If the Higgs exists, why has discovering it taken so long – and why, if no definitive discovery is announced next week, might it continue to take even longer?
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a large spiral galaxy surrounded by dozens of smaller satellite galaxies. Scientists have long theorized that occasionally these satellites will pass through the disk of the Milky Way, perturbing both the satellite and the disk. A team of astronomers from Canada and the United States have discovered what may well be the smoking gun of such an encounter, one that occurred close to our position in the galaxy and relatively recently, at least in the cosmological sense.
Subscribe Today Renew Give a Gift Archives Customer Service Facebook Twitter Newsletter SEARCH Health Medicine Mind Brain Technology Space Human Origins Living World Environment Physics Math Video Photos Podcast RSS A light bending exercise in space Teachers : help your kids detect cosmic rays The galaxy that shouldn’t be there It’s generally said that discoveries in science tend to be at the thin hairy edge of what you can do always at the faintest limits you can see , the furthest reaches , the lowest signals . That can be trivially true because stuff that’s easy to find has already been discovered . But many times , when you’re looking farther and fainter than you ever have , you find things that really are new and can maybe be a problem for existing models of how the Universe . behaves
A new crack in the Standard Model may be starting to form. Recently analyzed data from the BaBar experiment show that one type of particle decay happens more often than predicted by the Standard Model. 
It’s a mystery where ultra-high-energy cosmic rays come from and what they’re made of. But a new technique, currently in the works, could drastically improve scientists’ chances of finding out.
Hi all, I’ve just arrived at the American Astronomical Society 220th meeting in Anchorage AK (#aas220 on Twitter, follow it). Quite a few people working on the Zoo are here too and it promises to be an exciting meeting. But what I really wanted to share was this sign spotted by a cafe just outside [...]
I hope you all had clear skies during the Transit of Venus. If not, it’ll be over a hundred years before you get another chance…. and in Zoo-related news, the Transit of Venus is an example of one way we find planets around other stars. We look for a dip in the brightness of the [...]
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The galaxy at the center of this image contains an Xray source, CID-42, with exceptional properties.