From BBC: “Mammals on brink of ‘extinction calamity'” in Australia

BBC

10 February 2015
Helen Briggs

The endangered northern quoll, a mammal species native to Australia

Australia has lost one in ten of its native mammals over the last 200 years in what conservationists describe as an “extinction calamity”.

No other nation has had such a high rate of loss of land mammals over this time period, according to scientists at Charles Darwin University, Australia.

The decline is mainly due to predation by the feral cat and the red fox, which were introduced from Europe, they say.

Large scale fires to manage land are also having an impact.

As an affluent nation with a small population, Australia’s wildlife should be relatively secure from threats such as habitat loss.

But a new survey of Australia’s native mammals, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests the scale of the problem is more serious than anticipated.

Since 1788, 11% of 273 native mammals living on land have died out, 21% are threatened and 15% are near threatened, the study found. Marine mammals are faring better.

Shy species

“No other country has had such a high rate and number of mammal extinctions over this period, and the number we report for Australia is substantially higher than previous estimates,” said conservation biologist John Woinarski, who led the research.

“A further 56 Australian land mammals are now threatened, indicating that this extremely high rate of biodiversity loss is likely to continue unless substantial changes are made.

“The extent of the problem has been largely unappreciated until recently because much of the loss involves small, nocturnal, shy species with [little] public profile – few Australians know of these species, let alone have seen them, so their loss has been largely unappreciated by the community.”

The brush-tailed rabbit-rat, a mammal species native to Australia that is listed as a near-threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature The brush-tailed rabbit-rat, a mammal species native to Australia that is listed as a near-threatened species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature

In time, iconic species such as the koala will also decline, said the researchers, from Charles Darwin University, Southern Cross University and the Department of Parks and Wildlife in Wanneroo.

The prospects for Australia’s wildlife can be improved but is “a very formidable challenge”, they added.

It is estimated there are between 15 and 23 million wild cats living on the continent.

Practical measures to protect native species include boosting biosecurity on islands off the mainland, which have fewer feral cats and foxes.

The islands could also act as arks for endangered species, while more careful use of fire and control measures to wipe out foxes and feral cats are also being considered.

But the researchers warn that Australians may ultimately need to consider the way they live on the land to stem the loss of natural assets.

See the full article here.

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From BBC: “Are we sending aliens the right messages?”

BBC

12 November 2014
Tracey Logan

Despite decades of sending sounds and pictures into space no aliens have responded. Have we been doing it wrong? Tracey Logan investigates, and discovers some novel attempts to make contact – including the smells of our planet.

NASA

For decades we’ve been sending signals – both deliberate and accidental – into space, and listening out for alien civilisations’ broadcasts. But what is the plan if one day we were to hear something?

Artist Carrie Paterson has long dreamed of beaming messages far out to the emptiness of space. Except her messages would have an extra dimension – smell.

By broadcasting formulae of aromatic chemicals, she says, aliens could reconstruct all sorts of whiffs that help to define life on Earth: animal blood and faeces, sweet floral and citrus scents or benzene to show our global dependence on the car. This way intelligent life forms on distant planets who may not see or hear as we do, says Paterson, could explore us through smell, one of the most primitive and ubiquitous senses of all.

It is nearly 40 years since the Arecibo facility sent messages out into space

Her idea is only the latest in a list of attempts to hail intelligent life outside of the Solar System. Forty years ago this month, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico sent an iconic picture message into space – and we’ve arguably been broadcasting to aliens ever since we invented TV and radio.

However in recent years, astronomers, artists, linguists and anthropologists have been converging on the idea that creating comprehensible messages for aliens is much harder than it seems. This week, Paterson and others discussed the difficulties of talking to our cosmic neighbours at a conference called Communicating Across the Cosmos, held by SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). It seems our traditional ways of communicating through pictures and language may well be unintelligible – or worse, be catastrophically misconstrued. So how should we be talking to ET?

Lost in translation?

We have always wanted to send messages about humanity beyond the planet. According to Albert Harrison, a space psychologist and author of Starstruck: Cosmic Visions in Science, Religion and Folklore, the first serious designs for contacting alien life appeared two centuries ago, though they never got off the ground.

In the 1800s, mathematician Carl Gauss proposed cutting down lines of trees in a densely forested area and replanting the strips with wheat or rye, Harrison wrote in his book. “The contrasting colours would form a giant triangle and three squares known as a Pythagoras figure which could be seen from the Moon or even Mars.” Not long after, the astronomer Joseph von Littrow proposed creating huge water-filled channels topped with kerosene. “Igniting them at night showed geometric patterns such as triangles that Martians would interpret as a sign of intelligence, not nature.”

Odours needn’t be pleasant – the smell of gasoline, for instance, could hint at our reliance on fossil fuels (Getty Images)

But in the 20th Century, we began to broadcast in earnest. The message sent by Arecibo hoped to make first contact on its 21,000 year journey to the edge of the Milky Way. The sketches it contained, made from just 1,679 digital bits, look cute to us today, very much of the ‘Pong’ video game generation. Just before then, NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes each carried a metal calling card bolted onto their frame with symbols and drawings on the plaque, showing a naked man and woman.

NASA/Pioneer 10

Yet it’s possible that these kinds of message may turn out to be incomprehensible to aliens; they might find it as cryptic as we find Stone Age etchings.

Antique tech

“Linear drawings of a male and a female homo sapiens are legible to contemporary humans,” says Marek Kultys, a London-based science communications designer. ”But the interceptors of Pioneer 10 could well assume we are made of several separate body parts (i.e. faces, hair and the man’s chest drawn as a separate closed shapes) and our body surface is home for long worm-like beings (the single lines defining knees, abdomens or collarbones.).”

Man-made tech may also be an issue. The most basic requirement for understanding Voyager’s Golden Record, launched 35 years ago and now way out beyond Pluto, is a record player. Aliens able to play it at 16 and 2/3 revolutions a minute will hear audio greetings in 55 world languages, including a message of ‘Peace and Friendship’ from former United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. But how many Earthlings today have record players, let alone extraterrestrials?

Our sights and sounds of Earth might be unintelligible to an alien audience (NASA, Pioneer)

What if the aliens we’re trying to talk to are utterly different from us, physically and mentally? What if alien life is like the type encountered in Stanislav Lem’s Solaris, for instance, where a planet is surrounded by an intelligent ocean. The ocean itself is the alien being, a disembodied mind.

“Supposing an “alienish” speaking human wished to explain the whole concept of sexual reproduction to a homogenous sentient ocean, would there be any chance for the human to become understood?” says Kultys. “Sharing the same context is essential for comprehension.”

Time capsule

Inevitably such messages become outdated too, like time capsules. Consider the case of the Oglethorpe Atlanta Crypt of Civilization – a time capsule sealed on Earth in 1940, complete with a dry martini and a poster of Gone With the Wind. It was intended as a snapshot of 20th Century life for future humans, not aliens, but like an intergalactic message, may only give a limited picture to future generations. When, in 61,000 years, the Oglethorpe time capsule is opened, would Gone With The Wind have stood the test of time?

Oglethorpe Atlanta Crypt of Civilization interior

This message was taken into the stars by Pioneer – but we have no idea if aliens would be able to understand it (Nasa)

Kultys argues that all these factors should be taken into account when we calculate the likelihood of communicating with intelligent life. The astronomer Frank Drake’s famous equation allows anyone to calculate how many alien species are, based on likely values of seven different factors. At a UK Royal Society meeting in 2010 Drake estimated there are roughly 10,000 detectable civilisations in the galaxy. Yet Kultys points out that we should also factor in how many aliens are using the same channel of communications as us, are as willing to contact us as we are them, whose language we hope to learn, and who are physically similar to us.

Another barrier we might consider is the long distance nature of trans-cosmos communication. It means that many years ‒ even a thousand ‒ could pass between sending a message and receiving a reply. Paterson sees romance in that. “Our hope for communication with another intelligent civilisation has a melancholic aspect to it. We are on an island in a vast, dark space. Imagine if communication… became like an exchange of perfumed love letters with the quiet agony of expectation… Will we meet? Will we be as the other imagined? Will the other be able to understand us?”

Ready for an answer?

Anthropologist John Traphagan of the University of Texas in Austin has been asking the same question, though his view is more cautious. “When it comes to ET, you’ll get a signal of some kind; not much information and very long periods between ‘Hi, how are you?’ and whatever comes back. We may just shrug our shoulders and say ‘This is boring’, and soon forget about it or, if the time lag wasn’t too long, we might use the minimal information we get from our slow-speed conversation to invent what we think they’re like and invent a kind concept of what they’re after.”

The aliens in Independence Day (1996) did not come in peace (20th Century Fox)

While we have been sending out messages, we have not been preparing the planet for what happens when we get an interstellar return call. First contact could cause global panic. We might assume those answering are bent on galactic domination or, perhaps less likely, that they are peaceful when in fact they’re nasty.

Consider how easy it is to mess up human-to-human communications; I got Traphagan’s first name wrong when I e-mailed him for this article. An apology within minutes cleared up the confusion, yet if he had been an alien anthropologist on some distant planet it would have taken much longer to fix. He later confessed: “I could have thought this is a snooty English journalist and our conversation might never have happened.”

Even if Earth’s interstellar messaging committees weeded out the typos, cultural gaffes are always a possibility. These can only be avoided by understanding the alien’s culture – something that’s not easy to do, especially when you’ve never met those you’re communicating with.

Rosy picture

So, what is the best way to communicate? This is still up for grabs – perhaps it’s via smell, or some other technique we haven’t discovered yet. Clearly, creating a message that is timeless, free of cultural bias and universally comprehensible would be no mean feat.

But for starters, being honest about who we are is important if we want to have an extra-terrestrial dialogue lasting centuries, says Douglas Vakoch, director of interstellar message composition at Seti. (Otherwise, intelligent civilisations who’ve decoded our radio and TV signals might smell a rat.)

The golden discs aboard the Voyager spacecraft require aliens to understand how to play a record (NASA)

“Let’s not try to hide our shortcomings,” says Vakoch. “The message we should send to another world is straightforward: We are a young civilisation, in the throes of our technological adolescence. We’re facing a lot of problems here on Earth, and we’re not even sure that we’ll be around as a species when their reply comes in. But in spite of all of these challenges, we humans also have hope – especially hope in ourselves.”

Voyager’s Golden Record paints a rosy picture of humanity. It doesn’t mention our wars or famines, Earth’s pollution or nuclear explosions. According to Traphagan, any aliens who came to Earth on the basis of that would say: “Hey, I thought this was a really nice place but they’ve polluted the crap out of it.”

Yet ultimately what matters, says Paterson, is that they stop and consider the beings who sent them a message; the people who wanted to say: “Here are some important things. Here’s our DNA, here is some maths and universal physics. And here is our longing and desire to say “I’m like you, but I’m different.”

See the full article here.

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From BBC: “LHC scientists to search for ‘fifth force of Nature'”

10 July 2014
Pallab Ghosh

The next couple of years will be make or break for the next big theory in physics called supersymmetry – SUSY for short. It might make way for a rival idea which predicts the existence of a ‘fifth force’ of nature.

Next Spring, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) resumes its experiments, scientists will be looking for evidence of SUSY. It explains an awful lot that the current theory of particle physics does not. But there is a growing problem, provocatively expressed by Nobel Laureate George Smoot: “supersymmetry has got symmetry and it’s super but there is no experimental data to suggest it is correct.”

LHC tunnel

LHC map

According to the simplest versions of the theory, supersymmetric particles should have been discovered at the LHC by now. One set of null results prompted Prof Chris Parkes, of the LHCb to quip: “Supersymmetry may not be dead but these latest results have certainly put it into hospital”.

But other forms of the theory are still very much in play.

Next year will be an important year for SUSY. The LHC will be smashing atoms together at almost twice the energy it did in its first run. Even those who are still strong advocates of SUSY, such as Cern’s revered professor of theoretical physics, John Ellis, agree that if LHC scientists do not find super particles in the LHC’s second run, it might be time for the hospital patient to be moved to the mortuary.

“If it is not found in LHC run two then there will be relatively few corners it could hide,” he told BBC News.

“I know that at that point the community may decide that the guys who predicted supersymmetry are dying off like flies and that young guys will be interested in different types of theories and supersymmetry may be forgotten. But I don’t think we are at that point yet.”
LHC Tunnel Engineers have spent more than a year upgrading the LHC’s systems. The hope is that this will allow a new realm of physics to be opened up

One of those young guys is Thibaut Mueller, a 24-year-old PhD student at Cambridge University. He is already checking out alternatives to SUSY.

“A few years ago we thought it was a case of who will be first to find supersymmetry,” he said.

“Now there is less and less focus on it and more people are starting to branch out into other models.”

Mr Mueller’s PhD looks at an alternative to supersymmetry called the composite Higgs model. This idea has been around for decades but is undergoing a resurgence as some researchers raise questions over supersymmetry. Physicists will be looking for evidence for it in the next run of the LHC in 2015.

Thibault’s colleague Dr Ben Gripaios believes that the Composite Higgs theory is now a serious alternative to supersymmetry.
Continue reading the main story

“SUSY was regarded by many people as the perfect theory. We have been looking really hard for it for a long time and we have not found it and so possibly there is a different explanation. For me the most compelling alternative is the Composite Higgs. It is just as plausible as supersymmetry,” he told BBC News.

The current theory to explain the forces of nature was developed in the 1960s and is called the Standard Model. It elegantly explains how 13 particles, including the Higgs, interact to create three of the four forces of nature: electromagnetism, and the nuclear strong and weak forces.

The Standard Model of elementary particles, with the three generations of matter, gauge bosons in the fourth column, and the Higgs boson in the fifth.

But the Standard Model does not explain how gravity works, nor can it account for the [dark] matter and [dark] energy that makes up 95% of the Universe – referred to by physicists as the “Dark Universe”.

Supersymmetry is an extension of the Standard Model and is an attempt to explain some of the things the current theory can’t.
Super particles The stage has been set for some years for the detection of super particles. But so far they have been a no show.

It predicts the existence of so-called superparticles which account for much of the missing mass and energy of the Universe.

Supersymmetry standard model

Supersymmetry also neatly solves what physicists describe as the “fine tuning problem”. In very crude terms, all subatomic particles can be thought to have two values for their mass: Their mass in isolation which is called their “bare” mass, and their experimental mass, which includes interactions with other sub-atomic particles.

For all particles the two masses are about the same, except for the Higgs, whose bare mass must be many times larger than its experimental mass.

Going from such a relatively big number to a small number is an unlikely occurrence, rather like a skydiver landing on the head of a pin each time they jump out of a plane. It can only happen if there is an overarching force guiding the skydiver on to the pin head – something that physicists call “fine tuning”.

The existence of superparticles interacting with their normal counterparts fine tunes the Higgs’s two masses perfectly. The drawback though is that there is no evidence of SUSY, at least not yet.

The composite Higgs theory also solves the fine tuning problem, albeit less elegantly and, just as with SUSY, there is no experimental evidence for it. It supposes that the Higgs is not a fundamental particle, but is instead made up of other fundamental particles bound together by a hitherto unseen fifth force of nature. This is similar to what is already known to happen with the strong nuclear force, which binds quarks together to produce nuclear particles like protons and neutrons.

Scientists at the LHC hope to detect evidence for one or other theory when they resume their experiments in April. In effect, the starting gun goes off in an invisible two-horse race where the winner emerges only at the finish line. Supersymmetry is still the favourite in the minds of most particle physicists, but Thibaut Mueller thinks that the likelihood of finding evidence for composite Higgs theory is not far behind.

Why then is this promising youngster gambling his still early career on the outsider?

High risk

“This is a high risk, high gain game,” he explained. “If we find either (SUSY or the composite Higgs) this would be the biggest revolution in particle physics and possibly the whole of physics since quantum mechanics in the the 1940s.

“Even if we do not find evidence for SUSY or composite Higgs, we will still have learned important facts about the Standard Model, which will guide us to new theories”.

Of course, the researchers may see neither, which raises the possibility that no fine tuning is needed to turn the big Higgs into the little Higgs.

That would mean that we live in a Universe where the dice are loaded to ensure that the Higgs experimental mass will always improbably land neatly on its bare mass each and every time.

In the absence of evidence for either theory, this anthropic principle might seem like a tempting option. But it’s one that those on the front line of research vehemently resist.

According to Thibault Mueller that view is a “conversation stopper”.

“It says that ‘we are special because we as humans are here to observe it and so we exist’. If we accept that then we might as well give up science altogether.

“We (have established) that we as a species are not special, the Earth is not special, our Solar System is not special. Now we are saying: ‘Ah! Our Universe is not that special either’.”

Prof Rolf Dieter Heuer, the director-general of the European Centre for Nuclear Research (Cern) recently told researchers at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in Valencia, that there was “a lot at stake” for the LHC’s second run starting next year.

Indeed there is: careers, reputations and deeply cherished ideas.

But whatever the outcome, physicists are preparing themselves for the ride of their lives. As Prof Heuer told the physics community: “There’s much more to be discovered in the Dark Universe”.

See the full article here.

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From BBC: “Dark matter hunt: LUX experiment reaches critical phase”

8 April 2014
Rebecca Morelle

The quest to find the most mysterious particles in the Universe is entering a critical phase, scientists say.

An experiment located in the bottom of a gold mine in South Dakota, US, could offer the best chance yet of detecting dark matter.

Scientists believe this substance makes up more than a quarter of the cosmos, yet no-one has ever seen it directly.

Early results from this detector, which is called LUX, confirmed it was the most powerful experiment of its kind.

In the coming weeks, it will begin a 300-day-long run that could provide the first direct evidence of these enigmatic particles.

Spotting WIMPs

Beneath the snow-covered Black Hills of South Dakota, a cage rattles and creaks as it begins to descend into the darkness.

For more than 100 years, this was the daily commute for the Homestake miners searching for gold buried deep in the rocks.

Today, the subterranean caverns and tunnels have been transformed into a high-tech physics laboratory.

Scientists now make the 1.5km (1-mile) journey underground in an attempt to solve one of the biggest mysteries in science.

“We’ve moved into the 21st Century, and we still do not know what most of the matter in the Universe is made of,” says Prof Rick Gaitskell, from Brown University in Rhode Island, one of the principle investigators on Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment.

The LUX detector is located 3km underground – and could be our best hope yet of finding dark matter

Scientists believe all of the matter we can see – planets, stars, dust and so on – only makes up a tiny fraction of what is actually out there.

They say about 85% of the matter in the Universe is actually dark matter, so called because it cannot be seen directly and nobody really knows what it is.

This has not stopped physicists coming up with ideas though. And the most widely supported theory is that dark matter takes the form of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, or WIMPs.

Prof Gaitskell explains: “If one considers the Big Bang, 14bn years ago, the Universe was very much hotter than it is today and created an enormous number of particles.

“The hypothesis we are working with at the moment is that a WIMP was the relic left-over from the Big Bang, and in fact dominates over the regular material you and I are made of.”

The Homestake gold mine, which has now been converted into a lab, is in the Black Hills of South Dakota

The presence of dark matter was first inferred because of its effect on galaxies like our own.

As these celestial systems rotate around their dense centre, all of the regular matter that they contain does not have enough mass to account for the gravity needed to hold everything together. Really, a spinning galaxy should fly apart.

Instead, scientists believe that dark matter provides the extra mass, and therefore gravity, needed to hold a galaxy together.

It is so pervasive throughout the Universe that researchers believe a vast number of WIMPs are streaming through the Earth every single second. Almost all pass through without a trace.

However, on very rare occasions, it is thought that dark matter particles do bump into regular matter – and it is this weak interaction that scientists are hoping to see.

The LUX detector is one of a number of physics experiments based in the Sanford Underground Research Facility that require a “cosmic quietness”.

Prof Gaitskell says: “The purpose of the mile of rock above is to deal with cosmic rays. These are high-energy particles generated from outside our Solar System and also by the Sun itself, and these are very penetrating.

“If we don’t put a mile of rock between us and space, we wouldn’t be able to do this experiment.”

Inside a cavern in the mine, the detector is situated inside a stainless steel tank that is two storeys high.

The detector is in housed in a tank that is filled with purified water

This is filled with about 300,000 litres (70,000 gallons) of ultra-purified water, which means it is free from traces of naturally occurring radioactive elements that could also interfere with the results.

“With LUX, we’ve worked extremely hard to make this the quietest verified place in the world,” says Prof Gaitskell.

At the detector’s heart is 370kg (815lb) of liquid xenon. This element has the unusual, but very useful, property of throwing out a flash of light when particles bump into it.

And detecting a series of these bright sparks could mean that dark matter has been found.

The LUX detector was first turned on last year for a 90-day test run. No dark matter was seen, but the results concluded that it was the most sensitive experiment of its kind.

Now, when the experiment is run for 300 days, Prof Gaitskell says these interactions might be detected once a month or every few months.

The team would have to see a significant number of interactions – between five and 10 – to suggest that dark matter has really been glimpsed. The more that are seen, the more statistical confidence there will be.

LUX uses light detectors called photomultiplier tubes to record any flashes of light

However, LUX is not the only experiment setting its sights on dark matter.

With the Large Hadron Collider, scientists are attempting to create dark matter as they smash particles together, and in space, telescopes are searching for the debris left behind as dark matter particles crash into each other.

LHC at CERN

Mike Headley, director of the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority, which runs the Sanford laboratory, says a Nobel prize will very probably be in store for the scientists who first detect dark matter.

He says: “There are a handful of experiments located at different underground laboratories around the world that want to be the first ones to stand up and say ‘we have discovered it’, and so it is very competitive.”

Finding dark matter would transform our understanding of the Universe, and usher in a new era in fundamental physics.

However, there is also a chance that it might not be spotted – and the theory of dark matter is wrong.

Dr Jim Dobson, based at the UK’s University of Edinburgh and affiliated with University College London, says: “We are going into unknown territory. We really don’t know what we’re going to find.

“If we search with this experiment and then the next experiment, LUX Zeppelin, which is this much, much bigger version of LUX – if we didn’t find anything then there would be a good chance it didn’t exist.

He adds: “In some ways, showing that there was no dark matter would be a more interesting result than if there was. But, personally, I would rather we found some.”

Prof Carlos Frenk, a cosmologist from Durham University, says that many scientists have gambled decades of research on finding dark matter.

He adds: “If I was a betting man, I think LUX is the frontrunner. It has the sensitivity we need. Now, we just need the data.

“If they don’t [find it], it means the dark matter is not what we think it is. It would mean I have wasted my whole scientific career – everything I have done is based on the hypothesis that the Universe is made of dark matter. It would mean we had better look for something else.”

See the full article here.

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Brian Cox, BBC Wonders of Life

It is no secret in these pages that I believe that Brian Cox, Sir Brian Cox, physicist, teacher, TV darling, is the best thing to happen for Basic Science Research ever.

Brian was the host of The Big Bang Machine about the LHC at CERN, which was featured here.

Brian also did the BBC produced Wonders of the Solar System, Wonders of the Universe and so far two series of Stargazing.

Now comes also from the BBC Wonders of Life, Brian’s latest bit of programming. The program is truly a wonder in itself. Pretty much all of the above you can find on YouTube with some searching.

Here is the first video in Wonders of Life to get you started.

From BBC: “First glimpse of a black hole’s spin”

Astronomers have measured the rate of spin of a supermassive black hole for the first time – and it is big.

Measurements undertaken with two space-based X-ray telescopes imaged the black hole at the centre of galaxy NGC 1365

NGC 1635 Credit:ESO

The spin measurement, published in Nature, gives precious clues as to how the black hole grew and achieved supermassive status.

Now Guido Risaliti of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and colleagues have looked at markedly higher energies – less subject to absorption in those gas layers – using Europe’s XMM-Newton telescope and the recently launched Nu-Star telescope.

ESA XMM Newton

NASA Nu-Star

Nustar is unprecedented in its ability to focus in on distant parts of the cosmos in these high-energy X-rays. The results suggest a black hole more than 3 million km across, whose outermost edge is moving at a speed near that of light.”

Expansion from Lawrence Livermore Lab

‘We can trace matter as it swirls into a black hole using X-rays emitted from regions very close to the black hole,’ said Fiona Harrison, NuSTAR principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and coauthor of a new study appearing in the Feb. 28 edition of Nature. ‘The radiation we see is warped and distorted by the motions of particles, and by the black hole’s incredibly strong gravity.’

The formation of supermassive black holes is thought to mirror the formation of the galaxy itself, since a fraction of all the matter drawn into the galaxy finds its way into the black hole. Because of this, astronomers are interested in measuring the spin rates of black holes in the hearts of galaxies.

The observations also are a powerful test of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which holds that gravity can bend light and space-time. The X-ray telescopes detected these warping effects in the most extreme of environments, where the immense gravity field of a black hole is severely altering space-time.

NuSTAR and XMM-Newton simultaneously observed the two-million-solar-mass supermassive black hole lying at the dust and gas-filled heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365. The results showed that the black hole is spinning close to the maximal rate allowed by Einstein’s theory of gravity.”

See the full article here.

From BBC: “Exoplanet Kepler 37b is tiniest yet – smaller than Mercury”

20 February 2013
Jason Palmer

“Astronomers have smashed the record for the smallest planet beyond our Solar System – finding one only slightly larger than our Moon.

To spot the tiny, probably rocky planet, they first needed to precisely measure the size of its host star. They did so using astroseismology – effectively, turning tiny variations in the star’s light into sounds. A report in Nature describes the blistering, probably rocky planet, which orbits its star in just 13 days.

It is joined in this far-flung solar system by two other planets, one three-quarters Earth’s size and one twice as large as Earth. The record for smallest exoplanet is routinely being broken, as astronomers get better and better at finding them.

The best tool in the planet-hunters’ toolbox is the Kepler space telescope, which stares at a fixed part of the sky, trying to detect the tiny dips in stars’ light that happens when planets pass in front of them: what is called a transit event.

NASA Kepler

In its earliest days, the Kepler team tended to find large planets – Jupiter- and Neptune-sized behemoths. In more recent years, the catalogue of exoplanet has seen an increasing number of so-called super-Earths, up to about twice the radius of our planet. Only recently has something definitively Earth-sized been found. But the new find is a planet just a third the size of that recent record-holder, smaller even than our Solar System’s smallest planet, Mercury.

‘I think it’s an amazing technological achievement to be able to be able to detect small rocks like this,’ said Francois Fressin, a co-author of the paper based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.’It means we’re really in the arena where it’s possible to detect all the planets of our Solar System, but around other stars,’ he told BBC News.”

See the full article here.

From BBC: “Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to release first results”

18 February 2013
Jonathan Amos

“The scientist leading one of the most expensive experiments ever put into space says the project is ready to come forward with its first results.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) was put on the International Space Station to survey the skies for high-energy particles, or cosmic rays. Nobel Laureate Sam Ting said the scholarly paper to be published in a few weeks would concern dark matter.

AMS

This is the unseen material whose gravity holds galaxies together. Researchers do not know what form this mysterious cosmic component takes, but one theory points to it being some very weakly interacting massive particle (or Wimp for short).

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor said the project he first proposed back in the mid-1990s had now reached an important milestone. ‘We’ve waited 18 years to write this paper, and we’re now making the final check,’ he told reporters.’I would imagine in two or three weeks, we should be able to make an announcement.’

Although telescopes cannot detect the Wimp, there are high hopes that AMS can confirm its existence and describe some of its properties from indirect measures.

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-02) is a state-of-the-art particle physics detector constructed, tested and operated by an international team composed of 60 institutes from 16 countries and organized under United States Department of Energy (DOE) sponsorship. The AMS-02 will use the unique environment of space to advance knowledge of the universe and lead to the understanding of the universe’s origin by searching for antimatter, dark matter and measuring cosmic rays.

See the full BBC article here.

From BBC: “The Hunt for the Higgs: A Horizon Special”

I was hunting around the BBC looking for something else when I came upon an excellent video originally broadcast in January 2012. While it is one year old, and while the question of the Higgs boson is probably very close to being answered*, still this video presents a valuable lesson.

Our host is Prof JIM AL-KHALILI, OBE, Professor of Theoretical Physics and Chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey.

Prof Jim Al-Khalili

The video is especially valuable because it ventures into the LHCb Collaboration at CERN’s incredible LHC.

In this section on the LHCb experiment, the subjects of Broken Symmetry and the theory, to date untested, of Supersymmetry are explored. These subjects were not at all present in the PBS Frontline piece The Atom Smashers (2008), nor the BBC video The Big Bang Machine(2008).

If you use either the Opera browser or Firefox, there are excellent video download utilities for saving an .mp4 in at least 720p HD.

I hope that you will enjoy the video and might add it to your collection.

The BBC page for the video is here.

*On July 4, 2012 The General Director of CERN, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, announced that both the ATLAS and CMS collaborations had discovered a new particle with a degree of certainty [beyond five Σ (sigma)] which placed the find beyond doubt. The particle was a boson. But, there was not then and there is still not now certainty that the find was the Higgs boson. That has yet to be confirmed. This confirmation might wait until the completion of the International Linear Collider.