Dedicated to spreading the Good News of Basic and Applied Science at great research institutions world wide. Good science is a collaborative process. The rule here: Science Never Sleeps.
I am telling the reader this story in the hope of impelling him or her to find their own story and start a wordpress blog. We all have a story. Find yours.
The oldest post I can find for this blog is From FermiLab Today: Tevatron is Done at the End of 2011 (but I am not sure if that is the first post, just the oldest I could find.)
But the origin goes back to 1985, Timothy Ferris Creation of the Universe PBS, November 20, 1985, available in different videos on YouTube; The Atom Smashers, PBS Frontline November 25, 2008, centered at Fermilab, not available on YouTube; and The Big Bang Machine, with Sir Brian Cox of U Manchester and the ATLAS project at the LHC at CERN.
In 1993, our idiot Congress pulled the plug on The Superconducting Super Collider, a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 Tev per proton and was set to be the world’s largest and most energetic. It would have greatly surpassed the current record held by the Large Hadron Collider, which has ring circumference 27 km (17 mi) and energy of 13 TeV per proton.
If this project had been built, most probably the Higgs Boson would have been found there, not in Europe, to which the USA had ceded High Energy Physics.
(We have not really left High Energy Physics. Most of the magnets used in The LHC are built in three U.S. DOE labs: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory; and Brookhaven National Laboratory. Also, see below. the LHC based U.S. scientists at Fermilab and Brookhaven Lab.)
I have recently been told that the loss of support in Congress was caused by California pulling out followed by several other states because California wanted the collider built there.
The project’s director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Louis Ianniello served as its first Project Director for 15 months. The project was cancelled in 1993 due to budget problems, cited as having no immediate economic value.
Some where I learned that fully 30% of the scientists working at CERN were U.S. citizens. The ATLAS project had 600 people at Brookhaven Lab. The CMS project had 1,000 people at Fermilab. There were many scientists which had “gigs” at both sites.
I started digging around in CERN web sites and found Quantum Diaries, a “blog” from before there were blogs, where different scientists could post articles. I commented on a few and my dismay about the lack of U.S recognition in the press.
Those guys at Quantum Diaries, gave me access to the Greybook, the list of every institution in the world in several tiers processing data for CERN. I collected all of their social media and was off to the races for CERN and other great basic and applied science.
Since then I have expanded the list of sites that I cover from all over the world. I build .html templates for each institution I cover and plop their articles, complete with all attributions and graphics into the template and post it to the blog. I am not a scientist and I am not qualified to write anything or answer scientific questions. The only thing I might add is graphics where the origin graphics are weak. I have a monster graphics library. Any science questions are referred back to the writer who is told to seek his answer from the real scientists in the project.
The blog has to date 900 followers on the blog, its Facebook Fan page and Twitter. I get my material from email lists and RSS feeds. I do not use Facebook or Twitter, which are both loaded with garbage in the physical sciences.
Christopher Riseley
Research Fellow
Università di Bologna (IT)
Tessa Vernstrom
Senior research fellow
The University of Western Australia (AU)
The colliding cluster Abell 3266 as seen across the electromagnetic spectrum, using data from ASKAP and the ATCA (red/orange/yellow colours), XMM-Newton (blue) and the Dark Energy Survey (background map). Christopher Riseley (Università di Bologna), Author provided.
However, these galaxies represent only a few percent of a cluster’s total mass. About 80% of it is Dark Matter, and the rest is a hot plasma “soup”: gas heated to above 10,000,000℃ and interwoven with weak magnetic fields.
We and our international team of colleagues have identified a series of rarely observed radio objects – a radio relic, a radio halo and fossil radio emission – within a particularly dynamic galaxy cluster called Abell 3266. They defy existing theories about both the origins of such objects and their characteristics.
Relics, haloes and fossils
Galaxy clusters allow us to study a broad range of rich processes – including magnetism and plasma physics – in environments we can’t recreate in our labs.
When clusters collide with each other, huge amounts of energy are put into the particles of the hot plasma, generating radio emission. And this emission comes in a variety of shapes and sizes.
“Radio relics” are one example. They are arc-shaped and sit towards a cluster’s outskirts, powered by shockwaves travelling through the plasma, which cause a jump in density or pressure, and energise the particles. An example of a shockwave on Earth is the sonic boom that happens when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.
“Radio haloes” are irregular sources that lie towards the cluster’s centre. They’re powered by turbulence in the hot plasma, which gives energy to the particles. We know both haloes and relics are generated by collisions between galaxy clusters – yet many of their gritty details remain elusive.
Then there are “fossil” radio sources. These are the radio leftovers from the death of a supermassive black hole at the centre of a radio galaxy.
When they’re in action, black holes shoot huge jets of plasma far out beyond the galaxy itself. As they run out of fuel and shut off, the jets begin to dissipate. The remnants are what we detect as radio fossils.
Abell 3266
Our new paper, published in the MNRAS [below], presents a highly detailed study of a galaxy cluster called Abell 3266.
This is a particularly dynamic and messy colliding system around 800 million light-years away. It has all the hallmarks of a system that should be host to relics and haloes – yet none had been detected until recently.
Following up on work conducted using the Murchison Widefield Array earlier this year, we used new data from the ASKAP radio telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to see Abell 3266 in more detail.
Our data paint a complex picture. You can see this in the lead image: yellow colours show features where energy input is active. The blue haze represents the hot plasma, captured at X-ray wavelengths.
Redder colours show features that are only visible at lower frequencies. This means these objects are older and have less energy. Either they have lost a lot of energy over time, or they never had much to begin with.
The radio relic is visible in red near the bottom of the image. And our data here reveal particular features that have never been seen before in a relic.
The ‘wrong-way’ relic in Abell 3266 is shown here with yellow/orange/red colours representing the radio brightness. Credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, ATCA, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey.
Its concave shape is also unusual, earning it the catchy moniker of a “wrong-way” relic. Overall, our data break our understanding of how relics are generated, and we’re still working to decipher the complex physics behind these radio objects.
Ancient remnants of a supermassive black hole
The radio fossil, seen towards the upper right of the lead image (and also below), is very faint and red, indicating it is ancient. We believe this radio emission originally came from the galaxy at the lower left, with a central black hole that has long been switched off.
The radio fossil in Abell 3266 is shown here with red colours and contours depicting the radio brightness measured by ASKAP, and blue colours showing the hot plasma. The cyan arrow points to the galaxy we think once powered the fossil. Credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey.
Our best physical models simply can’t fit the data. This reveals gaps in our understanding of how these sources evolve – gaps that we’re working to fill.
Finally, using a clever algorithm, we de-focused the lead image to look for very faint emission that’s invisible at high resolution, unearthing the first detection of a radio halo in Abell 3266 (see below).
The radio halo in Abell 3266 is shown here with red colours and contours depicting the radio brightness measured by ASKAP, and blue colours showing the hot plasma. The dashed cyan curve marks the outer limits of the radio halo. Credit: Christopher Riseley, using data from ASKAP, XMM-Newton and the Dark Energy Survey.
Towards the future
This is the beginning of the road towards understanding Abell 3266. We have uncovered a wealth of new and detailed information, but our study has raised yet more questions.
The telescopes we used are laying the foundations for revolutionary science from the Square Kilometre Array project.
______________________________________________ The Square Kilometre Array (SKA)– a next-generation telescope due to be completed by the end of the decade – will likely be able to make images of the earliest light in the Universe, but for current telescopes the challenge is to detect the cosmological signal of the stars through the thick hydrogen clouds.
The Dark Energy Survey is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. The Dark Energy Survey began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Albert Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Saul Perlmutter (center) [The Supernova Cosmology Project] shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt (right) and Adam Riess (left) [The High-z Supernova Search Team] for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called Dark Energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
The Dark Energy Survey is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of Dark Energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the Dark Energy Survey collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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Dark Matter Background Fritz Zwicky discovered Dark Matter in the 1930s when observing the movement of the Coma Cluster., Vera Rubin a Woman in STEM, denied the Nobel, some 30 years later, did most of the work on Dark Matter.
Thirty years later, astronomer Vera Rubin provided a huge piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She discovered that the centers of galaxies rotate at the same speed as their extremities, whereas, of course, they should rotate faster. Think of a vinyl LP on a record deck: its center rotates faster than its edge. That’s what logic dictates we should see in galaxies too. But we do not. The only way to explain this is if the whole galaxy is only the center of some much larger structure, as if it is only the label on the LP so to speak, causing the galaxy to have a consistent rotation speed from center to edge.
The University of Western Australia ORGAN Experiment’s main detector. A small copper cylinder called a “resonant cavity” traps photons generated during dark matter conversion. The cylinder is bolted to a “dilution refrigerator” which cools the experiment to very low temperatures.
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The Conversation (AU) launched as a pilot project in October 2014. It is an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community, delivered direct to the public.
Our team of professional editors work with university and research institute experts to unlock their knowledge for use by the wider public.
Access to independent, high quality, authenticated, explanatory journalism underpins a functioning democracy. Our aim is to promote better understanding of current affairs and complex issues. And hopefully allow for a better quality of public discourse and conversation.
DOE-funded Dark Energy Camera captures a trove of celestial phenomena in one shot.
This image, taken by astronomers using the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, captures the galaxy NGC 1566 as it twirls, flinging its arms through the vastness of space. Colloquially nicknamed the Spanish Dancer, this spiral galaxy is often studied by astronomers learning about galaxy groups, stars of different ages, and galactic black holes.
Located in the constellation Dorado and lying around 70 million light-years away, NGC 1566 is a grand-design spiral galaxy with two arms that appear to wind around the galactic core, just like the arms of a dancer as they spin around and around in a furious twirl. This image was taken from Chile at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO)[above], a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab, using the Dark Energy Camera [above]. The galaxy’s face-on view to us, its location, and its composition make it a trove of observational opportunities for astronomers across many fields of astronomy.
NGC 1566 is home to stars at all stages of stellar evolution. In this image, the bright blue color that outlines the arms of the galaxy arises from young, brightly burning stars. Darker spots within these arms are dust lanes. The arms are rich in gas, and form large-scale areas that provide the perfect environment for new stars to form. Closer to the center of the galaxy are cooler, older stars and dust, all evident by the redder color in the image. This galaxy has even been host to an observed stellar end-of-life event, when a supernova, named SN2010el, burst onto the scene in 2010.
The center of NGC 1566 is dominated by a supermassive black hole. The distinct and highly luminous nucleus of the galaxy is known as an active galactic nucleus. The light from the nucleus changes on timescales of only hundreds of days, making it’s exact classification difficult for astronomers.
NGC 1566 is the brightest member, and one of three dominant members, of a collection of galaxies known as the Dorado Group, another member of which is NGC 1515. Galaxy groups are collections of fewer than 50 galaxies, loosely held together by the gravitational pull that each exerts on the others. The Dorado Group consists of at least 46 galaxies. NGC 1566 itself is so dominant that it has its own group, the NGC 1566 Group. The commanding role of NGC 1566 in the Dorado Group has made it a key target for scientists aiming to determine the distance to the group itself, thereby improving our understanding of large-scale structures within the Universe.
The image was taken for the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a project funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and National Science Foundation (NSF) which aims to discover the nature of dark energy by mapping millions of galaxies. The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 400 scientists from 26 institutions in seven countries. This image was captured using a camera specially designed for the DES: the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). One of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the world, DECam was operated by the DOE and NSF between 2013 and 2019. DECam was funded by the DOE and was built and tested at DOE’s Fermilab. Currently DECam is used for programs covering a huge range of science.
The galaxy pictured here continues to intrigue astronomers. NGC 1566 and eighteen other nearby galaxies will be observed in infrared light with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) by Gemini Observatory’s Chief Scientist, NOIRLab astronomer Janice Lee, as part of the PHANGS project. This project will make observations of galaxies that can be seen face-on from Earth, and will take advantage of JWST’s ability to see through gas and dust to investigate stars in their earliest stages of formation.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications(US) at The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (US) provides supercomputing and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, The University of Illinois (US) faculty, staff, students, and collaborators from around the globe use advanced digital resources to address research grand challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been advancing one-third of the Fortune 50® for more than 30 years by bringing industry, researchers, and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.
The DOE Office of Science (US) is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.
After the Big Bang, the universe, glowing brightly, was opaque and so hot that atoms could not form. Eventually cooling down to about minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit (-270 degrees Celsius), much of the energy from the Big Bang took the form of light. This afterglow, known as the cosmic microwave background [CMB], can now be seen with telescopes at microwave frequencies invisible to human eyes. It has tiny fluctuations in temperature that provide information about the early universe.
Now scientists might have an explanation for the existence of an especially cold region in the afterglow, known as the CMB Cold Spot. Its origin has been a mystery so far but might be attributed to the largest absence of galaxies ever discovered.
Scientists used data collected by the Dark Energy Survey to confirm the existence of one of the largest supervoids known to humanity, the Eridanus supervoid, as reported in a paper published in December 2021 [MNRAS]. This once-hypothesized but now-confirmed void in the cosmic web might be a possible cause for the anomaly in the CMB.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the DES collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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The Eridanus supervoid
The cosmic web is made of clusters and superclusters of galaxies. They are pulled together by the attractive force of gravity and accelerated away from each other by the repulsive force of a mysterious, not-yet-understood phenomenon called dark energy.
Between these clusters of galaxies are voids: vast regions of space that contain fewer galaxies, and thus less ordinary matter, and less dark matter than exists within the galaxy clusters.
Among the largest structures known to humanity, the supervoid in the constellation Eridanus is a massive, elongated, cigar-shaped void in the cosmic web that’s 1.8 billion lightyears wide and has been observed to contain about 30% less matter than the surrounding galactic region. Its center is located 2 billion lightyears from Earth, making it the dominant underdensity of matter in our galactic neighborhood.
Mapping Dark Matter
To make this discovery, scientists used Dark Energy Survey data to create a map of Dark Matter in the same direction as the CMB Cold Spot, by observing the effect of gravitational lensing.
It’s a phenomenon that occurs when the paths of light are warped by the gravitational influence of Dark Matter.
The Cold Spot resides in the constellation Eridanus in the southern galactic hemisphere. The inset shows the microwave temperature map of this patch of sky, as mapped by the European Space Agency Planck satellite. The main figure depicts the map of the Dark Matter distribution created by the Dark Energy Survey team. Image: Gergö Kránicz and András Kovács.
“This map of Dark Matter is the largest ever such map that’s been created,” said Niall Jeffrey, the scientist who worked on the construction of a dark matter map. “We have been able to map out Dark Matter over a quarter of the Southern Hemisphere.”
Scientists previously counted the number of galaxies visible in the location of the CMB Cold Spot and found an underdensity of galaxies in that region. The new map shows there is a matching underdensity of invisible Dark Matter.
Using voids to understand dark energy
The Dark Energy Survey is an international effort to understand the effect dark energy has on the acceleration of the universe. It involves 300 scientists from 25 institutions in seven countries.
The Dark Energy Survey documents hundreds of millions of galaxies, supernovae and patterns within the cosmic web, using a 570-Megapixel digital camera, called the DECam, high in the Chilean Andes. This camera’s construction and integration of components was led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
“We were thinking many years ago, a decade and a half at least, how would voids affect the present acceleration of the universe,” said Juan Garcia-Bellido, a cosmologist from IFT-Madrid and co-author of the paper.
At the largest scales of the universe, there is a tug-of-war between the gravitational forces and the expansion of the universe from dark energy, making some of the voids between galactic clusters deeper.
“Photons or particles of light enter into a void at a time before the void starts deepening and leave after the void has become deeper,” said Garcia-Bellido. “This process means that there is a net energy loss in that journey; that’s called the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. When photons fall into a potential well, they gain energy, and when they come out of a potential well, they lose energy. This is the gravitational redshift effect.”
Open questions
Although the new result confirms that the Eridanus supervoid is gigantic, it still is not sufficient to explain the discrepancy between the predictions of the current standard cosmological model used to predict the behavior of dark energy—known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter model—and the observed change in temperature in the Cold Spot that can be attributed to the supervoid’s effect on photons from the CMB.
“Having the coincidence of these two individually rare structures in the cosmic web and in the CMB is basically not enough to prove causality with the scientific standard,” said András Kovács, the lead researcher on this project.
“It is enough of a new element in the long history of the CMB Cold Spot problem that after this, people will at least be sure that there is a supervoid, which is a good thing because some people have debated that,” said Kovács.
In short, there are two ways to think about this problem: Either the Lambda-CDM model is correct, and the CMB Cold Spot is an extreme anomaly that coincidentally has a massive supervoid in front of it, or the Lambda-CDM model is incorrect, and the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect is stronger in supervoids than expected.
The latter would indicate a greater influence of dark energy on the universe and possibly faster cosmic expansion. Interestingly, this possibility is backed up by evidence from other, more distant supervoids. Moreover, the Dark Energy Survey team observed that the lensing signal from the Eridanus supervoid is slightly weaker than expected.
“The trouble is that typical alternative models cannot explain this discrepancy either, so if true, it might mean that we do not understand something very deep about dark energy,” said Kovács.
______________________________________________________ Dark Matter Background Fritz Zwicky discovered Dark Matter in the 1930s when observing the movement of the Coma Cluster., Vera Rubin a Woman in STEM, denied the Nobel, some 30 years later, did most of the work on Dark Matter.
Thirty years later, astronomer Vera Rubin provided a huge piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She discovered that the centers of galaxies rotate at the same speed as their extremities, whereas, of course, they should rotate faster. Think of a vinyl LP on a record deck: its center rotates faster than its edge. That’s what logic dictates we should see in galaxies too. But we do not. The only way to explain this is if the whole galaxy is only the center of some much larger structure, as if it is only the label on the LP so to speak, causing the galaxy to have a consistent rotation speed from center to edge.
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory(US), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a Department of Energy (US) national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operated by the Fermi Research Alliance, a joint venture of the University of Chicago, and the Universities Research Association (URA). Fermilab is a part of the Illinois Technology and Research Corridor.
Fermilab’s Tevatron was a landmark particle accelerator; until the startup in 2008 of the Large Hadron Collider(CH) near Geneva, Switzerland, it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, accelerating antiprotons to energies of 500 GeV, and producing proton-proton collisions with energies of up to 1.6 TeV, the first accelerator to reach one “tera-electron-volt” energy. At 3.9 miles (6.3 km), it was the world’s fourth-largest particle accelerator in circumference. One of its most important achievements was the 1995 discovery of the top quark, announced by research teams using the Tevatron’s CDF and DØ detectors. It was shut down in 2011.
In addition to high-energy collider physics, Fermilab hosts fixed-target and neutrino experiments, such as MicroBooNE (Micro Booster Neutrino Experiment), NOνA (NuMI Off-Axis νe Appearance) and SeaQuest.
Completed neutrino experiments include MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search), MINOS+, MiniBooNE and SciBooNE (SciBar Booster Neutrino Experiment).
The MiniBooNE detector was a 40-foot (12 m) diameter sphere containing 800 tons of mineral oil lined with 1,520 phototube detectors. An estimated 1 million neutrino events were recorded each year. SciBooNE sat in the same neutrino beam as MiniBooNE but had fine-grained tracking capabilities. The NOνA experiment uses, and the MINOS experiment used, Fermilab’s NuMI (Neutrinos at the Main Injector) beam, which is an intense beam of neutrinos that travels 455 miles (732 km) through the Earth to the Soudan Mine in Minnesota and the Ash River, Minnesota, site of the NOνA far detector.
In the public realm, Fermilab is home to a native prairie ecosystem restoration project and hosts many cultural events: public science lectures and symposia, classical and contemporary music concerts, folk dancing and arts galleries. The site is open from dawn to dusk to visitors who present valid photo identification.
Asteroid 11998 Fermilab is named in honor of the laboratory.
Weston, Illinois, was a community next to Batavia voted out of existence by its village board in 1966 to provide a site for Fermilab.
The laboratory was founded in 1969 as the National Accelerator Laboratory; it was renamed in honor of Enrico Fermi in 1974. The laboratory’s first director was Robert Rathbun Wilson, under whom the laboratory opened ahead of time and under budget. Many of the sculptures on the site are of his creation. He is the namesake of the site’s high-rise laboratory building, whose unique shape has become the symbol for Fermilab and which is the center of activity on the campus.
After Wilson stepped down in 1978 to protest the lack of funding for the lab, Leon M. Lederman took on the job. It was under his guidance that the original accelerator was replaced with the Tevatron, an accelerator capable of colliding protons and antiprotons at a combined energy of 1.96 TeV. Lederman stepped down in 1989. The science education center at the site was named in his honor.
The later directors include:
John Peoples, 1989 to 1996
Michael S. Witherell, July 1999 to June 2005
Piermaria Oddone, July 2005 to July 2013
Nigel Lockyer, September 2013 to the present
Fermilab continues to participate in the work at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC); it serves as a Tier 1 site in the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid.
UMD astronomers discovered that comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is among the most distant active comets from the sun providing key information about its composition.
The Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB), represented in this artist rendition as it might look in the outer Solar System, is estimated to be about 1000 times more massive than a typical comet. The largest comet discovered in modern times, it is among the most distant comets to be discovered with a coma, which means ice within the comet is vaporizing and forming an envelope of dust and vapor around the comet’s core. (Image Credit: J. da Silva/Spaceengine. NOIRLab/NSF/The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA)(US).
A new study by University of Maryland astronomers shows that comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB), the largest comet ever discovered, was active long before previously thought, meaning the ice within it is vaporizing and forming an envelope of dust and vapor known as a coma. Only one active comet has been observed farther from the sun, and it was much smaller than comet BB.
The finding will help astronomers determine what BB is made of and provide insight into conditions during the formation of our solar system. The finding was published in The Planetary Science Journal on November 29, 2021.
“These observations are pushing the distances for active comets dramatically farther than we have previously known,” said Tony Farnham, a research scientist in the UMD Department of Astronomy and the lead author of the study.
Knowing when a comet becomes active is key to understanding what it’s made of. Often called “dirty snowballs” or “icy dirtballs,” comets are conglomerations of dust and ice left over from the formation of the solar system. As an orbiting comet approaches its closest point to the sun, it warms, and the ices begin to vaporize. How warm it must be to start vaporizing depends on what kind of ice it contains (e.g., water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide or some other frozen compound).
Scientists first discovered comet BB in June 2021 using data from the Dark Energy Survey, a collaborative, international effort to survey the sky over the Southern hemisphere. The survey captured the bright nucleus of the comet but did not have high-enough resolution to reveal the envelope of dust and vapor that forms when the comet becomes active.
At 100 km across, comet BB is the largest comet ever discovered by far, and it is farther from the sun than the planet Uranus. Most comets are around 1 km or so and much closer to the sun when they are discovered. When Farnham heard about the discovery, he immediately wondered if images of comet BB had been captured by the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which observes one area of the sky for 28 days at a time.
He thought TESS’s longer exposure times could provide more detail.
Farnham and his colleagues combined thousands of images of comet BB collected by TESS from 2018 through 2020. By stacking the images, Farnham was able to increase the contrast and get a clearer view of the comet. But because comets move, he had to layer the images so that comet BB was precisely aligned in each frame. That technique removed the errant specks from individual shots while amplifying the image of the comet, which allowed researchers to see the hazy glow of dust surrounding BB, proof that BB had a coma and was active.
To ensure the coma wasn’t just a blur caused by the stacking of images, the team repeated this technique with images of inactive objects from the Kuiper belt, which is a region much farther from the sun than comet BB where icy debris from the early solar system is plentiful.
When those objects appeared crisp, with no blur, researchers were confident that the faint glow around comet BB was in fact an active coma.
The size of comet BB and its distance from the sun suggests that the vaporizing ice forming the coma is dominated by carbon monoxide. Since carbon monoxide may begin to vaporize when it is up to five times farther away from the sun than comet BB was when it was discovered, it is likely that BB was active well before it was observed.
“We make the assumption that comet BB was probably active even further out, but we just didn’t see it before this,” Farnham said. “What we don’t know yet is if there’s some cutoff point where we can start to see these things in cold storage before they become active.”
According to Farnham, the ability to observe processes like the formation of a cometary coma farther than ever before opens an exciting new door for astronomers.
“This is just the beginning,” Farnham said. “TESS is observing things that haven’t been discovered yet, and this is kind of a test case of what we will be able to find. We have the potential of doing this a lot, once a comet is seen, going back through time in the images and finding them while they are at farther distances from the sun.”
The thirst for new knowledge is a fundamental and defining characteristic of humankind. It is also at the heart of scientific endeavor and discovery. As we seek to understand our world, across a host of complexly interconnected phenomena and over scales of time and distance that were virtually inaccessible to us a generation ago, our discoveries shape that world. At the forefront of many of these discoveries is the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS).
CMNS is home to 12 major research institutes and centers and to 10 academic departments: astronomy, atmospheric and oceanic science, biology, cell biology and molecular genetics, chemistry and biochemistry, computer science, entomology, geology, mathematics, and physics.
Our Faculty
Our faculty are at the cutting edge over the full range of these disciplines. Our physicists fill in major gaps in our fundamental understanding of matter, participating in the recent Higgs boson discovery, and demonstrating the first-ever teleportation of information between atoms. Our astronomers probe the origin of the universe with one of the world’s premier radio observatories, and have just discovered water on the moon. Our computer scientists are developing the principles for guaranteed security and privacy in information systems.
Our Research
Driven by the pursuit of excellence, the University of Maryland has enjoyed a remarkable rise in accomplishment and reputation over the past two decades. By any measure, Maryland is now one of the nation’s preeminent public research universities and on a path to become one of the world’s best. To fulfill this promise, we must capitalize on our momentum, fully exploit our competitive advantages, and pursue ambitious goals with great discipline and entrepreneurial spirit. This promise is within reach. This strategic plan is our working agenda.
The plan is comprehensive, bold, and action oriented. It sets forth a vision of the University as an institution unmatched in its capacity to attract talent, address the most important issues of our time, and produce the leaders of tomorrow. The plan will guide the investment of our human and material resources as we strengthen our undergraduate and graduate programs and expand research, outreach and partnerships, become a truly international center, and enhance our surrounding community.
Our success will benefit Maryland in the near and long term, strengthen the State’s competitive capacity in a challenging and changing environment and enrich the economic, social and cultural life of the region. We will be a catalyst for progress, the State’s most valuable asset, and an indispensable contributor to the nation’s well-being. Achieving the goals of Transforming Maryland requires broad-based and sustained support from our extended community. We ask our stakeholders to join with us to make the University an institution of world-class quality with world-wide reach and unparalleled impact as it serves the people and the state of Maryland.
Our researchers are also at the cusp of the new biology for the 21st century, with bioscience emerging as a key area in almost all CMNS disciplines. Entomologists are learning how climate change affects the behavior of insects, and earth science faculty are coupling physical and biosphere data to predict that change. Geochemists are discovering how our planet evolved to support life, and biologists and entomologists are discovering how evolutionary processes have operated in living organisms. Our biologists have learned how human generated sound affects aquatic organisms, and cell biologists and computer scientists use advanced genomics to study disease and host-pathogen interactions. Our mathematicians are modeling the spread of AIDS, while our astronomers are searching for habitable exoplanets.
Our Education
CMNS is also a national resource for educating and training the next generation of leaders. Many of our major programs are ranked among the top 10 of public research universities in the nation. CMNS offers every student a high-quality, innovative and cross-disciplinary educational experience that is also affordable. Strongly committed to making science and mathematics studies available to all, CMNS actively encourages and supports the recruitment and retention of women and minorities.
Our Students
Our students have the unique opportunity to work closely with first-class faculty in state-of-the-art labs both on and off campus, conducting real-world, high-impact research on some of the most exciting problems of modern science. 87% of our undergraduates conduct research and/or hold internships while earning their bachelor’s degree. CMNS degrees command respect around the world, and open doors to a wide variety of rewarding career options. Many students continue on to graduate school; others find challenging positions in high-tech industry or federal laboratories, and some join professions such as medicine, teaching, and law.
Lars Lindberg Christensen
NSF’s NOIRLab
Head of Communications, Education & Engagement
Cell: +1 520 461 0433 lars.christensen@noirlab.edu
About a kilometer across, space rock 2021 PH27 is the Sun’s nearest neighbor.
Using the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile, astronomers just ten days ago discovered an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System. The orbit of the approximately 1-kilometer-diameter asteroid takes it as close as 20 million kilometers (12 million miles or 0.13 au), from the Sun every 113 days. Asteroid 2021 PH27, revealed in images acquired during twilight, also has the smallest mean distance (semi-major axis) of any known asteroid in our Solar System — only Mercury has a shorter period and smaller semi-major axis. The asteroid is so close to the Sun’s massive gravitational field, it experiences the largest general relativistic effects of any known Solar System object.
The asteroid designated 2021 PH27 was discovered by Scott S. Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution of Science in data collected by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the DES collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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The discovery images of the asteroid were taken by Ian Dell’antonio and Shenming Fu of Brown University (US) in the twilight skies on the evening of 13 August 2021. Sheppard had teamed up with Dell’antonio and Fu while conducting observations with DECam for the Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey, which is studying most of the massive galaxy clusters in the local Universe [1]. They took time out from observing some of the largest objects millions of light-years away to search for far smaller objects — asteroids — closer to home.
One of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the world, DECam was designed for the Dark Energy Survey (DES) funded by the Department of Energy (US) , was built and tested at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (US), and was operated by the DOE and National Science Foundation (US) between 2013 and 2019. At present DECam is used for programs covering a huge range of science. The DECam science archive is curated by the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC). CTIO and CSDC are programs of NSF’s NOIRLab.
Twilight, just after sunset or before sunrise, is the best time to hunt for asteroids that are interior to Earth’s orbit, in the direction of the two innermost planets, Mercury and Venus. As any stargazer will tell you, Mercury and Venus never appear to get very far from the Sun in the sky and are always best visible near sunrise or sunset. The same holds for asteroids that also orbit close to the Sun.
Following 2021 PH27’s discovery, David Tholen of the University of Hawai‘i (US) measured the asteroid’s position and predicted where it could be observed the following evening. Subsequently, on 14 August 2021, it was observed once more by DECam, and also by the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.
Then, on the evening of the 15th, Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganisation](EU) used the Las Cumbres Observatory network of 1- to 2-meter telescopes to observe it from CTIO in Chile and from South Africa, in addition to further observations from DECam and Magellan, as astronomers postponed their originally scheduled observations to get a sight of the newly found asteroid.
“Though telescope time for astronomers is very precious, the international nature and love of the unknown make astronomers very willing to override their own science and observations to follow up new, interesting discoveries like this,” says Sheppard.
Planets and asteroids orbit the Sun in elliptical (or oval-shaped) orbits, with the widest axis of the ellipse having a radius described as the semi-major axis. 2021 PH27 has a semi-major axis of 70 million kilometers (43 million miles or 0.46 au), giving it a 113-day orbital period on a elongated orbit that crosses the orbits of both Mercury and Venus [2].
It may have begun life in the main Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter and got dislodged by gravitational disturbances from the inner planets that drew it closer to the Sun. Its high orbital inclination of 32 degrees suggests, however, that it might instead be an extinct comet from the outer Solar System that got captured into a closer short-period orbit when passing near one of the terrestrial planets. Future observations of the asteroid will shed more light on its origins.
Its orbit is probably also unstable over long periods of time, and it will likely eventually either collide with Mercury, Venus or the Sun in a few million years, or be ejected from the inner Solar System by the inner planets’ gravitational influence.
Astronomers have a hard time finding these interior asteroids because they are very often hidden by the glare of the Sun. When asteroids get so close to our nearest star, they experience a variety of stresses, such as thermal stresses from the Sun’s heat, and physical stresses from gravitational tidal forces. These stresses could cause some of the more fragile asteroids to break up.
“The fraction of asteroids interior to Earth and Venus compared to exterior will give us insights into the strength and make-up of these objects,” says Sheppard. If the population of asteroids on similar orbits to 2021 PH27 appears depleted, it could tell astronomers what fraction of near-Earth asteroids are piles of rubble that are loosely held together, as opposed to solid chunks of rock, which could have consequences for asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth and how we might deflect them.
“Understanding the population of asteroids interior to Earth’s orbit is important to complete the census of asteroids near Earth, including some of the most likely Earth impactors that may approach Earth during daylight and that cannot easily be discovered in most surveys that are observing at night, away from the Sun,” says Sheppard. He adds that since 2021 PH27 approaches so close to the Sun, “…its surface temperature gets to almost 500 degrees C (around 900 degrees F) at closest approach, hot enough to melt lead”.
Because 2021 PH27 is so close to the Sun’s massive gravitational field, it experiences the largest general relativistic effects of any known Solar System object. This reveals itself as a slight angular deviation in the asteroid’s elliptical orbit over time, a movement called precession, which amounts to about one arcminute per century [3].
The asteroid is now entering solar conjunction when from our point of view it is seen to move behind the Sun. It is expected to return to visibility from Earth early in 2022, when new observations will be able to determine its orbit in more detail, allowing the asteroid to get an official name.
Notes
[1] The Local Volume Complete Cluster Survey (LoVoCCS) is an NSF’s NOIRLab survey program that is using DECam to measure the dark matter distribution and the galaxy population in 107 nearby galaxy clusters. These deep exposures will allow a clean comparison of faint variable objects when combined with data from Vera C. Rubin Observatory.
[2] 2021 PH27 is only one of around 20 known Atira asteroids that have their orbits completely interior to the Earth’s orbit.
[3] Observation of Mercury’s precession puzzled scientists until Einstein’s general theory of relativity explained its orbital adjustments over time. 2021 PH27’s precession is even faster than Mercury’s.
The NSF NOIRLab Vera C. Rubin Observatory. It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy(US) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. The astronomical community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on Iolkam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawaiʻi, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that these sites have to the Tohono O’odham Nation, to the Native Hawaiian community, and to the local communities in Chile, respectively.
richardmitnick
9:30 am on August 4, 2021 Permalink
| Reply Tags: "‘Dancing ghosts’ a new and deeper scan of the sky throws up surprises for astronomers", A deep search returns many surprises., Astronomy ( 10,927 ), Astrophysics ( 8,876 ), Basic Research ( 16,507 ), Cosmology ( 8,992 ), CSIRO’s new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP)-a radio telescope that probes deeper into the Universe than any other., CSIROscope (AU) ( 33 ), Dark Energy Survey, EMU will help us understand the birth of new stars in these galaxies., EMU: Evolutionary Map of the Universe (AU)., Radio galaxies ( 5 ), The "Dancing Ghosts" were just one of several surprises found in our first deep search of the sky using ASKAP., The first big surprise from the EMU Pilot Survey was the discovery of mysterious Odd Radio Circles (ORCs) which seem to be giant rings of radio emission., When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before you are likely to make new discoveries.
From CSIROscope (AU): “‘Dancing ghosts’ a new and deeper scan of the sky throws up surprises for astronomers”
We saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what they were.
The two galaxies we think are responsible for the streams of electrons (shown as curved arrows) that form the “Dancing Ghosts”. But we don’t understand what is causing the filament labelled as 3.
Image by Jayanne English and Ray Norris using data from EMU and the Dark Energy Survey (US).
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the DES collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Scanning through data fresh off the telescope, we saw two ghosts dancing deep in the cosmos. We had never seen anything like it before, and we had no idea what they were.
Several weeks later, we had figured out we were seeing two radio galaxies, about a billion light years away. In the centre of each one is a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons that are bent into grotesque shapes by an intergalactic wind.
But where does the intergalactic wind come from? Why is it so tangled? And what is causing the streams of radio emission? We still don’t understand the details of what is going on here, and it will probably take many more observations and modelling before we do.
We are getting used to surprises as we scan the skies in the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (AU) project, using CSIRO’s new Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP)-a radio telescope that probes deeper into the Universe than any other.
When you boldly go where no telescope has gone before you are likely to make new discoveries.
A deep search returns many surprises.
The “Dancing Ghosts” were just one of several surprises found in our first deep search of the sky using ASKAP. This search, called the EMU Pilot Survey, is described in detail in a paper soon to appear in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia.
The first big surprise from the EMU Pilot Survey was the discovery of mysterious Odd Radio Circles (ORCs) which seem to be giant rings of radio emission, nearly a million light years across, surrounding distant galaxies.
These had never been seen before, because they are so rare and faint. We still don’t know what they are, but we are working furiously to find out.
We are finding surprises even in places we thought we understood. Next door to the well-studied galaxy IC5063, we found a giant radio galaxy, one of the largest known, whose existence had never even been suspected.
This new galaxy too contains a supermassive black hole, squirting out jets of electrons nearly 5 million light years long. ASKAP is the only telescope in the world that can see the total extent of this faint emission.
The Galaxy NGC 7125 with EMU radio data (contours) overlaid on an optical image (coloured_ from the Dark Energy Survey. Image created by Baerbel Koribalski from EMU data and Dark Energy Survey data.
What EMU can do
Most known sources of radio emissions are caused by supermassive black holes in quasars and active galaxies, which produce exceptionally bright signals. This is because radio telescopes have always struggled to see the much fainter radio emission from normal spiral galaxies like our own Milky Way.
The EMU project goes deep enough to see them too. EMU sees almost all the spiral galaxies in the nearby Universe that were previously seen only by optical and infrared telescopes. EMU can even trace the spiral arms in the nearest ones.
EMU will help us understand the birth of new stars in these galaxies.
These some of the first results the EMU project, which we started in 2009. The EMU team of more than 400 scientists in more than 20 countries has spent the past 12 years planning the project, developing techniques, writing software, and working with the CSIRO engineers who were building the telescope. It has been a long haul, but we are at last seeing the amazing data we have dreamed of for so long.
But this is only the start. Over the next few years, EMU will use the ASKAP telescope to explore even deeper in the Universe, building on these discoveries and finding more. All the data from EMU will eventually be placed in the public domain, so that astronomers from around the world can mine the data and make new discoveries.
But don’t take my word for it. You can already use EMU Pilot Survey data to explore the radio sky yourself, using the zoomable image on our website.
Use your mouse wheel to zoom in from the big picture down to the finest details, and see what you find. Perhaps you may even discover something there that the astronomers have missed.
CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO maintains more than 50 sites across Australia and in France, Chile and the United States, employing about 5,500 people.
Federally funded scientific research began in Australia 104 years ago. The Advisory Council of Science and Industry was established in 1916 but was hampered by insufficient available finance. In 1926 the research effort was reinvigorated by establishment of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), which strengthened national science leadership and increased research funding. CSIR grew rapidly and achieved significant early successes. In 1949 further legislated changes included renaming the organisation as CSIRO.
Notable developments by CSIRO have included the invention of atomic absorption spectroscopy; essential components of Wi-Fi technology; development of the first commercially successful polymer banknote; the invention of the insect repellent in Aerogard and the introduction of a series of biological controls into Australia, such as the introduction of myxomatosis and rabbit calicivirus for the control of rabbit populations.
Research and focus areas
Research Business Units
As at 2019, CSIRO’s research areas are identified as “Impact science” and organised into the following Business Units:
Agriculture and Food
Health and Biosecurity
Data 61
Energy
Land and Water
Manufacturing
Mineral Resources Oceans and Atmosphere
National Facilities
CSIRO manages national research facilities and scientific infrastructure on behalf of the nation to assist with the delivery of research. The national facilities and specialized laboratories are available to both international and Australian users from industry and research. As at 2019, the following National Facilities are listed:
At the end of a winding road into the mountains, a group of white and silver domes stand stark against the dusty earth.
It takes researchers three flights and a shuttle bus ride up the switchbacks to reach the observatory from the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (US) near Chicago. The trip takes about 24 hours one-way, and many astrophysicists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration make it several times a year. They’re headed to the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope, home to the Dark Energy Camera.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the DES collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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At least, that’s what they were doing, before a global pandemic threw a wrench in their travel plans.
Researchers using the Dark Energy Camera aren’t the only ones who ran into issues over the past year or so. When the pandemic hit, observations stopped short for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona. Both DECam and DESI receive funding from the Department of Energy.
Not only was it difficult to travel to the observatory; once there, several people needed to work in the control room together, something they could no longer do, says Fermilab astrophysicist Elizabeth Buckley-Geer.
After a few months in shutdown, DESI restarted observations. They pared down the in-person team to a single operator—and sometimes a lead observer, who could work in a separate room.
Astrophysicists who normally made long journeys to the telescope instead scanned the stars from their own homes, using the same web-based software they’d used at the observatory, while connected to a virtual private network.
DES researchers Sahar Allam and Douglas Tucker, who are married, have observed from home since even before the beginning of the pandemic. The setup in their office is fairly simple. Tucker says he connects a laptop to two other monitors. While they work, their black-and-white cat wanders between the screens.
Tucker and Allam both say that flipping through lots of tabs becomes a necessity, as they’re used to having double the number of monitors in the control room. During observing shifts, the remote researchers stay in contact with the telescope operator via Zoom call.
Buckley-Geer says she has a similar setup in her home office.
“Personally, I think it’s somewhat better to be in the control room seeing the instrument,” she says. “But it works. I mean, we haven’t had any big disasters or problems, and we’re taking very good data.”
While remote observing isn’t entirely new, it hasn’t been practiced at this scale before, says Antonella Palmese, who works at Fermilab on both DESI and projects using DECam. Many labs house remote observing centers where scientists can connect to observatories remotely. But when the labs went virtual during the pandemic, so did the centers.
Palmese says she’d observed remotely from Fermilab plenty of times, but doing it from home was different.
“I’m grateful for the opportunity to be able to get data, but I would say it’s definitely not as exciting,” Palmese says. “One of the nice things about being an astronomer is being able to travel to the telescope and learn more about the instrument. It’s just a different experience.”
Buckley-Geer notes that remote observing has some advantages. Reducing travel cuts carbon emissions, as well as saving time and money.
Palmese says she’d take the long trip to Chile once a year and stay at the observatory for around a week. But while remote observing, all she has to do is set an alarm and take a few steps into her living room.
One unforeseen advantage to switching to observing from home, Palmese says, was the ability to take advantage of time zones. International researchers, who might not normally make it out to the telescope at all, could pick up daytime observing shifts.
There’s no guarantee when in-person observing will resume. Even when it does, Palmese and Buckley-Geer guess that some adjustments will stick around.
“We designed the whole system to be able to operate remotely [from the beginning] because that’s how we debugged problems and things like that,” Buckley-Geer says. “But we’ve given remote operating much more testing and much more use than we ever, ever envisioned.”
Still, Palmese says she looks forward to observing in-person again. She says she used to get a lot of her work done while observing in Chile because during downtime, she had her collaborators right there with her.
Palmese, Allam and Tucker say they miss in-person observing for reasons other than productivity.
“A lot of the time you’re inside the dome, in a lit room with a lot of terminals,” Tucker says. “But every once in a while, you go outside.
“And when your eyes adjust to the dark, you see the Milky Way spread over the sky. In Chile, you see the Magellanic Clouds. You can see galaxies which are visible by eye. And on the Andes mountain range, the Pacific Ocean is just about 30 miles away. So if you look outwards over the ocean, you see the sea fog coming in.”
Allam shares the sentiment. “It’s just beautiful,” she says. “Since we do it for years and years, it’s emotional. If you do it once, even just for your soul, you will fall in love.”
Argonne-driven technology is part of a broad initiative to answer fundamental questions about the birth of matter in the universe and the building blocks that hold it all together.
Imagine the first of our species to lie beneath the glow of an evening sky. An enormous sense of awe, perhaps a little fear, fills them as they wonder at those seemingly infinite points of light and what they might mean. As humans, we evolved the capacity to ask big insightful questions about the world around us and worlds beyond us. We dare, even, to question our own origins.
“The place of humans in the universe is important to understand,” said physicist and computational scientist Salman Habib. “Once you realize that there are billions of galaxies we can detect, each with many billions of stars, you understand the insignificance of being human in some sense. But at the same time, you appreciate being human a lot more.”
The South Pole Telescope is part of a collaboration between Argonne and a number of national labs and universities to measure the CMB, considered the oldest light in the universe.
The high altitude and extremely dry conditions of the South Pole keep water vapor from absorbing select light wavelengths.
With no less a sense of wonder than most of us, Habib and colleagues at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory are actively researching these questions through an initiative that investigates the fundamental components of both particle physics and astrophysics.
The breadth of Argonne’s research in these areas is mind-boggling. It takes us back to the very edge of time itself, to some infinitesimally small portion of a second after the Big Bang when random fluctuations in temperature and density arose, eventually forming the breeding grounds of galaxies and planets.
It explores the heart of protons and neutrons to understand the most fundamental constructs of the visible universe, particles and energy once free in the early post-Big Bang universe, but later confined forever within a basic atomic structure as that universe began to cool.
And it addresses slightly newer, more controversial questions about the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, both of which play a dominant role in the makeup and dynamics of the universe but are little understood.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the DES collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
“And this world-class research we’re doing could not happen without advances in technology,” said Argonne Associate Laboratory Director Kawtar Hafidi, who helped define and merge the different aspects of the initiative.
“We are developing and fabricating detectors that search for signatures from the early universe or enhance our understanding of the most fundamental of particles,” she added. “And because all of these detectors create big data that have to be analyzed, we are developing, among other things, artificial intelligence techniques to do that as well.”
Decoding messages from the universe
Fleshing out a theory of the universe on cosmic or subatomic scales requires a combination of observations, experiments, theories, simulations and analyses, which in turn requires access to the world’s most sophisticated telescopes, particle colliders, detectors and supercomputers.
Argonne is uniquely suited to this mission, equipped as it is with many of those tools, the ability to manufacture others and collaborative privileges with other federal laboratories and leading research institutions to access other capabilities and expertise.
As lead of the initiative’s cosmology component, Habib uses many of these tools in his quest to understand the origins of the universe and what makes it tick.
And what better way to do that than to observe it, he said.
“If you look at the universe as a laboratory, then obviously we should study it and try to figure out what it is telling us about foundational science,” noted Habib. “So, one part of what we are trying to do is build ever more sensitive probes to decipher what the universe is trying to tell us.”
To date, Argonne is involved in several significant sky surveys, which use an array of observational platforms, like telescopes and satellites, to map different corners of the universe and collect information that furthers or rejects a specific theory.
For example, the South Pole Telescope survey, a collaboration between Argonne and a number of national labs and universities, is measuring the cosmic microwave background (CMB) [above], considered the oldest light in the universe. Variations in CMB properties, such as temperature, signal the original fluctuations in density that ultimately led to all the visible structure in the universe.
Additionally, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and the forthcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory are specially outfitted, ground-based telescopes designed to shed light on dark energy and dark matter, as well as the formation of luminous structure in the universe.
All the data sets derived from these observations are connected to the second component of Argonne’s cosmology push, which revolves around theory and modeling. Cosmologists combine observations, measurements and the prevailing laws of physics to form theories that resolve some of the mysteries of the universe.
But the universe is complex, and it has an annoying tendency to throw a curve ball just when we thought we had a theory cinched. Discoveries within the past 100 years have revealed that the universe is both expanding and accelerating its expansion — realizations that came as separate but equal surprises.
Saul Perlmutter (center) [The Supernova Cosmology Project] shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt (right) and Adam Riess (left) [The High-z Supernova Search Team] for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
“To say that we understand the universe would be incorrect. To say that we sort of understand it is fine,” exclaimed Habib. “We have a theory that describes what the universe is doing, but each time the universe surprises us, we have to add a new ingredient to that theory.”
Modeling helps scientists get a clearer picture of whether and how those new ingredients will fit a theory. They make predictions for observations that have not yet been made, telling observers what new measurements to take.
Habib’s group is applying this same sort of process to gain an ever-so-tentative grasp on the nature of dark energy and dark matter. While scientists can tell us that both exist, that they comprise about 68 and 26% of the universe, respectively, beyond that not much else is known.
Dark Matter Background Fritz Zwicky discovered Dark Matter in the 1930s when observing the movement of the Coma Cluster., Vera Rubin a Woman in STEM denied the Nobel, some 30 years later, did most of the work on Dark Matter.
Fritz Zwicky from http:// palomarskies.blogspot.com.
Coma cluster via NASA/ESA Hubble.
In modern times, it was astronomer Fritz Zwicky, in the 1930s, who made the first observations of what we now call dark matter. His 1933 observations of the Coma Cluster of galaxies seemed to indicated it has a mass 500 times more than that previously calculated by Edwin Hubble. Furthermore, this extra mass seemed to be completely invisible. Although Zwicky’s observations were initially met with much skepticism, they were later confirmed by other groups of astronomers.
Thirty years later, astronomer Vera Rubin provided a huge piece of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She discovered that the centers of galaxies rotate at the same speed as their extremities, whereas, of course, they should rotate faster. Think of a vinyl LP on a record deck: its center rotates faster than its edge. That’s what logic dictates we should see in galaxies too. But we do not. The only way to explain this is if the whole galaxy is only the center of some much larger structure, as if it is only the label on the LP so to speak, causing the galaxy to have a consistent rotation speed from center to edge.
Vera Rubin, following Zwicky, postulated that the missing structure in galaxies is dark matter. Her ideas were met with much resistance from the astronomical community, but her observations have been confirmed and are seen today as pivotal proof of the existence of dark matter.
Astronomer Vera Rubin at the Lowell Observatory in 1965, worked on Dark Matter (The Carnegie Institution for Science).
Vera Rubin measuring spectra, worked on Dark Matter (Emilio Segre Visual Archives AIP SPL).
Vera Rubin, with Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM) image tube spectrograph attached to the Kitt Peak 84-inch telescope, 1970
Observations of cosmological structure — the distribution of galaxies and even of their shapes — provide clues about the nature of dark matter, which in turn feeds simple dark matter models and subsequent predictions. If observations, models and predictions aren’t in agreement, that tells scientists that there may be some missing ingredient in their description of dark matter.
But there are also experiments that are looking for direct evidence of dark matter particles, which require highly sensitive detectors [above]. Argonne has initiated development of specialized superconducting detector technology for the detection of low-mass dark matter particles.
This technology requires the ability to control properties of layered materials and adjust the temperature where the material transitions from finite to zero resistance, when it becomes a superconductor. And unlike other applications where scientists would like this temperature to be as high as possible — room temperature, for example — here, the transition needs to be very close to absolute zero.
Habib refers to these dark matter detectors as traps, like those used for hunting — which, in essence, is what cosmologists are doing. Because it’s possible that dark matter doesn’t come in just one species, they need different types of traps.
“It’s almost like you’re in a jungle in search of a certain animal, but you don’t quite know what it is — it could be a bird, a snake, a tiger — so you build different kinds of traps,” he said.
Lab researchers are working on technologies to capture these elusive species through new classes of dark matter searches. Collaborating with other institutions, they are now designing and building a first set of pilot projects aimed at looking for dark matter candidates with low mass.
Tuning in to the early universe
Amy Bender is working on a different kind of detector — well, a lot of detectors — which are at the heart of a survey of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
“The CMB is radiation that has been around the universe for 13 billion years, and we’re directly measuring that,” said Bender, an assistant physicist at Argonne.
The Argonne-developed detectors — all 16,000 of them — capture photons, or light particles, from that primordial sky through the aforementioned South Pole Telescope, to help answer questions about the early universe, fundamental physics and the formation of cosmic structures.
Now, the CMB experimental effort is moving into a new phase, CMB-Stage 4 (CMB-S4).
This larger project tackles even more complex topics like Inflationary Theory, which suggests that the universe expanded faster than the speed of light for a fraction of a second, shortly after the Big Bang.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ Inflation
Alan Guth, from Highland Park High School and M.I.T., who first proposed cosmic inflation
[caption id="attachment_55311" align="alignnone" width="632"] HPHS Owls
Lamda Cold Dark Matter Accerated Expansion of The universe http scinotions.com the-cosmic-inflation-suggests-the-existence-of-parallel-universes Alex Mittelmann, Coldcreation
A section of a detector array with architecture suitable for future CMB experiments, such as the upcoming CMB-S4 project. Fabricated at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, 16,000 of these detectors currently drive measurements collected from the South Pole Telescope. (Image by Argonne National Laboratory.)
While the science is amazing, the technology to get us there is just as fascinating.
Technically called transition edge sensing (TES) bolometers, the detectors on the telescope are made from superconducting materials fabricated at Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials, a DOE Office of Science User Facility.
Each of the 16,000 detectors acts as a combination of very sensitive thermometer and camera. As incoming radiation is absorbed on the surface of each detector, measurements are made by supercooling them to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. (That’s over three times as cold as Antarctica’s lowest recorded temperature.)
Changes in heat are measured and recorded as changes in electrical resistance and will help inform a map of the CMB’s intensity across the sky.
CMB-S4 will focus on newer technology that will allow researchers to distinguish very specific patterns in light, or polarized light. In this case, they are looking for what Bender calls the Holy Grail of polarization, a pattern called B-modes.
Capturing this signal from the early universe — one far fainter than the intensity signal — will help to either confirm or disprove a generic prediction of inflation.
It will also require the addition of 500,000 detectors distributed among 21 telescopes in two distinct regions of the world, the South Pole and the Chilean desert. There, the high altitude and extremely dry conditions keep water vapor in the atmosphere from absorbing millimeter wavelength light, like that of the CMB.
While previous experiments have touched on this polarization, the large number of new detectors will improve sensitivity to that polarization and grow our ability to capture it.
“Literally, we have built these cameras completely from the ground up,” said Bender. “Our innovation is in how to make these stacks of superconducting materials work together within this detector, where you have to couple many complex factors and then actually read out the results with the TES. And that is where Argonne has contributed, hugely.”
Down to the basics
Argonne’s capabilities in detector technology don’t just stop at the edge of time, nor do the initiative’s investigations just look at the big picture.
Most of the visible universe, including galaxies, stars, planets and people, are made up of protons and neutrons. Understanding the most fundamental components of those building blocks and how they interact to make atoms and molecules and just about everything else is the realm of physicists like Zein-Eddine Meziani.
“From the perspective of the future of my field, this initiative is extremely important,” said Meziani, who leads Argonne’s Medium Energy Physics group. “It has given us the ability to actually explore new concepts, develop better understanding of the science and a pathway to enter into bigger collaborations and take some leadership.”
Taking the lead of the initiative’s nuclear physics component, Meziani is steering Argonne toward a significant role in the development of the Electron-Ion Collider, a new U.S. Nuclear Physics Program facility slated for construction at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (US).
Argonne’s primary interest in the collider is to elucidate the role that quarks, anti-quarks and gluons play in giving mass and a quantum angular momentum, called spin, to protons and neutrons — nucleons — the particles that comprise the nucleus of an atom.
EIC Electron Animation, Inner Proton Motion.
Electrons colliding with ions will exchange virtual photons with the nuclear particles to help scientists “see” inside the nuclear particles; the collisions will produce precision 3D snapshots of the internal arrangement of quarks and gluons within ordinary nuclear matter; like a combination CT/MRI scanner for atoms. (Image by Brookhaven National Laboratory.)
While we once thought nucleons were the finite fundamental particles of an atom, the emergence of powerful particle colliders, like the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University and the former Tevatron at DOE’s Fermilab, proved otherwise.
It turns out that quarks and gluons were independent of nucleons in the extreme energy densities of the early universe; as the universe expanded and cooled, they transformed into ordinary matter.
“There was a time when quarks and gluons were free in a big soup, if you will, but we have never seen them free,” explained Meziani. “So, we are trying to understand how the universe captured all of this energy that was there and put it into confined systems, like these droplets we call protons and neutrons.”
Some of that energy is tied up in gluons, which, despite the fact that they have no mass, confer the majority of mass to a proton. So, Meziani is hoping that the Electron-Ion Collider will allow science to explore — among other properties — the origins of mass in the universe through a detailed exploration of gluons.
And just as Amy Bender is looking for the B-modes polarization in the CMB, Meziani and other researchers are hoping to use a very specific particle called a J/psi to provide a clearer picture of what’s going on inside a proton’s gluonic field.
But producing and detecting the J/psi particle within the collider — while ensuring that the proton target doesn’t break apart — is a tricky enterprise, which requires new technologies. Again, Argonne is positioning itself at the forefront of this endeavor.
“We are working on the conceptual designs of technologies that will be extremely important for the detection of these types of particles, as well as for testing concepts for other science that will be conducted at the Electron-Ion Collider,” said Meziani.
Argonne also is producing detector and related technologies in its quest for a phenomenon called neutrinoless double beta decay. A neutrino is one of the particles emitted during the process of neutron radioactive beta decay and serves as a small but mighty connection between particle physics and astrophysics.
“Neutrinoless double beta decay can only happen if the neutrino is its own anti-particle,” said Hafidi. “If the existence of these very rare decays is confirmed, it would have important consequences in understanding why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.”
Argonne scientists from different areas of the lab are working on the Neutrino Experiment with Xenon Time Projection Chamber (NEXT) collaboration to design and prototype key systems for the collaborative’s next big experiment. This includes developing a one-of-a-kind test facility and an R&D program for new, specialized detector systems.
“We are really working on dramatic new ideas,” said Meziani. “We are investing in certain technologies to produce some proof of principle that they will be the ones to pursue later, that the technology breakthroughs that will take us to the highest sensitivity detection of this process will be driven by Argonne.”
The tools of detection
Ultimately, fundamental science is science derived from human curiosity. And while we may not always see the reason for pursuing it, more often than not, fundamental science produces results that benefit all of us. Sometimes it’s a gratifying answer to an age-old question, other times it’s a technological breakthrough intended for one science that proves useful in a host of other applications.
Through their various efforts, Argonne scientists are aiming for both outcomes. But it will take more than curiosity and brain power to solve the questions they are asking. It will take our skills at toolmaking, like the telescopes that peer deep into the heavens and the detectors that capture hints of the earliest light or the most elusive of particles.
We will need to employ the ultrafast computing power of new supercomputers. Argonne’s forthcoming Aurora exascale machine will analyze mountains of data for help in creating massive models that simulate the dynamics of the universe or subatomic world, which, in turn, might guide new experiments — or introduce new questions.
And we will apply artificial intelligence to recognize patterns in complex observations — on the subatomic and cosmic scales — far more quickly than the human eye can, or use it to optimize machinery and experiments for greater efficiency and faster results.
“I think we have been given the flexibility to explore new technologies that will allow us to answer the big questions,” said Bender. “What we’re developing is so cutting edge, you never know where it will show up in everyday life.”
Funding for research mentioned in this article was provided by Argonne Laboratory Directed Research and Development; Argonne program development; DOE Office of High Energy Physics: Cosmic Frontier, South Pole Telescope-3G project, Detector R&D; and DOE Office of Nuclear Physics.
DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory (US) seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their is a science and engineering research national laboratory operated by UChicago Argonne LLC for the United States Department of Energy. The facility is located in Lemont, Illinois, outside of Chicago, and is the largest national laboratory by size and scope in the Midwest.
Argonne had its beginnings in the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, formed in part to carry out Enrico Fermi’s work on nuclear reactors for the Manhattan Project during World War II. After the war, it was designated as the first national laboratory in the United States on July 1, 1946. In the post-war era the lab focused primarily on non-weapon related nuclear physics, designing and building the first power-producing nuclear reactors, helping design the reactors used by the United States’ nuclear navy, and a wide variety of similar projects. In 1994, the lab’s nuclear mission ended, and today it maintains a broad portfolio in basic science research, energy storage and renewable energy, environmental sustainability, supercomputing, and national security.
UChicago Argonne, LLC, the operator of the laboratory, “brings together the expertise of the University of Chicago (the sole member of the LLC) with Jacobs Engineering Group Inc.” Argonne is a part of the expanding Illinois Technology and Research Corridor. Argonne formerly ran a smaller facility called Argonne National Laboratory-West (or simply Argonne-West) in Idaho next to the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. In 2005, the two Idaho-based laboratories merged to become the DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory.
What would become Argonne began in 1942 as the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, which had become part of the Manhattan Project. The Met Lab built Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor, under the stands of the University of Chicago sports stadium. Considered unsafe, in 1943, CP-1 was reconstructed as CP-2, in what is today known as Red Gate Woods but was then the Argonne Forest of the Cook County Forest Preserve District near Palos Hills. The lab was named after the surrounding forest, which in turn was named after the Forest of Argonne in France where U.S. troops fought in World War I. Fermi’s pile was originally going to be constructed in the Argonne forest, and construction plans were set in motion, but a labor dispute brought the project to a halt. Since speed was paramount, the project was moved to the squash court under Stagg Field, the football stadium on the campus of the University of Chicago. Fermi told them that he was sure of his calculations, which said that it would not lead to a runaway reaction, which would have contaminated the city.
Other activities were added to Argonne over the next five years. On July 1, 1946, the “Metallurgical Laboratory” was formally re-chartered as Argonne National Laboratory for “cooperative research in nucleonics.” At the request of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, it began developing nuclear reactors for the nation’s peaceful nuclear energy program. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the laboratory moved to a larger location in unincorporated DuPage County, Illinois and established a remote location in Idaho, called “Argonne-West,” to conduct further nuclear research.
In quick succession, the laboratory designed and built Chicago Pile 3 (1944), the world’s first heavy-water moderated reactor, and the Experimental Breeder Reactor I (Chicago Pile 4), built-in Idaho, which lit a string of four light bulbs with the world’s first nuclear-generated electricity in 1951. A complete list of the reactors designed and, in most cases, built and operated by Argonne can be viewed in the, Reactors Designed by Argonne page. The knowledge gained from the Argonne experiments conducted with these reactors 1) formed the foundation for the designs of most of the commercial reactors currently used throughout the world for electric power generation and 2) inform the current evolving designs of liquid-metal reactors for future commercial power stations.
Conducting classified research, the laboratory was heavily secured; all employees and visitors needed badges to pass a checkpoint, many of the buildings were classified, and the laboratory itself was fenced and guarded. Such alluring secrecy drew visitors both authorized—including King Leopold III of Belgium and Queen Frederica of Greece—and unauthorized. Shortly past 1 a.m. on February 6, 1951, Argonne guards discovered reporter Paul Harvey near the 10-foot (3.0 m) perimeter fence, his coat tangled in the barbed wire. Searching his car, guards found a previously prepared four-page broadcast detailing the saga of his unauthorized entrance into a classified “hot zone”. He was brought before a federal grand jury on charges of conspiracy to obtain information on national security and transmit it to the public, but was not indicted.
Not all nuclear technology went into developing reactors, however. While designing a scanner for reactor fuel elements in 1957, Argonne physicist William Nelson Beck put his own arm inside the scanner and obtained one of the first ultrasound images of the human body. Remote manipulators designed to handle radioactive materials laid the groundwork for more complex machines used to clean up contaminated areas, sealed laboratories or caves. In 1964, the “Janus” reactor opened to study the effects of neutron radiation on biological life, providing research for guidelines on safe exposure levels for workers at power plants, laboratories and hospitals. Scientists at Argonne pioneered a technique to analyze the moon’s surface using alpha radiation, which launched aboard the Surveyor 5 in 1967 and later analyzed lunar samples from the Apollo 11 mission.
In addition to nuclear work, the laboratory maintained a strong presence in the basic research of physics and chemistry. In 1955, Argonne chemists co-discovered the elements einsteinium and fermium, elements 99 and 100 in the periodic table. In 1962, laboratory chemists produced the first compound of the inert noble gas xenon, opening up a new field of chemical bonding research. In 1963, they discovered the hydrated electron.
High-energy physics made a leap forward when Argonne was chosen as the site of the 12.5 GeV Zero Gradient Synchrotron, a proton accelerator that opened in 1963. A bubble chamber allowed scientists to track the motions of subatomic particles as they zipped through the chamber; in 1970, they observed the neutrino in a hydrogen bubble chamber for the first time.
Meanwhile, the laboratory was also helping to design the reactor for the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, which steamed for more than 513,550 nautical miles (951,090 km). The next nuclear reactor model was Experimental Boiling Water Reactor, the forerunner of many modern nuclear plants, and Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II), which was sodium-cooled, and included a fuel recycling facility. EBR-II was later modified to test other reactor designs, including a fast-neutron reactor and, in 1982, the Integral Fast Reactor concept—a revolutionary design that reprocessed its own fuel, reduced its atomic waste and withstood safety tests of the same failures that triggered the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. In 1994, however, the U.S. Congress terminated funding for the bulk of Argonne’s nuclear programs.
Argonne moved to specialize in other areas, while capitalizing on its experience in physics, chemical sciences and metallurgy. In 1987, the laboratory was the first to successfully demonstrate a pioneering technique called plasma wakefield acceleration, which accelerates particles in much shorter distances than conventional accelerators. It also cultivated a strong battery research program.
Following a major push by then-director Alan Schriesheim, the laboratory was chosen as the site of the Advanced Photon Source, a major X-ray facility which was completed in 1995 and produced the brightest X-rays in the world at the time of its construction.
On 19 March 2019, it was reported in the Chicago Tribune that the laboratory was constructing the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Costing $500 million it will have the processing power of 1 quintillion flops. Applications will include the analysis of stars and improvements in the power grid.
With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more visit http://www.anl.gov.
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more visit http://www.anl.gov.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), as seen in a synthetic color composite image made with the Las Cumbres Observatory 1-meter telescope at Sutherland, South Africa, on 22 June 2021. The diffuse cloud is the comet’s coma. Credit: LOOK/LCO.
A newly discovered visitor to the outer edges of our Solar System has been shown to be the largest known comet ever, thanks to the rapid response telescopes of Las Cumbres Observatory. The object, which is named Comet C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its two discoverers, was first announced on Saturday, June 19th, 2021. C/2014 UN271 was found by reprocessing four years of data from the Dark Energy Survey, which was carried out using the 4-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile between 2013 and 2019.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called Dark Energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the DES collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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At the time of the announcement, there was no indication that this was an active world. Anticipation was immediately high among astronomers. C/2014 UN271 was inbound from the cold outer reaches of the Solar System, so rapid imaging was needed to find out: when would the big new-found world start to show a comet’s tail?
Las Cumbres Observatory was quickly able to determine whether the object had become an active comet in the three years since it was first seen by the Dark Energy Survey. “Since the new object was far in the south and quite faint, we knew there wouldn’t be many other telescopes that could observe it,” says Dr. Tim Lister, Staff Scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO). “Fortunately LCO has a network of robotic telescopes across the world, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere, and we were able to quickly get images from the LCO telescopes in South Africa,” explained Tim Lister.
The images from one of LCO’s 1-meter telescopes hosted at the South African Astronomical Observatory, came in around 9pm PDT on Monday night June 22.
Astronomers in New Zealand who are members of the LCO Outbursting Objects Key (LOOK) Project were the first to notice the new comet.
“Since we’re a team based all around the world, it just happened that it was my afternoon, while the other folks were asleep. The first image had the comet obscured by a satellite streak and my heart sank. But then the others were clear enough and gosh: there it was, definitely a beautiful little fuzzy dot, not at all crisp like its neighbouring stars!” said Dr. Michele Bannister at University of Canterbury [Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha] (NZ). Analysis of the LCO images showed a fuzzy coma around the object, indicating that it was active and was indeed a comet, even though it is still out at a remarkable distance of more than 1,800,000,000 miles, more than double Saturn’s distance from the Sun.
The comet is estimated to be over 100km in diameter, which is more than three times the size of the next biggest comet nucleus we know, Comet Hale-Bopp, which was discovered in 1995. This comet is not expected to become naked-eye bright: it will remain a telescopic object because its closest distance to the Sun will still be beyond Saturn. Since Comet C/2014 UN271 was discovered so far out, astronomers will have over a decade to study it. It will reach its closest approach to the Sun in January of 2031. A recent article in the New York Times about the comet details its predicted travel.
Thus Tim Lister and the other astronomers of the LOOK Project will have plenty of time to use the telescopes of Las Cumbres Observatory to study C/2014 UN271. The LOOK Project is continuing to observe the behavior of a large number of comets and how their activity evolves as they come closer towards the Sun. The scientists are also using the rapid response capability of LCO to get observations very quickly when a comet goes into an outburst.
“There are now a large number of surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility and the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory, that are monitoring parts of the sky every night.
These surveys can provide alerts if one of the comets changes brightness suddenly and then we can trigger the robotic telescopes of LCO to get us more detailed data and a longer look at the changing comet while the survey moves onto other areas of the sky,” explains Tim Lister. “The robotic telescopes and sophisticated software of LCO allow us to get images of a new event within 15 minutes of an alert. This lets us really study these outbursts as they evolve.”
An orbital diagram showing the path of Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) through the Solar System. The comets’ path is shown in gray when it is below the plane of the planets and in bold white when it is above the plane. Credit: National Aeronautics Space Agency (US).
Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network is an integrated set of robotic telescopes, distributed around the world. The network currently includes two 2-meter telescopes, sited in Hawaii and eastern Australia, nine 1-meter telescopes, sited in Chile, South Africa, eastern Australia, and Texas, and three 0.4-meter telescopes, sited in Chile and the Canary Islands.
What are the basic building blocks of our cosmos, and how do they interact? What happens at the smallest levels, and what hidden potential lies therein? How did our universe evolve, and what may the future hold? Particle physics research seeks that knowledge.
Scientists supported by the U.S. Department of Energy tackle these fundamental mysteries at universities and national labs across the country. They build state-of-the-art experiments that yield incredible discoveries and achievements. Along the way, they create new technologies, applications, and a highly trained workforce.
In the past, these technologies have found uses in areas as diverse as consumer electronics and medicine. When J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, few could imagine that one day life might largely revolve around devices built around it. When accelerator magnets were engineered to power the discovery of new particles, few foresaw their spinoff to new life-saving roles in MRI machines and cancer treatment. While today’s basic research delves into the fundamentals of our cosmos, it too may reveal knowledge that we will build on in tomorrow’s breakthroughs.
Perhaps the most well-known physics discovery of the past decade was that of the Higgs boson. It’s a long sought after particle that helps give rise to much of the mass in the universe. Hundreds of scientists at DOE labs and universities were part of the international teams that co-discovered the particle in 2012. Scientists have since learned much about how the Higgs boson lives, decays, and interacts with other particles. U.S. researchers were also instrumental in building the accelerator technology that made the intense high-energy beams of particles. They’re now making upgrades to the Large Hadron Collider’s particle accelerators and detectors, building innovative equipment and setting world records along the way.
In the U.S., particle physicists have also built on and expanded prior knowledge. Earlier this year, the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab provided further proof of an anomaly discovered 20 years ago at Brookhaven Lab. Researchers found that muons (the heavier cousins of electrons) behave in a way that scientists’ best theory does not predict—possibly because of new subatomic particles or forces at work.
Another class of particles known as neutrinos also display odd properties that hint at new physics. Researchers want to figure out whether these particles were key players in how our universe evolved, particularly if they’re the reason matter exists at all. The recent operation at CERN of a house-sized neutrino detector called ProtoDUNE successfully demonstrated the novel technology needed to help answer that question.
Together with our international partners, we will use it to build the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment here in the U.S. It’s a project made possible by the world’s most intense high-energy neutrino beam.
Researchers also gather more clues on the nature of dark matter, which makes up most of the mass in the universe. Using a gigantic, ultrasensitive camera developed at our national labs, the Dark Energy Survey produced the largest dark matter maps of the cosmos.
_____________________________________________________________________________________ Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is an international, collaborative effort to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thousands of supernovae, and find patterns of cosmic structure that will reveal the nature of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our Universe. DES began searching the Southern skies on August 31, 2013.
According to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, gravity should lead to a slowing of the cosmic expansion. Yet, in 1998, two teams of astronomers studying distant supernovae made the remarkable discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. To explain cosmic acceleration, cosmologists are faced with two possibilities: either 70% of the universe exists in an exotic form, now called dark energy, that exhibits a gravitational force opposite to the attractive gravity of ordinary matter, or General Relativity must be replaced by a new theory of gravity on cosmic scales.
DES is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia are working on the project. The collaboration built and is using an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes, to carry out the project.
Over six years (2013-2019), the DES collaboration used 758 nights of observation to carry out a deep, wide-area survey to record information from 300 million galaxies that are billions of light-years from Earth. The survey imaged 5000 square degrees of the southern sky in five optical filters to obtain detailed information about each galaxy. A fraction of the survey time is used to observe smaller patches of sky roughly once a week to discover and study thousands of supernovae and other astrophysical transients.
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A suite of current and upcoming experiments – including ADMX, DESI, the Vera Rubin Observatory, LZ and SuperCDMS – is poised to reveal dark matter’s secrets through direct detection and further mapping of matter.
These maps of the celestial distribution of matter also help us understand the properties of the mysterious dark energy responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Our national labs also use their expertise in the quantum world to make important strides in quantum information science. The launch of the National Quantum Initiative has emphasized the importance of QIS to the nation’s cybersecurity and economic competitiveness. Scientists, engineers, and technicians at five new national quantum centers are working to build everything from quantum sensors to computers. They implement particle accelerator technologies and new computing algorithms while training a quantum workforce. A crucial step on the way to a viable quantum internet, DOE-funded researchers even made the first demonstration of sustained high-fidelity quantum teleportation.
While used in particle physics to smash particles together, accelerator technology also has applications in medicine, energy, national security, and materials science. In medicine alone, accelerators are used in imaging devices, radiation treatment for cancer, and X-ray beams to develop more effective drugs. Investments in accelerator research improve our current facilities as well as pursue advances that could result in new technologies. For example, laser-driven plasma wake field technology may be able to make the length of an accelerator 2,000 times smaller than today’s machines. Our accelerator stewardship program helps make this technology more widely available to science and industry.
Applications for the new knowledge gained by basic physics research are broad and transform society, yet are difficult to predict. They go hand-in-hand with answering one of our most fundamental questions: How does this universe work?
Stem Education Coalition
The mission of the Energy Department is to ensure America’s security and prosperity by addressing its energy, environmental and nuclear challenges through transformative science and technology solutions.
Science Programs Organization
The Office of Science manages its research portfolio through six program offices:
Advanced Scientific Computing Research
Basic Energy Sciences
Biological and Environmental Research
Fusion Energy Sciences
High Energy Physics
Nuclear Physics
The Science Programs organization also includes the following offices:
The Department of Energy’s Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer Programs, which the Office of Science manages for the Department;
The Workforce Development for Teachers and Students program sponsors programs helping develop the next generation of scientists and engineers to support the DOE mission, administer programs, and conduct research; and
The Office of Project Assessment provides independent advice to the SC leadership regarding those activities essential to constructing and operating major research facilities.
NOIRLabNSF NOIRLab NOAO Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory(CL) approximately 80 km to the East of La Serena, Chile, at an altitude of 2200 meters. 
Timeline of the Inflationary Universe WMAP. 
Saul Perlmutter (center) [The Supernova Cosmology Project] shared the 2006 Shaw Prize in Astronomy, the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, and the 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with Brian P. Schmidt (right) and Adam Riess (left) [The High-z Supernova Search Team] for providing evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
Fritz Zwicky.
Coma cluster via NASA/ESA Hubble, the original example of Dark Matter discovered during observations by Fritz Zwicky and confirmed 30 years later by Vera Rubin.
Astronomer Vera Rubin at the Lowell Observatory in 1965, worked on Dark Matter (The Carnegie Institution for Science).
Vera Rubin measuring spectra, worked on Dark Matter(Emilio Segre Visual Archives AIP SPL).
Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search from DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University at SNOLAB (Vale Inco Mine, Sudbury, Canada). 
DAMA at Gran Sasso uses sodium iodide housed in copper to hunt for dark matter LNGS-INFN. 
Yale HAYSTAC axion dark matter experiment at Yale’s Wright Lab. 
The LBNL LZ Dark Matter Experiment Dark Matter project at SURF, Lead, SD. 
PandaX II Dark Matter experiment at Jin-ping Underground Laboratory (CJPL) in Sichuan, China. 
FNAL Don Lincoln.
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