Brazil to join the European Southern Observatory Astronomy Magazine
Updated: 2010-12-30 22:27:16
On Saturday, Dec. 18, scientists at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory lowered their last strand of particle detectors into the ice beneath them. The garland of 86 basketball-sized optical sensors completed a frozen array of 5,160 detectors that will search for neutrinos 1.5 km beneath the surface at the South Pole.
Our latest merger paper is called “Galaxy Zoo: Multi-Mergers and the Millennium Simulation.” We used the original catalogue of 3003 mergers from the previous mergers study to find the interesting subset of systems with three or more galaxies merging in a near-simultaneous manner. We found 39 such multi-mergers (which you can see in the image [...]
Heavy-ion season is the ALICE detector’s time to shine. Of the four detectors at the LHC, only ALICE was designed specifically to study these types of collisions. This post breaks down different components of the ALICE detector and explains how scientists use them to study matter as it formed after the big bang.
This two-panel graphic contains two composite images of galaxies used in a recent study of supermassive black holes.
This week’s OOTW features my OOTD ‘A Dark Secret in Virgo‘ posted on the 11th of December 2010.
On the 17th of March 1781, Pierre Méchain discovered this beautiful galaxy. NGC4254 lurks 50 million light years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. It’s a disturbed spiral, with its right arm jutting out further than the other. So [...]
This year, five laboratories in four countries invited more than 200 photographers to tour their grounds and translate the work of science into works of art. A calendar featuring the 15 winning images from the Global Particle Physics Photowalk is now available for free download.
Prominent string theorist Joseph Polchinski described the existence of monopoles as "one of the safest bets that one can make about physics not yet seen." But not one experiment has irrefutably demonstrated that monopoles exist. This year’s reports seem to worsen the odds.
Editor’s note: This story first appeared in the CERN Bulletin on December 13, 2010, under the headline 2010 ion run: completed! For more information, see posts about heavy-ion collisions and what scientists can learn from them. You can also read more in symmetry breaking about first measurements from the heavy-ion run and new insight into [...]
This week’s OOTW features Lightbulb500’s OOTD posted on the 4th of December 2010.
This star, with a mass of around half of that of our own star and a temperature many degrees cooler; is a red dwarf. They are the most common stars in the universe, 85% of our galaxy’s stellar population is composed of [...]