Feature Channels: Particle Physics

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A cloud of gas 300,000 light-years long is arching around the Milky Way, shunted away from two dwarf galaxies orbiting our own. For decades, astronomers have wanted to know which of the two galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, is the source of the gas that has been expelled as the two galaxies gravitationally pull at one another. The answer will help astronomers understand how galaxies form and change over time.

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TRIUMF welcomed Her Excellency the Right Honourable Julie Payette, Governor General of Canada, as part of her first official visit to British Columbia. 

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Scientists at Rutgers University–New Brunswick and elsewhere are at a crossroads in their 50-year quest to go beyond the Standard Model in physics.

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Researchers from TU Delft and Rijksmuseum Boerhaave have solved an age-old mystery surrounding Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes. A unique collaboration at the interface between culture and science has proved conclusively that the linen trader and amateur scholar from Delft ground and used his own thin lenses.

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A new particle detector design proposed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab could greatly broaden the search for dark matter – which makes up 85 percent of the total mass of the universe yet we don’t know what it’s made of – into an unexplored realm.

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In this week’s issue of Journal of Applied Physics, investigators report the discovery of a new material that may be able to directly detect dark matter. The material, known as a scintillator, should be sensitive to dark matter that is lighter than a proton. This will allow the search for dark matter to enter a largely unexplored mass range, below that of the proton.

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Precise weighing of very rare titanium isotopes has revealed subtle behaviours that have stymied predictions of the most successful theories of nuclear matter.

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Announcement describes completion of construction of FLARE, a powerful new machine to study magnetic reconnection.

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As missions with human crews are planned for deep-space, new research from the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center cautions that radiation exposure is much higher than previously thought and could have serious implications on both satellites and future astronauts.

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Stephen Hawking's genius and indomitable energy were an inspiration to the entire Perimeter Institute research community and to millions around the world.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have identified a very rare and odd assemblage of stars that has remained essentially unchanged for the past 10 billion years. The diffuse stellar island, galaxy NGC 1277, provides valuable new insights into the origin and evolution of galaxies billions of years ago.

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Working together, Miller, Boehme, Vardeny and their colleagues have shown that an organic-based magnet can carry waves of quantum mechanical magnetization, called magnons, and convert those waves to electrical signals. It’s a breakthrough for the field of magnonics (electronic systems that use magnons instead of electrons) because magnons had previously been sent through inorganic materials that are more difficult to handle.

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Most of the water in the universe floats in vast reservoirs called molecular clouds. It coats the surface of dust grains, turning them into cosmic snowflakes. When stars and planets form, those snowflakes get swept up, delivering key ingredients for life. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will map water and other cosmic ices to gain new insights into these building blocks for habitable planets.

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Part of NASA’s historic Juno mission to Jupiter, the Weizmann Institute's Prof. Yohai Kaspi and colleagues have revealed that the depth of Jupiter’s winds is far greater than expected.

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Astronomers have used Hubble to uncover a vast, complex dust structure, about 150 billion miles across, enveloping the young star HR 4796A. A bright, narrow, inner ring of dust is already known to encircle the star and may have been corralled by the gravitational pull of an unseen giant planet. This newly discovered huge structure around the system may have implications for what this yet-unseen planetary system looks like around the 8-million-year-old star, which is in its formative years of planet construction.

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Join astronomer Emily Levesque for a live webcast March 7 that will explore some of the most puzzling and bizarre objects being studied by astronomers today.

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Scientists at Queen’s University Belfast have led an international team to the ground-breaking discovery that magnetic waves crashing through the Sun may be key to heating its atmosphere and propelling the solar wind.

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University of Notre Dame researchers are using neutrons at ORNL to study how specialized molecules might improve petroleum production processes, as well as their potential uses in advanced photovoltaic technologies. Specifically, they want to know what effects functionalized molecules called petroporphyrins have on asphaltenes—darkly colored, high-molecular-weight molecules abundant in heavy crude oil.

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Scientists using NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes have found a larger than expected amount of water in the atmosphere of WASP-39b, a hot, bloated, Saturn-mass exoplanet located about 700 light-years from Earth. Though no planet like this resides in our solar system, WASP-39b can provide new insights into how and where planets form around a star.

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Using NERSC supercomputers, astrophysicists at Berkeley Lab and the University of Portsmouth discovered how to control the effects of "micolensing." Armed with this knowledge they believe they will be able to find 1000 strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae in real-time from LSST data--that's 20 times more than previous expectations.

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The CUORE experiment set the tightest limits yet on the rare decay of tellurium-130, providing insights into the nature of neutrinos.

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Fifty years after pulsar discovery published, massive new data set moves closer to finding very-low-frequency gravitational waves, researchers say.

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Using data from ALMA, a team of astronomers discovered that a powerful stellar flare erupted from Proxima Centauri last March.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have made the most precise measurement to date of the rate at which the universe is expanding the big bang. This may mean that there's something unknown about the makeup of the universe. The new numbers remain at odds with independent measurements of the early universe's expansion.

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Neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe and could reveal insight into physics beyond the Standard Model. However, they’re incredibly difficult to detect. While most neutrino detectors are very large, two experiments supported by the Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are poised to demonstrate that even modest neutrino experiments can make big discoveries.

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Three billion miles away on the farthest known major planet in our solar system, an ominous, dark storm is shrinking out of existence as seen in pictures of Neptune taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Immense dark storms on Neptune were first discovered in the late 1980s by the Voyager 2 spacecraft. Since then, only Hubble has tracked these elusive features that play a game of peek-a-boo over the years.

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Article describes dissertation award for graduate of Princeton University Department of Astrophysical Sciences.

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West Virginia University alumna Caitlin Ahrens (BS Geology and Physics, 2015) was chosen as the 2018 Jaycees Outstanding Young West Virginian for her role as a NASA ambassador and advocacy for young women in science.

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Forty-five years ago this month, a telescope tucked inside a 14-story, 500-ton dome atop a mile-high peak in Arizona took in the night sky for the first time and recorded its observations on glass photographic plates. Today, the dome closes on the previous science chapters of the 4-meter Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope and starts preparing for its new role in creating the largest 3-D map of the universe. This map could help determine why the universe is expanding at faster and faster rates, driven by an unknown force called dark energy.

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Today, the dome closes on the previous science chapters of the 4-meter Mayall Telescope in Arizona so that it can prepare for its new role in creating the largest 3-D map of the universe. This map could help to solve the mystery of dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe.

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Scientists working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)—the world’s largest particle collider, hosted at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory—have precisely measured the mass of the W boson, a particle that plays a weighty role in a delicate balancing act of the quantum universe.

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Nuclear physicists are using the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) to study particle interactions important to energy production in the Sun and stars and to propel the search for new physics discoveries. The research team using Titan, including principal investigator William Detmold of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is calculating proton-proton fusion—a process that powers the Sun and other stars in which two protons fuse to form a deuteron—and double beta decay, a rare process which occurs when an unstable nucleus decays by emitting two electrons with or without neutrinos (subatomic particles with near-zero mass).

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A particle physicist with extensive leadership and management experience, Asner will help expand a portfolio of physics programs and oversee instrumentation research and development.

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A research team at Case Western Reserve is asking an important question about the self-evident paradox standing in the way of our generally accepted theory of how the Earth's inner core formed. The "inner core nucleation paradox" suggests that there is now satisfactory solution to account for the existence of a solid inner core. So, now what?

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A research team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Rochester have provided the first experimental evidence for superionic conduction in water ice at planetary interior conditions, verifying a 30-year-old prediction.

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A study led by University of Colorado Boulder researchers provides new insight into the Moon's excessive equatorial bulge, a feature that solidified in place over four billion years ago as the Moon gradually distanced itself from the Earth.

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The Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program at the US Department of Energy’s Fermilab is further unraveling the mysteries of neutrinos with three vast detectors filled with ultrapure liquid argon.

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Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have conducted the first spectroscopic survey of the Earth-sized planets within the habitable zone around the nearby star TRAPPIST-1. Hubble reveals that at least three of the exoplanets (d, e, and f) do not seem to contain puffy, hydrogen-rich atmospheres similar to gaseous planets such as Neptune. The results, instead, favor more compact atmospheres like those of Earth, Venus, and Mars.

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An international team of astronomers has determined that Centaurus A, a massive elliptical galaxy 13 million light-years from Earth, is accompanied by a number of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting the main body in a narrow disk. In a paper published today in Science, the researchers note that this is the first time such a galactic arrangement has been observed outside the Local Group, home to the Milky Way.

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Supermassive black holes in some galaxies may eat orbiting stars at a rate of one per year in the period following a galactic merger.

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Prof. Emeritus Eugene Parker’s ideas were once widely questioned in the physics world. This week, he will receive one of the field’s highest honors. Parker will receive the American Physical Society’s Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research at a Feb. 1 ceremony in Washington, D.C. The medal citation notes Parker’s “fundamental contributions to space physics, plasma physics, solar physics and astrophysics for over 60 years.”

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Berkeley Lab physicists and their collaborators have demonstrated that computers are ready to tackle the universe’s greatest mysteries – they used neural networks to perform a deep dive into data simulating the subatomic particle soup that may have existed just microseconds after the big bang.

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Space physicists at University of Wisconsin-Madison have just released unprecedented detail on a bizarre phenomenon that powers the northern lights, solar flares and coronal mass ejections (the biggest explosions in our solar system).

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A new theory predicts that molecules are born in the winds with unique properties that enable them to adapt to and thrive in the hostile environment.

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Researchers used MAESTRO, an X-ray platform at Berkeley Lab, to zero in on signatures of exotic electronic behavior in a 2-D material. They found that the material may be highly tunable, with potential applications in spintronics and other emerging fields.

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