Feature Channels: Particle Physics

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Swirling around the young star Elias 2-27 is a stunning spiral-shape pinwheel of dust.

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Physics can often seem inconceivable. It’s a field of strange concepts and special terms. And to make things even more complicated, physics has repurposed a number of familiar English words. Not to worry! Here is a handy list of words that acquire a new meaning when spoken by physicists.

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The universe is expanding uniformly according to research led by UCL which reports that space isn’t stretching in a preferred direction or spinning.

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Besides providing substantive information about the atmospheres of other planets, cosmic dust particles can impact radio communications, climate and even serve as fertilizer for phytoplankton in the oceans. A team of researchers has developed a new experimental Meteoric Ablation Simulator (MASI) that can help answer questions about cosmic dust and how it impacts Earth and everything on it.

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LUX-ZEPLIN, an ultrasensitive dark matter detector, has cleared a major approval milestone and is on track to begin its mile-deep hunt for theoretical particles known as WIMPs in 2020.

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Researchers in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering have measured the twisting force, or torque, generated by light on a silicon chip. Their work holds promise for applications such as miniaturized gyroscopes and torsional sensors to measure magnetic field, which can have significant industrial and consumer impact.

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An international team of astronomers using ALMA has explored the same distant corner of the universe first revealed in the iconic image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

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Astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and a trick of nature, have confirmed the existence of a planet orbiting two stars in the system OGLE-2007-BLG-349, located 8,000 light-years away towards the center of our galaxy. The Hubble observations represent the first time such a three-body system has been confirmed using the gravitational microlensing technique.

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In a new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, scientists noticed that magnetic skyrmions – small electrically uncharged circular structures with a spiraling magnetic pattern – do get deflected by an applied current, much like a curveball gets deflected by airflow.

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Scientists have known for a long time that an atom or molecule can also be in two different states at once. Now researchers at the Stanford PULSE Institute and the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have exploited this Schroedinger’s Cat behavior to create X-ray movies of atomic motion with much more detail than ever before.

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An international team of researchers using ALMA and other telescopes has discovered the power source illuminating a so-called Lyman-alpha Blob – a rare, brightly glowing, and enormous concentration of gas in the distant universe.

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New data from ALMA reveal that the black hole at the center of a galaxy named NGC 1068 is actually the source of its own dusty torus of dust and gas, forged from material flung out of the black hole’s accretion disk.

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has approved nearly $10 million in funding to expand the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization Array (HERA) – a multinational experiment to study how primordial galaxies forever changed the very early universe. This investment will increase the number of HERA antennas from 19 to 240 by the year 2018.

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Clinking your glass of beer often leaves its contents sloshing back and forth. Soon, though, the motion stops, your drink settles, and you can sip without getting foam on your nose. The foam helps stop the sloshing, and now, physicists have figured out why. The analysis, published in Physics of Fluids, reveals a surprising effect on the surface of the water that contradicts conventional thought and deepens our understanding of the role of capillary forces.

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With three new detectors coming online in the next several years, scientists are confident they will collect enough geoneutrino data to measure Earth's fuel level

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When a NASA mission to the asteroid Bennu launches this month, Ithaca College Professor Beth Ellen Clark will be in charge of experiments that could reveal whether the roughly 500-meter-wide celestial body will collide with Earth in the next century.

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Using colors to identify the approximate ages of more than 130,000 stars in the Milky Way’s halo, University of Notre Dame astronomers have produced the clearest picture yet of how the galaxy formed more than 13.5 billion years ago.

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Over a hundred physicists from around the world came to the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory for two weeks in August to attend the 44th SLAC Summer Institute (SSI) on “New Horizons on the Energy Frontier.”

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The world's attention is now on Proxima Centauri b, a possibly Earth-like planet orbiting the closest star, 4.22 light-years away. The planet's orbit is just right to allow liquid water on its surface, needed for life. But could it in fact be habitable? If so, the planet evolved very different than Earth, say researchers at the University of Washington-based Virtual Planetary Laboratory where astronomers, geophysicists, climatologists, evolutionary biologists and others team to study how distant planets might host life.

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Astrophysicists have proposed a clever new way of shedding light on the mystery of dark matter, believed to make up most of the universe. The irony is they want to try to pin down the nature of this unexplained phenomenon by using another, a cosmic emanation known as “fast radio bursts.”