New clue to explain our existence

New York, May 18 (ANI): Scientists say they have come across a clue that could help explain why the universe is comprised of matter and not antimatter.

According to the researchers, arriving at that answer could reveal why we even exist.

The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory researchers say collisions of protons and anti-protons produce pairs of particles called muons more frequently than they produce anti-muons.

“This result may provide an important input for explaining the matter dominance in our universe,” The New York Times quoted Guennadi Borissov, a co-leader of the study from England”s Lancaster University, said Friday at the Fermi lab in Batavia, Ill, as saying.

Gustaaf Brooijmans of Columbia University, who is a member of the research team, says the world”s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, will help move the research forward.

“This is something we should be able to poke at with the Large Hadron Collider,” Brooijmans said.

Joe Lykken, a theorist at Fermilab, agrees the potential for a significant breakthrough in answering why we exist is great.

“So I would not say that this announcement is the equivalent of seeing the face of God, but it might turn out to be the toe of God,” Lykken said.

The results have now been posted on the Internet and submitted to the Physical Review. (ANI)

‘Big Bang Machine’ all set to start operations tomorrow

London, March 29 (ANI): Reports indicate that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), popularly known as the ‘Big Bang Machine’, is all set to start operations aimed for record-breaking high-energy particle experiments on March 30, after an 18-month delay for repairs.

According to a report in The Guardian, operators of the LHC have set Tuesday morning as the moment the machine will attempt to steer speeding particles into head-on collisions, creating microscopic bursts of energy that mimic conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

The start of high-energy operations at the collider marks the end of a frustrating 18-month delay for physicists who saw the machine shut down for essential repair work following an explosion at the laboratory in September 2008, just nine days after it was first switched on.

The 6 billion pounds collider, which occupies a 17-mile (27km) circular tunnel 100m beneath the French-Swiss border, accelerated two counter-rotating beams of protons to an unprecedented energy of 3.5tn electron volts (TeV) last week.

On Tuesday, the beams will be crossed for the first time in the highest-energy man-made collisions ever.

The incident that closed the machine was caused by a short circuit that led to a tonne of liquid helium bursting into the collider tunnel.

Repair work and extra protection systems cost the laboratory 24 million pounds.

The machine was designed to collide two 7 TeV beams of protons, but laboratory managers decided in January to operate the machine at half power until the end of 2011.

The machine will then close for a year of further engineering work to ensure it can run at full power in 2013 without breaking down again.

For scientists at CERN and elsewhere, the beginning of high-energy collisions on Tuesday will end a long period of working without any real data.

Until recently, many physicists have had to make do with computer simulations of particle collisions.

“There’s a lot of anticipation here. Everything’s been pent up for a while and everyone’s ready and eager to get some real data,” said David Wardrope, a British physicist at Cern who completed his PhD at the laboratory last year.

“So far, everything is looking good. We can do some real science now,” he added.

The LHC is expected to make new discoveries about the laws of physics at the highest energies and smallest scales ever probed.

Physicists hope these will help them decide which of their theories of nature are right and which should be junked. (ANI)

Mystery of Milky Way’s particle accelerators solved

Munich, June 26 (ANI): With help of a unique “ballistic study” that combines data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope and NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have now solved a long-standing mystery of the Milky Way’s particle accelerators.

The study shows that cosmic rays from our galaxy are very efficiently accelerated in the remnants of exploded stars.

Galactic cosmic rays come from sources inside our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and consist mostly of protons moving at close to the speed of light, the “ultimate speed limit” in the Universe.

“It has long been thought that the super-accelerators that produce these cosmic rays in the Milky Way are the expanding envelopes created by exploded stars, but our observations reveal the smoking gun that proves it,” said Eveline Helder from the Astronomical Institute Utrecht of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, the first author of the new study.

“You could even say that we have now confirmed the caliber of the gun used to accelerate cosmic rays to their tremendous energies,” said collaborator Jacco Vink, also from the Astronomical Institute Utrecht.

“When a star explodes in what we call a supernova a large part of the explosion energy is used for accelerating some particles up to extremely high energies,” said Helder.

“The energy that is used for particle acceleration is at the expense of heating the gas, which is therefore much colder than theory predicts,” she added.

The researchers looked at the remnant of a star that exploded in AD 185, as recorded by Chinese astronomers.

The remnant, called RCW 86, is located about 8200 light-years away towards the constellation of Circinus (the Drawing Compass). It is probably the oldest record of the explosion of a star.

Using ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the team measured the temperature of the gas right behind the shock wave created by the stellar explosion.

They measured the speed of the shock wave as well, using images taken with NASA’s X-ray Observatory Chandra three years apart.

They found it to be moving at between 10 and 30 million km/h, between 1 and 3 percent the speed of light.

The temperature of the gas turned out to be 30 million degrees Celsius.

This is quite hot compared to everyday standards, but much lower than expected, given the measured shock wave’s velocity. This should have heated the gas up to at least half a billion degrees.

“The missing energy is what drives the cosmic rays,” concluded Vink. (ANI)