It’s official. The NASA LCROSS mission has concluded that there is indeed water on the moon! The team of researchers who worked on the mission released their findings today, November 14, 2009:
The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.
Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.
NASA today opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.
This exciting news will forever change our understanding of the moon and the planets elsewhere in our solar system.
WIMPs, which is an acronym for weakly interacting massive particles, are thought to be potential particles born of the big bang that pass through us billions at a time per second. The exact function of WIMPs? To keep our galaxy and other conglomerate areas of the universe from flying apart by providing the necessary mass for balance.
Tom Shutt, who holds the Agnar Pytte Chair of Physics at Case Western Reserve and is the principal investigator for the project, uttered the words we hear often from physicists, “We know there is dark matter, we just don’t know what it is yet.”
Yes, after a year of waiting, the Large Hadron Collider is back for round two. As of now, the LHC is scheduled to begin operating again in November of this year. However, researchers are only cranking it up to half power, and will not reach full power until after 2010. Press officer James Gillies said this idea came about as a compromise as to not cause any more damage to the LHC and still retain enough energy to get good experimental results.
Tom LeCompte, physics coordinator for CERN’s ATLAS experiment, which will study collisions of protons, said “We’re still doing the same physics plan we had envisioned all along, but it’s happening at a slower pace.”
Almost all galaxies appear either red shifted or blue shifted when observed from Earth. However, recently scientists have discovered a group of green shifted galaxies, which has intrigued them greatly. Volunteers of the Galaxy Zoo project have found ~250 green shifted galaxies that they’ve so aptly dubbed ‘Green Pea’ Galaxies, or just Green Peas.
The image at left shows just a handful of these newly discovered galaxies. Interestingly, scientists are now beginning to speculate that these galaxies could allow us to gain insight into the formation of stars.
If you’ve ever read anything remotely related to quantum mechanics, you’ve certainly come across the infamous double slit experiment. Whether you understood it or not is a different story. If you didn’t, perhaps this post will explain it better.
I found this very helpful video that explains this experiment in a very easily understood manner. Though it appears it’s intended for youngsters, it still preserves the scientific truth behind this phenomena.
For years, astronomers have pondered a cosmic version of the chicken-and-egg problem: Which came first, monster black holes or the galaxies in which they reside? A new study hints that the black holes formed first.
Supermassive black holes cram the equivalent of millions to billions of suns into a volume smaller than the solar systems at the centers of galaxies. The preliminary finding suggests that early in the universe, supermassive black holes had already packed on most of their mass, and that the fireworks and fierce winds associated with the holes’ rapid growth triggered the formation of the black holes’ host galaxies, says Chris Carilli of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Socorro, N.M. He reported his team’s study at a January 7 press briefing during the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
This post is inspired by a comment my English 11 teacher made in class yesterday. Before I say anything, I must clarify that I respect this guy; he’s a really smart teacher. However, while reading a poem by Whalt Whitman, a line in the poem made reference to the transcendentalist belief of the life cycle (i.e. born from earth, live on earth, die on earth, become earth, bring forth more life). This resulted in a class discussion about death, what lies thereafter, God, etc. The discussion was very enlightening and healthy, especially considering we come from an area where born-again Christians dominate society (and that’s an understatement). However, when my teacher made the following comment, I wanted to argue against it.
One of the questions I am most often asked is, “what happened before the big bang?” or something similar. Usually if it is a religious argument the question is better phrased “what caused the big bang?” Today, I plan to answer both of these questions to the best of science’s ability. Before doing so however, we must admit, as all good scientists do, that we cannot know for certain how the big bang happened, or even if our universe began with a big bang. However, we do know that all the evidence points towards a big bang and we can therefore conclude that a big bang is a logical way of viewing the creation of our universe.
For some time now, it has been accepted that Jupiter acts as a protector of the inner planets. Astronomical and mathematical simulations show that the gas giant shields Earth from space debris left over from the planet making process. However, new studies have shown that Jupiter can sometimes “throw” space objects towards Earth.
Kevin Grazier of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and his colleagues used a model of some 40,000 planetesimals to study this phenomena in detail. They found that debris in the outer solar system initially had circular orbits and posed no threat to Earth or the other inner planets early in the history of the solar system. But the researchers showed that, through a series of close gravitational encounters with the outer planets, especially Jupiter, the objects assumed more elongated orbits and were handed down to the inner solar system.
Those of you who feared the world would end due to the Large Hadron Collider can breathe a sigh of relief, at least for a little while.
The project, which has just barely begun, has hit an unplanned snag (are there ever planned snags?).
This isn’t the first time something has gone wrong, but this incident will take longer to fix.
Some of the magnets inside, which normally have to be kept at 1.9 Kelvin, had increases in temperature of over 100 degrees. The superheating caused electrical parts to melt which then evolved into mechanical failure.
Coupled with this, there was also the loss of vacuum pressure as well as a helium leak. There was reportedly no danger to the public due to the leak, but the fire brigade was asked to respond.
The fix is estimated to be costly, and will probably delay progress by two months, if not more.
Quoting James Gillies, a CERN spokesman:
A full investigation is still under way but the most likely cause seems to be a faulty electrical connection between two of the magnets which probably melted, leading to a mechanical failure.
[...]
But we do know that we will have to warm the machine up, make the repair, cool it down, and that’s what brings you to two months of downtime for the LHC.
It sounds like a simple antidote but for such a gargantuan project I imagine it’s easier said than done.
6.6 billion dollars. Stopped for a magnet. Though, this is one of those cases I’d rather be safe than sorry.
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