Radiation fears stalk stellar mission
Updated: 2010-06-30 10:53:31
Technical problems could hinder the satellite's ability to map a billion stars in the Milky Way
Forty-odd Chicagoans gathered in a bar on June 3, not to watch the Blackhawks in the Stanley Cup finals, but to hear Jason St. John talk about particle colliders, the Standard Model and how the Large Hadron Collider won’t be the end of us all. His lecture was part of Chicago’s inaugural Nerd Nite, a monthly series of informal talks intended to educate and entertain the community’s “lay nerds,” as St. John describes them, while they kick back with beers and martinis.
During last week's Physics at LHC conference, textbooks were being literally rewritten as experimental particle physicists presented their remeasurements of the data contained in the particle data booklet, which contains all possible data for all existing and hypothetical particles. One theorist presented his prediction for a page from the 2016 version of the booklet.
The Large Hadron Collider's beam brightness has steadily increased over the past two and a half months. It currently takes a minute to see as many collisions as we used to see in a day. Very soon, the same number of collisions will take seconds.
It's been just over two months since the first high-energy proton collisions took place in the Large Hadron Collider, and scientists from the LHC experiments have been working feverishly to analyze the data now pouring from their detectors. The results of the first analyses using real LHC data are being presented this week at the "Physics at LHC" conference at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany.
Theorists say the discovery of a significant imbalance between the production of matter and antimatter during particle collisions at the Tevatron points to new physics at work -- including the possibility that there may be five types of Higgs boson, rather than just one.