Lifeboat Foundation

The story of particle mass starts right after the big bang. During the very first moments of the universe, almost all particles were massless, traveling at the speed of light in a very hot “primordial soup.” At some point during this period, the Higgs field turned on, permeating the universe and giving mass to the elementary particles.

The Higgs field changed the environment when it was turned on, altering the way that particles behave. Some of the most common metaphors compare the Higgs field to a vat of molasses or thick syrup, which slows some particles as they travel through.

Others have envisioned the Higgs field as a crowd at a party or a horde of paparazzi. As famous scientists or A-list celebrities pass through, people surround them, slowing them down, but less-known faces travel through the crowds unnoticed. In these cases, popularity is synonymous with mass—the more popular you are, the more you will interact with the crowd, and the more “massive” you will be.

The center of the Milky Way is mysteriously glowing.

Sure, there’s a whole bunch of stars there, along with a black hole 4 million times the mass of the Sun — but subtract the light from all that, and we’re still left with this mysterious excess gamma radiation that suffuses the region.

It’s called the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE), and it’s puzzled scientists since its discovery by physicists Lisa Goodenough and Dan Hooper in 2009. In data from NASA’s Fermi telescope, they found excess gamma radiation — some of the most energetic light in the Universe — and we haven’t been able to directly detect whatever is causing it.

Circa 2000 o.o 100000 times hotter than the sun quark gluon plasma is.quite interesting.

The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) plans to announce today (10 February) that it has “compelling evidence” that its scientists have created the quark–gluon state of matter predicted to have existed shortly after the Big Bang.

If confirmed, this would be the first time that conditions within the first three minutes after the Big Bang — the point at which the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei came into being — have been observed under experimental conditions.

Continue reading “CERN claims first experimental creation of quark–gluon plasma” »

The very first moments of the Universe can be reconstructed mathematically even though they cannot be observed directly. Physicists from the Universities of Göttingen and Auckland (New Zealand) have greatly improved the ability of complex computer simulations to describe this early epoch. They discovered that a complex network of structures can form in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. The behavior of these objects mimics the distribution of galaxies in today’s Universe. In contrast to today, however, these primordial structures are microscopically small. Typical clumps have masses of only a few grams and fit into volumes much smaller than present-day elementary particles. The results of the study have been published in the journal Physical Review D.

MIT Haystack Observatory is one of the 13 stakeholder institutions that constitute the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole. The EHT revealed today a new view of the massive object at the center of the M87 galaxy: how it looks in polarized light. This is the first time astronomers have been able to measure polarization, a signature of magnetic fields, this close to the edge of a black hole. The observations are key to explaining how the M87 galaxy, located 55 million light-years away, is able to launch energetic jets from its core.

Haystack Research Scientist Vincent Fish says “Hundreds of people around the world in the EHT collaboration, including scientists and engineers at Haystack, have worked very hard to investigate the role of magnetic fields in shaping jets around black holes. Can magnetic fields build up and dominate over the intense pull of gravity? Our data provide an answer.”

Data from ESA’s Gaia star mapping satellite have revealed tantalizing evidence that the nearest star cluster to the Sun is being disrupted by the gravitational influence of a massive but unseen structure in our galaxy.

If true, this might provide evidence for a suspected population of ‘dark matter sub-halos’. These invisible clouds of particles are thought to be relics from the formation of the Milky Way, and are now spread across the galaxy, making up an invisible substructure that exerts a noticeable gravitational influence on anything that drifts too close.

Continue reading “Tantalizing Evidence: Is the Nearest Star Cluster to the Sun Being Destroyed?” »

She confirmed dark matter, probed spiral galaxies and fought inequality.

About half of the relatively small portion of the universe that is not dark matter or energy is in fact a mixture of gases that may connect galaxies in a kind of loose cosmic web, according to new research illuminating vast areas that were previously unknown.

Until now, this sizable chunk of “baryonic matter,” which makes up 5% of the universe, had been unaccounted for. Researchers from institutions in Spain and the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois detailed their findings in a study published March 25 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

While the other 95% of the universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy, baryonic matter comprises stars, planets, galaxies and everything they contain, including living things. Astronomers knew it was there, but didn’t know if it was more stars, planets or anything else that wasn’t dark matter or energy.

Great new episode with NASA cosmologist Jason Rhodes who discusses everything from the earliest galaxy surveys to dark matter and the cosmic web.

Jason Rhodes, a cosmologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and the JPL Roman Space Telescope Project Scientist, discusses a proposed galaxy survey to end all galaxy surveys. One that would wring as much information out of our universe’s trillion or so galaxies across cosmic time as humanly possible. Astronomers are still at least half a century off from this final galaxy census, but the hope is that it will give cosmologists most of the answers they need about the makeup and structure of the universe.

Continue reading “Episode 43 --- What Future And Final Galaxy Surveys Will Teach Us About The Cosmos” »