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Nasa’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (Ibex) spacecraft has been launched into Earth orbit to study the edge of our Solar System.
Ibex was launched on Sunday aboard a Pegasus rocket that was dropped from a jet flying over the Pacific Ocean.
It is the first probe to study particle interactions at the boundary where our Solar System meets interstellar space.
The two-year mission should shed light on the decline of the solar wind, which is at its lowest pressure in 50 years.
The interstellar boundary is the point in space at which the particles emitted from the Sun begin to compete with those from elsewhere in the galaxy and all sorts of strange things occur….
…read more at the BBC
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Interesting news from physicsworld;
It is well-known that a radioactive substance follows a fixed exponential decay, and that is what we teach in school. No matter what you do to it it’s decay goes on unaffected.
But this is no longer the view of a pair of physicists in the US. Ephraim Fischbach and Jere Jenkins of Purdue University in Indiana are claiming that, far from being fixed, certain decay “constants” are influenced by the Sun.
The claim is naturally drawing mixed reactions from others in the physics community, if they’re right then decades of established science is flawed.
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On October 7, the Nobel Prize committee will announce their 2008 selection for the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Leading contenders include Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov from the University of Manchester for their work on graphene, the thinnest material ever discovered, and Vera Rubin at the Carnegie Institution in Washington helping prove the existence of mysterious dark matter
Last years prize was awarded to A. Fert and P Grunberg for their work on giant magnetoresistance.
GMR as it’s known is a quantum mechanical effect, a type of magnetoresistance effect, observed in thin film structures composed of alternating ferromagnetic and nonmagnetic metal layers.
The effect manifests itself as a significant decrease in electrical resistance in the presence of a magnetic field. In the absence of an external magnetic field, the direction of magnetization of adjacent ferromagnetic layers is antiparallel due to a weak anti-ferromagnetic coupling between layers. The result is high-resistance magnetic scattering.
When an external magnetic field is applied, the magnetization of the adjacent ferromagnetic layers is parallel. The result is lower magnetic scattering, and lower resistance.
The effect is exploited commercially by manufacturers of hard disk drives.
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Dozens of tiny crustaceans, 130 new species of soft corals and 100 small isopods are all new to science
Marine biologists have discovered hundreds of new and rare species while exploring the waters around two remote islands and a reef off the Australian coast.
Scientists conducted in-depth surveys of marine life around the Heron and Lizard islands on the Great Barrier Reef off the country’s northeastern coast, and in the waters around the 170-mile-long Ningaloo reef off the western coast.
Among their findings were an estimated 130 new species of soft corals, several undescribed shrimp-like species - some with claws larger than their bodies - and dozens of tiny crustaceans. They also collected around 100 small organisms called isopods that are believed to be new to science. Some isopods are parasites and burrow into fishes’ mouths and nibble their tongues away.
Read more here
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A log entry written by the current LHC co-ordinator at 11:27 am CET (10:27 am BST) states that there has been a “massive quench” in sector 3–4. Quenches occur when superfluid helium in the magnets rises above its operating temperature of 1.9 K, and can be caused, for example, when a proton beam veers off course.
According to the entry, firefighters were dispatched to that area of the tunnel. It also says that the vacuum in that part of the beam pipe was lost.
The latest thinking is that they will have to allow the LHC to warm up, repair it, and cool it down again. A delay of up to two months!
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At 10:31am (BST), Professor Brian Cox reports on the BBC Big bang day website that the ATLAS detector has detected it’s first beam.
This is what they saw:
ATLAS
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The LHC Safety Assessment Group have reviewed and updated a study first completed in 2003, which dispels fears of universe-gobbling black holes and of other possibly dangerous new forms of matter, and confirms that the switch-on will be completely safe.
The report, ‘Review of the Safety of LHC Collisions’, published in IOP Publishing’s Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, proves that if particle collisions at the LHC had the power to destroy the Earth, we would never have been given the chance to exist, because regular interactions with more energetic cosmic rays would already have destroyed the Earth or other astronomical bodies.
The group also writes, “Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth – and the planet still exists,” which is hardly a scientific reassurance!
The report concludes that, since cosmic-ray collisions are more energetic than those in the LHC, but are incapable of producing vacuum bubbles or dangerous magnetic monopoles, we should not fear their creation by the LHC.
LHC collisions will differ from cosmic-ray collisions in that any exotic particles created will have lower velocities, but the Safety Assessment Group shows that even fast-moving black holes produced by cosmic rays would have stopped inside the Earth or other astronomical bodies. Their existence proves that any such black holes could not gobble matter at a risky rate.
“Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists.”
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- Sept. 10, 1892 - American physicist Arthur Compton is born. Compton received the 1927 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in discovering the Compton effect, a form of scattering in which electromagnetic radiation (i.e. light waves) and matter interaction. This was a crucial discovery in the early development of quantum physics.
- Sept. 12, 1897 - French scientist Irene Joliot-Curie is born. She was the daughter of famed scientists Pierre & Marie Curie. Jointly with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie, she was awarded the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry in recognition of their work in discovering artificial radioactivity.
- Sept. 14, 1959 - The Soviet probe Luna 2 becomes the first man-made object to reach the moon, as it crashes into the surface of the moon.
- Sept. 10, 1975 - English physicist George Paget Thomson dies. Thomson was the son of J.J. Thomson, the famous physicist & chemist who discovered the electron. George Thomson similarly went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1937 for his own work in discovering electron diffraction, which was a major step toward understanding the nature of wave particle duality.
- Sept. 10, 1983 - Swiss-born physicist Felix Bloch dies. Bloch received the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in discovering the underlying principles of nuclear magnetic resonance which would ultimately lead to the invention of the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) device.
- Sept. 10, 2008 - The Large Hadron collider is turned on for the first time at the CERN facility in Switzerland.
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- Sept. 1, 1804 - German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding discovers Juno, one of largest asteroids in the asteroid belt.
- Sept. 3, 1905 - American experimental physicist Carl David Anderson is born. Anderson would receive the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the positron.
- Sept. 5, 1906 - Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann dies. Part of the illustrious Boltzmann family, which permeated nineteenth century European intellectual life in mathematics & the sciences, Ludwig is best known for his work in statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. He strongly advocated atomic theory, well before it was popular to do so.
- Sept. 3, 1976 - U.S. spacecraft Viking II arrived on Mars, landing at Utopia Planitia, and took the first pictures of the planet’s surface. Viking II was, of course, an unmanned spacecraft.
- Sept. 2, 1992 - The first automobile powered by natural gas is purchased. Fifty of these alternative fuel vehicles were purchased and put into service by the Southern California Gas Company.
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Radio 4 are hosting a special day in honor of the LHC firing up at CERN on the 10th of this month. As I covered in a post (and podcast) earlier this is a pretty big, in fact the experiment is one of the most complex and significant of modern times - and one that raises a lot of questions!
Andrew Marr will host a special day of programmes and report throughout the day live from the Control Room at CERN.
There’s a list of programmes HERE, alternatively, find out more at The Big Bang Day website
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