From Science at NASA: “Hot Jupiters”

A wonderful series is NASA Science

This video is a good example of what you will find if you follow this series. Enjoy.

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From Fermilab- “Frontier Science Result: MINOS Unraveling neutrino oscillations with MINOS”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Friday, May 24, 2013
Michelle Medeiros

‘Neutrinos are among the most mysterious particles that make up the universe, and they are not very easy to study. The three types can change from one to another in a quantum phenomenon known as neutrino oscillations.

In the MINOS experiment, we are able to measure these oscillations by producing a beam made of muon neutrinos (the NuMI beam) and detecting it in two different locations: at the near detector, located at Fermilab, and at the far detector, 734 kilometers away in Soudan, Minn. The large distance between the detectors gives the neutrinos a chance to change type, allowing us to observe neutrino oscillations.

The MINOS experiment has the special feature of being able to detect muon neutrinos and antineutrinos individually by separating the events each produces. Therefore we are able to study both muon neutrino and antineutrino oscillations, which are described essentially by two parameters: mixing angle and mass splitting.

Beyond that, we also use the far detector to detect neutrinos and antineutrinos created by interactions of cosmic ray particles with the nuclei in the Earth’s atmosphere. These are called atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos.

Several experiments have been measuring neutrino oscillations, helping us better understand this mysterious particle. For the first time, the MINOS collaboration has carried out a measurement by combining its two kinds of data: beam and atmospheric neutrinos and antineutrinos. We used the complete MINOS data set, accumulated over nine years of operation. The combined analysis has yielded the world’s most precise measurement of the mass splitting parameter for both muon neutrinos and antineutrinos. Furthermore, we compared results obtained for muon neutrinos and antineutrinos and found that they have practically the same oscillation parameters, providing more evidence that CPT symmetry is conserved in the neutrino sector. This is also the most precise comparison ever made between neutrino and antineutrino oscillation parameters.”

See the full article here.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From NASA/ESA : Hubblecast 66

Dr J takes us on a journey of discovery. Enjoy

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), is a free-standing science center, located on the campus of The Johns Hopkins University and operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) for NASA, conducts Hubble science operations.

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From ESO: ESOcast 57

ESO celebrates 15 years of the VLT in this wonderful new video. Enjoy.

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THE BASIC TOOLS OF E.S.O.

Paranal Platform The VLT

NTT – New Technology Telescope

La Silla

ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

ESO, European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.

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From Symmetry: “FACET boosts plasma acceleration”

May 23, 2013
Lori Ann White

Upgrades to the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests—including a new 10-terawatt laser—will assist in R&D for new methods of particle acceleration.

“Just over a year after opening its beam to researchers from around the world, the Facility for Advanced Accelerator Experimental Tests (FACET) at SLAC is shining a little brighter. With the addition of a new 10-terawatt laser and other equipment upgrades, one of the facility’s main goals—the development of a new method of particle acceleration that boosts particles’ energy on waves of plasma—looks especially promising.

During the facility’s first run, which took place from April through early July of 2012, researchers sent electrons accelerated in the SLAC linear accelerator into a chamber of hot gas, turning it into a plasma. Some of those very same electrons then rode the resulting plasma wave to even higher energies. This accelerated the electrons with great efficiency—thousands of times more in the same distance than the technology used in today’s particle accelerators.

But, as happens so often in basic research, FACET’s first run also revealed the need to make some modifications. Using the accelerated electron bunch to create its own plasma had issues—issues that make the laser a vital addition to the 2013 run, says SLAC Advanced Accelerator Research Department leader Mark Hogan, who is both an important part of FACET and, as one of the leaders of the plasma wakefield acceleration team, a hands-on experimenter himself.

‘Controlling the characteristics of both the electron bunches and the resulting plasma to where the process is efficient enough has turned out to be tough,’ Hogan says. ‘As it is, not enough of the electrons are being accelerated.’

The team will now use the new laser to zap the chamber of hot gas, turning it into a plasma before any electrons enter. That laser-created plasma will be more consistent than the electron-created version, which means that when the electron bunches do enter they’ll cause a more controlled plasma wave.

Selina Li, the SLAC accelerator physicist in charge of the project, says the laser is in good shape and should be operational this summer.”

See the full article here.

Symmetry is a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication.

From ESO: “ESO’s Very Large Telescope Celebrates 15 Years of Success”

Contacts

23 May 2013
Richard Hook
ESO, Public Information Officer
Garching bei München, Germany
Tel: +49 89 3200 6655
Cell: +49 151 1537 3591
Email: rhook@eso.org

“With this new view of a spectacular stellar nursery ESO is celebrating 15 years of the Very Large Telescope — the world’s most advanced optical instrument. This picture reveals thick clumps of dust silhouetted against the pink glowing gas cloud known to astronomers as IC 2944. These opaque blobs resemble drops of ink floating in a strawberry cocktail, their whimsical shapes sculpted by powerful radiation coming from the nearby brilliant young stars.

This new picture celebrates an important anniversary for the Very Large Telescope – it is fifteen years since the first light on the first of its four Unit Telescopes, on 25 May 1998. Since then the four original giant telescopes have been joined by the four small Auxiliary Telescopes that form part of the VLT Interferometer (VLTI). The VLT is one of the most powerful and productive ground-based astronomical facilities in existence. In 2012 more than 600 refereed scientific papers based on data from the VLT and VLTI were published (ann13009).

Interferometer

Interstellar clouds of dust and gas are the nurseries where new stars are born and grow. The new picture shows one of them, IC 2944, which appears as the softly glowing pink background. This image is the sharpest view of the object ever taken from the ground. The cloud lies about 6500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Centaurus (The Centaur). This part of the sky is home to many other similar nebulae that are scrutinised by astronomers to study the mechanisms of star formation.

Emission nebulae like IC 2944 are composed mostly of hydrogen gas that glows in a distinctive shade of red, due to the intense radiation from the many brilliant newborn stars. Clearly revealed against this bright backdrop are mysterious dark clots of opaque dust, cold clouds known as Bok globules. They are named after the Dutch-American astronomer Bart Bok, who first drew attention to them in the 1940s as possible sites of star formation. This particular set is nicknamed the Thackeray Globules.

See the full article complete with notes here.

Visit ESO in Social Media-

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THE BASIC TOOLS OF E.S.O.

Paranal Platform The VLT

NTT – New Technology Telescope

La Silla

ALMA Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array

The European Extremely Large Telescope
VISTA (the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy)

Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX)

ESO, European Southern Observatory, builds and operates a suite of the world’s most advanced ground-based astronomical telescopes.

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From ESA: “Watching for hazards: ESA opens asteroid centre”

European Space Agency

22 May 2013

“ESA today inaugurated a new hub that will strengthen Europe’s contribution to the global hunt for asteroids and other hazardous natural objects that may strike Earth.

Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs, are asteroids or comets with sizes ranging from metres to tens of kilometres that orbit the Sun and whose orbits come close to that of Earth. There are over 600 000 asteroids known in our Solar System, and almost 10 000 of them are NEOs.

Dramatic proof that some of these could strike Earth came on 15 February, when an unknown object thought to be 17–20 m in diameter exploded high above Chelyabinsk, Russia, with 20–30 times the energy of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The resulting shock wave caused widespread damage and injuries, making it the largest known natural object to have entered the atmosphere since the 1908 Tunguska event.

Asteroid trace over Chelyabinsk, Russia, on 15 February 2013

The NEO Coordination Centre will serve as the central access point to a network of European NEO data sources and information providers being established under ESA’s Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Programme.

Located at ESRIN, ESA’s centre for Earth observation, the centre was formally inaugurated today by Thomas Reiter, ESA Director of Human Spaceflight and Operations, together with Augusto Cramarossa, Italian Delegate to the ESA Council, and Claudio Portelli, Italian Delegate to the SSA Programme, both of ASI, the Italian space agency.

SSA-NEO Coordination Centre ESRIN

This is the second centre to be opened under SSA leadership after the Space Weather Coordination Centre that opened in Brussels last month.

See the full article here.

The European Space Agency (ESA), established in 1975, is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 19 member states. Headquartered in Paris, ESA has a staff of more than 2,000. ESA’s space flight program includes human spaceflight, mainly through the participation in the International Space Station program, the launch and operations of unmanned exploration missions to other planets and the Moon, Earth observation, science, telecommunication as well as maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, French Guiana, and designing launch vehicles. ESA science missions are based at ESTEC in Noordwijk, Netherlands, Earth Observation missions at ESRIN in Frascati, Italy, ESA Mission Control (ESOC) is in Darmstadt, Germany, the European Astronaut Centre (EAC) that trains astronauts for future missions is situated in Cologne, Germany, and the European Space Astronomy Centre is located in Villanueva de la Cañada, Spain.

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From Keck: “Mega-galaxy is Missing Link in History of Cosmos”

Keck Observatory

May 21, 2013
Steve Jefferson
Communications Officer
W. M. Keck Observatory
sjefferson@keck.hawaii.edu
808.881.3827

“Two hungry young galaxies that collided 11 billion years ago are rapidly forming a massive galaxy about 10 times the size of the Milky Way, according to UC Irvine-led research conducted on the W. M. Keck Observatory and other research facilities around the world. The results will be published today in the journal Nature.

Credit: JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/Keck Observatory/STScI/NRAO/SAO/ESA/NASA

Capturing the creation of this type of large, short-lived star body is extremely rare – the equivalent of discovering a missing link between winged dinosaurs and early birds, said the scientists, who relied primarily on data from Keck Observatory’s NIRC2 fitted with the laser guide star adaptive optics (LGSAO) system. The new mega-galaxy, dubbed HXMM01, is the brightest, most luminous and most gas-rich submillimeter-bright galaxy merger known.

HXMM01 is fading away as fast as it forms, a victim of its own cataclysmic birth. As the two parent galaxies smashed together, they gobbled up huge amounts of hydrogen, emptying that corner of the universe of the star-making gas.

‘These galaxies entered a feeding frenzy that would quickly exhaust the food supply in the following hundreds of million years and lead to the new galaxy’s slow starvation for the rest of its life,’ said lead author Hai Fu, a UC Irvine postdoctoral scholar.

The discovery solves a riddle in understanding how giant elliptical galaxies developed quickly in the early universe and why they stopped producing stars soon after. Other astronomers have theorized that giant black holes in the heart of the galaxies blew strong winds that expelled the gas. But cosmologist Asantha Cooray, the UC Irvine team’s leader, said that they and colleagues across the globe found definitive proof that cosmic mergers and the resulting highly efficient consumption of gas for stars are causing the quick burnout.

‘Finding this type of galaxy is as important as the discovery of the Archaeopteryx was in understanding dinosaurs’ evolution into birds, because they were both caught at a critical transitional phase,’ Fu said.

The new galaxy was initially spotted by UC Irvine postdoctoral scholar Julie Wardlow, also with Cooray’s group. She noticed ‘an amazing, bright blob’ in images of the so-called cold cosmos – areas where gas and dust come together to form stars – recorded by the European Space Agency’s Herschel telescope with important contributions from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. ‘Herschel captured carpets of galaxies, and this one really stood out.’

Follow-up views at a variety of wavelengths were obtained at more than a dozen ground-based observatories, particularly the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

‘The NIRC2/LGSAO image has revealed the existing stellar population of this pair of galaxies,’ Fu said. “The radiation captured by Keck tells us how many stars have already been formed in the system at the observed epoch. These data told us the constituents of the galaxy pair: they are each made of half gas and half stars, which indicates they are nascent galaxies in formation.

The NIRSPEC spectra measured the velocity difference of the two galaxies at only 300 km/s, indicating that the two galaxies are soon to merge instead of just flying by each other. The spectra also show the high-velocity winds driven by the intense star formation in both galaxies, uncovering the violent environment in these galaxies.

UC Irvine graduate student Jae Calanog is co-author of the paper, as are scientists at 27 other institutions in the U.S., Canada, Spain, France, England and South Africa. Funding was provided by NASA.

See the full article here.

Mission
To advance the frontiers of astronomy and share our discoveries with the world.

Today Keck Observatory is supported by both public funding sources and private philanthropy. As a 501(c)3, the organization is managed by the California Association for Research in Astronomy (CARA), whose Board of Directors includes representatives from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, with liaisons to the board from NASA and the Keck Foundation.

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From SLAC: “KIPAC Theorists Weigh In on Where to Hunt Dark Matter”

May 21, 2013
Lori Ann White

Theorists from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology are helping dark matter sleuths decide where to start their search.

“Now that it looks like the hunt for the Higgs boson is over, particles of dark matter are at the top of the physics ‘Most Wanted’ list. Dozens of experiments have been searching for them, but often come up with contradictory results.

Theorists from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint SLAC-Stanford institute, believe they’ve come up with an algorithm – a mathematical description of how the individual particles behave – that could help narrow the search for these elusive particles, which are thought to make up more than 25 percent of the matter and energy in the universe.

It starts with assumptions, said Yao-Yuan Mao, lead author of a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal that outlines their new search tool. Assumptions are a good starting point when you don’t know where to look. A popular assumption about dark matter is that it’s made up of WIMPs, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles. The “M” in WIMP accounts for gravity’s ability to herd these particles around; the “P” and “I” hint at why they’re so hard to detect otherwise.

KIPAC theorists (l to r) Louis Strigari, Risa Wechsler and Yao-Yuan Mao discussing dark matter velocity distributions. (Credit: Luis Fernandez.)

Most dark matter detectors are based on the assumption that, every once in a while, a WIMP must smack into the nucleus of an atom of visible matter, making the nucleus vibrate and releasing a signal. Such disruptions can be detected. But what that disruption looks like and how often it happens depends on yet more assumptions. How heavy is the dark matter particle? How fast is it moving?

Left panel: Air molecules whiz around at a variety of speeds, and some are very fast. When they collide with both heavy and light elements – for example, xenon (purple) and silicon (orange) – these fast moving particles have enough momentum to affect both nuclei. Right panel: Dark matter particles are moving more slowly and are less able to affect the heavy xenon nucleus. As a result, detectors made from lighter materials like silicon may prove to be more effective at picking up signals of dark matter. (Credit: Greg Stewart/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Another common assumption that touches on these issues, said Mao, is that collections of WIMPs behave as an ideal gas, a collection of particles that hang out together and occasionally bounce off each other. Sometimes a lucky bounce gives a particle more energy, sending it zooming off at a greater speed. How often particles pick up more energy and more speed depends on how much you turn up the heat or put on the pressure.

But, as far as scientists can tell, turning up the heat and putting on the pressure doesn’t affect WIMPs. Only gravity does.

“The Ideal Gas Law doesn’t describe a system of particles, like dark matter particles, that don’t seem to transfer energy to each other,” said Mao. This incorrect description can distort the carefully built picture upon which a search for WIMPs is based. In particular, it means predictions of their velocities can be off by a significant amount, but velocities affect what a detector will see.

Mao and his colleagues have used simulations to provide new insight into how fast WIMPs are expected to move.”

See the full article here.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, California, SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the DOE’s Office of Science.

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From Brookhaven Lab: “Atomic-Scale Investigations Solve Key Puzzle of LED Efficiency”

Brookhaven Lab

MIT and Brookhaven Lab scientists use electron microscopy imaging techniques to settle a solid-state controversy and raise new experimental possibilities

May 22, 2013
Contacts: Justin Eure, (631) 344-2347 or Peter Genzer, (631) 344-3174

“From the high-resolution glow of flat screen televisions to light bulbs that last for years, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) continue to transform technology. The celebrated efficiency and versatility of LEDs—and other solid-state technologies including laser diodes and solar photovoltaics—make them increasingly popular. Their full potential, however, remains untapped, in part because the semiconductor alloys that make these devices work continue to puzzle scientists.

CFN’s Kim Kisslinger, seen here with a focused-ion beam instrument, reduced the InGaN samples to a thickness of just 20 nanometers to prepare them for electron microscopy.

A contentious controversy surrounds the high intensity of one leading LED semiconductor—indium gallium nitride (InGaN)—with experts split on whether or not indium-rich clusters within the material provide the LED’s remarkable efficiency. Now, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated definitively that clustering is not the source. The results—published online May 16 in Applied Physics Letters—advance fundamental understanding of LED technology and open new research pathways.

‘This discovery helps solve a significant mystery in the field of LED research and demonstrates breakthrough experimental techniques that can advance other sensitive and cutting-edge electronics,’ said Silvija Gradečak, the Thomas Lord Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and a coauthor on the study. ‘The work brings us closer to truly mastering solid-state technologies that could supply light and energy with unprecedented efficiency.’

The research was supported by the Center for Excitonics, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The work at Brookhaven Lab’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials was also supported by DOE’s Office of Science, with additional work carried out at the MIT Center for Materials Science Engineering.”

This scanning transmission electron microscope’s non-destructive imaging of specific InGaN samples clarified a decade of research, demonstrating conclusively that indium-rich clustering does not drive the efficient light emission.

These images of the InGaN samples—produced by CFN’s low-voltage scanning transmission electron microscope—reveal a lack of structural changes over time. After 16 minutes of scanning, no damage or decomposition is visible, and the higher magnification (c) exhibits none of the clustering previously theorized to be central to LED efficiency

See the full article here. There is a ton of interesting information here.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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