Stalking dark matter with the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider.
Now that they’ve identified the Higgs boson, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) – the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator – have set their sights on an even more elusive target.
What exactly is the Higgs boson?
All around us is dark matter and dark energy — the invisible stuff that binds the galaxy together, but which no one has been able to directly detect. LianTao Wang is a University of Chicago professor of physics who studies how to find signals in large particle accelerators like the LHC.
Wang said: “We know for sure there’s a dark world, and there’s more energy in it than there is in ours.”
Wang, along with scientists from the University of Chicago and affiliated Fermilab, think they may be able to lead us to its tracks; in a paper published April 3, 2019, in Physical Review Letters, they laid out an innovative method for stalking dark matter in the LHC by exploiting a potential particle’s slightly slower speed.
In case you missed it, NASA took their new Mars 2020 Rover for a walk through the streets of New York City last month.
Now NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories) reports that Mars 2020 engineers are outfitting Mars 2020 Rover with an antenna so it can phone home with a bit more ease allowing it to “point itself directly at Earth to uplink or downlink data.”
The image was taken on April 19, 2019, in the Spacecraft Assembly Facility’s High Bay 1 clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.
JPL is building and will manage operations of the Mars 2020 rover for the NASA Science Mission Directorate at the agency’s headquarters in Washington.
See more information about the mission, see: Mars 2020 Mission
See more Mars 2020 images, including the projected Ares 3 Landing site.
Mission facts:
Launch Window: July 17 – Aug. 5 2020
Launch Location: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida
Landing: Feb. 18, 2021
Landing Site: Jezero Crater, Mars
Mission Duration: At least one Mars year (about 687 Earth days)
In case you missed last night, I’ll re-up this for the Canary.
The skies are primed to present a dazzling Eta Aquarids meteor shower, which are the particles of debris and dust from Halley’s Comet.
From CNN:
With a new moon allowing a black background starting Saturday the display should be highly visible. Both Saturday night/Sunday morning and Sunday night/Monday morning should be great for skywatchers.
EarthSky says the most meteors could fall before dawn on (or near) May 5.
It’s in the constellation Aquarius, in the southeast before dawn.
NASA says the shower reaches its peak the morning of the 6th.
Things to watch for in May, like a “once in a Blue Moon” full moon is going to rise on May 18.
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Published 2 May 2019