE DARKNESS The failure to detect dark matter particles suggests scientists might need new strategies for unlocking the secrets of the cosmos. DAVID CURTIS please log in to view this image EMail please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE Scientists, like athletes, are obsessed with experiencing the thrill of victory. Just as they fear the agony of defeat. And in the wide world of science, thrills make news much more often than the agony. Winners get the publicity, losers can’t get published. But sometimes the defeats deserve to make news too, especially when highly publicized experiments fail in their quest. Data reported in 2016 have forced physicists to face the prospect of just such a failure — not once, but twice. Dark matter, supposedly the most abundant form of mass in the cosmos, declines to show up in devices designed to detect it. And it refuses to appear in experiments constructed to make it. For decades, physicists specializing in subatomic particles have expected to find an entirely new species of matter, a type never seen on Earth, swarming throughout the vastness of space. Galaxies rotate too rapidly and clump too closely if the only source of gravitational force is the matter that glows in visible light. Something else must be out there — an invisible, unidentified source of gravity that does not glow like stars or gas. In fact, most (roughly 85 percent) of the matter in the cosmos, astronomers have long known, must be dark. Billions of these dark matter particles ought to be passing through your body every second. Your body wouldn’t notice, but large, sophisticated detectors should record a vibration or flash of light when a dark matter particle collides with an atomic nucleus in the detecting material. please log in to view this image The LUX experiment, located in the Sanford Underground Research Facility, reported no signs of dark matter particles this year. C.H. FAHAM And yet such experiments repeatedly come up empty. In August and September, for instance, three search teams reported no luck detecting dark matter particles (SN: 11/12/16, p. 14). These were just the latest disappointing reports from similar searches over the last two decades. (One search, from a detector in Italy called DAMA/Libra, does claim dark matter detection, but nobody can confirm it and hardly anybody believes it.) Still, physicists continue the search, largely because they have a second motivation for believing that dark matter is made of a new kind of particle—a theoretical concept known as supersymmetry. Supersymmetry appeals to physicists because it hints at ways to solve unsolved problems, such as incorporating gravity into the theory explaining other forces. It originated in physicists’ efforts to understand symmetries connecting force and matter, just as Einstein had exploited symmetries of space and time to develop his theory of relativity. Supersymmetry’s equations imply the existence of “superpartner” particles heavier than particles now known: a force particle partner for every known matter particle, and a matter particle partner for every known force particle. A massive superpartner should have precisely the properties needed to account for the dark matter in space; it would interact only weakly with ordinary matter, inspiring the nickname of WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle). To many physicists, this confluence of motivations seemed sufficient justification to invoke Gibbs’ Rule No. 39 (for those who watch NCIS on TV): There is no such thing as a coincidence. It was called the “WIMP miracle.” Independently of any theoretical forecasts, astronomers had observed clear signs of a mysterious source of gravity, most likely particles unknown on Earth. Independently of gravitational anomalies in space, theorists had forecast exotic new massive particles permeating the cosmos. One reinforced the other, just as centuries ago Isaac Newton’s law of gravity gained credibility because it explained both the orbits of the planets in space and falling apples on Earth. Many physicists fully expected the world’s most powerful particle collider — the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva — to produce WIMPs. But just as direct dark matter detection experiments have failed to spot them, the LHC has reported no sign of creating them (SN: 10/1/16, p. 12). Story continues after graphic please log in to view this image This collision from the Large Hadron Collider’s ATLAS experiment was selected as a candidate in the search for supersymmetric particles. But scientists have found no evidence of the particles. ATLAS COLLABORATION There’s still hope. LHC experiments might yet create superpartners; dark matter detectors might yet snatch a WIMP from the sky. It’s like a football game late in the fourth quarter, says cosmologist Rocky Kolb of the University of Chicago. “The game is not over yet,” he says. “The clock is ticking, but they have a couple of more years of exploration ahead.” Nevertheless this convergence of failures hints at a dual crisis in the quest to understand the cosmos. If WIMPs don’t exist, two huge gaps in that understanding persist. Something else must be messing with the motion of galaxies. And something other than supersymmetry will be needed to help physicists incorporate gravity into, and solve other problems with, their standard model of particles and forces. At a deeper level, the double failure calls into question the very strategies for success that 20th century physics established. Perhaps the power of symmetry principles to reveal nature’s secrets has been drained, and a novel insight into how to pry secrets from nature awaits discovery. And the confidence provided by converging motivations may turn out to be more like wishful thinking than rigorous reasoning. Advocates of a multiplicity of universes, for instance, cite two independent arguments: One, that the best theory for explaining the observed universe implies the existence of others; two, that mathematical formulations (embodied in superstring theory) describe a vast number of different potential vacuum states. Those many states can be interpreted as descriptions of multiple universes. But the dual dark matter failures would suggest that convergent motivations are no guarantee of correctness. Reasoning based on Rule 39 might not be so solid. So maybe something extraordinarily revolutionary is lurking behind today’s failures. Or maybe not. The dark source of gravity distorting the motion of galaxies might simply be particles other than WIMPs —perhaps a very light, wispy hypothetical particle called the axion. Or it might consist of black holes littered in and around galaxies. In any event, failure to find or make dark matter particles does avoid one snafu that Kolb had worried about. “Five years ago, I was concerned that we would have indications of new physics from LHC and different signals from direct detection experiments, and we would be in a period of confusion trying to reconcile the signals,” he says. “Well, we don’t have that problem.”
Magnetic stars could have created LIGO’s massive black holes Strong magnetic field prevents mass from fleeing, computer simulations show BY CHRISTOPHER CROCKETT 6:00AM, DECEMBER 12, 2016 please log in to view this image ATTRACTIVE PAIR Magnetic stars (illustrated) could help create massive black holes. This is a visualization of a pair of such stars discovered in 2015. Yellow lines trace the magnetic field, and color shows north (red) and south (blue) magnetic poles. V. HOLZWARTH/KIS please log in to view this image EMail please log in to view this image Twitter please log in to view this image Facebook please log in to view this image Reddit please log in to view this image Google+ SPONSOR MESSAGE To create a heavy black hole, it might help to start with a massive magnetic star. Strong magnetic fields could help stem the flow of gas from a heavyweight star, leaving behind enough material to form hefty black holes, a new study suggests. A pair of such magnetic stars could be responsible for giving birth to the black hole duo that created recently detected gravitational waves, researchers report online December 1 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The shake-up in spacetime that was picked up the Advanced Laser Interferometric Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, in 2015 came from a collision between two black holes weighing about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6). Such plump black holes were surprising. The creation of a big black hole requires the explosive death of a gargantuan star. But weighty stars are so bright that the light blows gas into space. “These massive stars can lose up to half their mass to their dense stellar winds,” says study coauthor Véronique Petit, an astrophysicist at Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. That leaves only enough mass to make a more modest black hole. Having a paucity of elements heavier than helium is one way a massive star might retain gas. Atoms such as carbon, oxygen and iron present large targets to the radiation streaming from a star. Photons nudge these atoms along, generating strong stellar winds. A lack of heavy elements could keep these winds in check. Petit and colleagues have proposed another idea: intense magnetic fields that might redirect escaping gas back onto the star. Observations in recent years have led to the discovery that about 10 percent of stellar heavyweights have powerful magnetic fields, some exceeding 10,000 gauss (the sun’s magnetic field is, on average, closer to 1 gauss). Computer simulations allowed researchers to see how much mass a star could retain if it were blanketed by magnetic fields. Magnetism is an effective levee, they found. A magnetic star that starts off with 80 times as much mass as the sun, for example, ends its life about 20 suns heavier than a similarly massive one that’s not magnetic. “This is an interesting alternative hypothesis for how stars can end up holding onto more of their mass, so they can form such heavy black holes,” says Vicky Kalogera, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. But, she cautions, “the mechanism is somewhat speculative.” Astronomers don’t have a good handle yet on how magnetic fields change as a star evolves, she says, particularly as the star approaches the end of its life. “It’s going to be hard to test our hypothesis,” Petit says. Pinpointing the host galaxy of a future collision between obese black holes might help, but that’s fraught with ambiguity. If the galaxy is rich in heavy elements, then perhaps magnetic fields are needed to hold back the flow of gas from gigantic stars. But that doesn’t mean the black holes were born in that environment. They could also have formed early in the universe, says Petit, when their galaxy had fewer heavy elements, in which case magnetic fields might not be necessary.
I get confused over this (it's not difficult to confuse me in these things). One minute I'm told gravity is not a force, the next minute I'm seeing it described as one. Wish they'd make up their bloody minds.
Does the standard model fall to pieces without it? Does it hold stuff together in a metaphorical and physical sense as well? Or does particle physics still offer no explanation as to what the 'carrier', the boson of gravity is? But does it need one if, as Einstein explained, it is an effect rather than a force?
