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21st Century Astronomy
- Thread starter Leongsam
- Start date
Seeing the Aurora lights is something that I hope to cross out from my black book if not this year then in the next year. Be that in Canada or Iceland I do not know yet. Likely to be in an outdoor hotspring where ever that might be.
The Great Observatories have been combined efforts of Western and other major countries. Great as PRC space prog is, the Chinese alone will not be able to match International collaboration efforts of Webb, Chandra, Spitzer, ALMA kind of efforts.
I keep my fingers crossed and pray that Webb be operational and a landing on Europa made before our Earth go upside down in a tsunami of global warmings and other environmental disasters.
Sinkiie,
even without the haze, Singapore skies were finished for any astronomy other than wayang wayang astronomy as far back as 1980.
For all yr mum's organs that you've mentioned, you can't even answer my question and jumping to this thread???
Is my question so complicated for you to answer? Or yr brains is just full of yr mum's organs?
bro ur really lucky to see skies like that "live" and not in some video.
i think its too late for our planet too, at the current rate of consumption and pollution, clear skies will become a luxury.
side note - if you can get hold of some night vision device, its quite good for star gazing too =)
After monkeying about with reflector and then with 3" refractor and then Maksutov, I grown to accept for laid back person like me, my best equipment remains a Mk 1 eyeball, even if eyeball needed much work or lenses in lieu. I just could not trust the Lasik. If glasses bad, can always change glasses.
Of course, much work in search of good enough skies. But since I like going to wild areas for leisure, not too much problem for me.
A good Nikon 7x35 , which is also light and good for birds come in handy as well.
For fabulous stunning shots of deep space, I go to the Internet and forage there instead of relying on puny 6" like before.
wish you all the best in ur star gazing, and hope you see the northern lights soon!
Those that like deep space
Check their other photos in this series
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/space-photo-of-the-day-2/?pid=6293
Check their other photos in this series
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/01/space-photo-of-the-day-2/?pid=6293
<nyt_text style="color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, serif;">http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/31/s...-scientists-say-proudly.html?pagewanted=print
October 30, 2013
Dark Matter Experiment Has Detected Nothing, Researchers Say Proudly
By DENNIS OVERBYE
The former Homestake Gold Mine in Lead, S.D., has a hallowed place in the history of physics as a spot where nothing happens.
It was there, in the 1970s, that Raymond Davis Jr. attempted to catch neutrinos, spooky subatomic particles emitted by the sun, in a vat of cleaning fluid a mile underground and for a long time came up empty. For revolutionizing the study of those particles, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2002.
On Wednesday, an international team of physicists based in the same cavern of the former mine announced a new milestone of frustration, but also hope — this time in the search for dark matter, the mysterious, invisible ingredient that astronomers say makes up a quarter of the cosmos.
In the first three months of running the biggest, most sensitive dark matter detector yet — a vat of 368 kilograms of liquid xenon cooled to minus 150 degrees Fahrenheit — the researchers said they had not seen a trace of the clouds of particles that theorists say should be wafting through space, the galaxy, the Earth and, of course, ourselves, knocking out at least one controversial class of dark matter candidates.
But the experiment has just begun and will run for all of next year. The detector, already twice as sensitive as the next best one, will gain another factor of sensitivity in the coming run.
“Just because we don’t see anything in the first run doesn’t mean we won’t see anything in the second,” said Richard Gaitskell, a professor of physics at Brown University and a spokesman for an international collaboration that operates the experiment known as LUX, for the Large Underground Xenon dark matter experiment.
As has become de rigueur for such occasions, the scientists took pride and hope in how clearly they did not see anything. “In 25 years of searching, this is the cleanest signal I’ve ever seen,” Dr. Gaitskell said in an interview.
That meant, the scientists said, that their detector was working so well that they would easily see a dark matter particle if and when it decided to drop by.
In this case, they had support from outside scientists. Neal Weiner, a particle theorist at New York University, called the results impressive.
“They have not found dark matter,” he said. “There is nothing smacking you in the face to make you think there is something there.” But as the sensitivity of the detector increases, he added, “If there is anything in there, it should become apparent.”
The announcement at the Homestake site capped a morning of ceremony, which included Gov. Dennis Daugaard of South Dakota and members of the State Legislature, at what amounted to a coming-out party for LUX and for the Sanford Underground Research Facility, a lab being developed in the old mine with a mix of state and private money, as well as support from the Energy Department. The lab is named after the philanthropist T. Denny Sanford, who donated $70 million to get it going.
LUX is the latest in a long series of ever-larger experiments that have occupied and taunted the world’s physicists over the last few years. They are all in abandoned mines or other underground places to shield them from cosmic rays, which could cause false alarms. Daniel McKinsey, an associate professor of physics at Yale and a spokesman for the LUX group, said in an interview that the biggest source of noise in the LUX device was trace radioactivity in the detector itself.
Larger instruments are already on the drawing boards of LUX and other collaborations, but physicists say the experiments are already sensitive enough to test some versions of dark matter that have been proposed, including the idea that dark particles interact with ordinary matter by exchanging the recently discovered Higgs boson. Dr. Weiner said he held his breath every time new results from a dark matter experiment were released.
Dark matter has teased and tantalized physicists since the 1970s, when it was demonstrated that some invisible material must be providing the gravitational glue to hold galaxies together. Determining what it is would provide insight into particles and forces not described by the Standard Model that now rules physics, not to mention a slew of Nobel Prizes.
Physicists’ best guess is that this dark matter consists of clouds of exotic subatomic particles left over from the Big Bang and known generically as WIMPs, for weakly interacting massive particles, which would weigh several hundred times as much as a proton but could nevertheless pass through the Earth like smoke through a screen door. They are a generic feature of a much-hyped idea known as supersymmetry.
Particle physicists have been hoping to produce these particles or other evidence of supersymmetry in the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva or to read their signature in cosmic rays from outer space. No one has ever claimed to have seen such a heavy WIMP, in space or underground, but another experiment in another mine, the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search, claims to have recorded three events that could have been low-mass dark matter particles, only a few times heavier than a proton.
The new results from the Homestake mine, if they are correct, would rule out those low-mass particles. Dr. Gaitskell explained that if those particles were real, the Homestake detector would have recorded 1,550 of them.
“If there are 1,550 of them, boy are we going to see them,” he said in a presentation at the Homestake facility on Wednesday. “We do not see the low-mass WIMPS.”
But afterward, Juan I. Collar, a dark matter specialist at the University of Chicago who has been urging the community to take low-mass WIMPs seriously, questioned whether the LUX detector had been adequately calibrated to detect them.
“They do have a real interest in performing those calibrations, because they would settle the issue,” Dr. Collar said in an email. “We just have to be patient. At the end they promised to do so, and I have no doubts they will.”
For now, a quarter of the universe is still missing in action.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 31, 2013
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the time period of the experiment that the researchers based their findings on. It was 85 days, not 110 days.
</nyt_text>
Gravity waves have not been detected either to now.
That doesnt mean that G W do not exist.
That God particle remained hidden by God (or gods) for long long time.
Despite trying and trying for 30-40 years with bigger and bigger machines.
Lucky they did not give up and we finally got enough of glimpse of that and that 80++ year old man can get his Nobel prize finally. Perhaps he should use some of that
money to buy a mobile phone so people can reach him more easily in future and he need not rely on people walking by him to tell him good news.
I think we will find the GW and hear the screams of dying black holes with next generation of LIGO before we know Black Matter.
They should rather search for Black Energy as after all, there is twice as much of B E than B M
And I suspect they find B M to be B E incarnate. Like head is the other side of tail on the same coin.
That doesnt mean that G W do not exist.
That God particle remained hidden by God (or gods) for long long time.
Despite trying and trying for 30-40 years with bigger and bigger machines.
Lucky they did not give up and we finally got enough of glimpse of that and that 80++ year old man can get his Nobel prize finally. Perhaps he should use some of that
money to buy a mobile phone so people can reach him more easily in future and he need not rely on people walking by him to tell him good news.
I think we will find the GW and hear the screams of dying black holes with next generation of LIGO before we know Black Matter.
They should rather search for Black Energy as after all, there is twice as much of B E than B M
And I suspect they find B M to be B E incarnate. Like head is the other side of tail on the same coin.
They found dark matter!
Found it ten years ago but they had eyes that did not see that time.
Hints of cold dark matter pop up in 10-year-old circuit
http://www.newscientist.com/article...&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS&#.UqEaBuIomI9
Found it ten years ago but they had eyes that did not see that time.
Hints of cold dark matter pop up in 10-year-old circuit
http://www.newscientist.com/article...&utm_medium=NLC&utm_source=NSNS&#.UqEaBuIomI9
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Thanks. When it is nailed down, it will most probably be from an experiment that was looking for something completely different.
Their equipment is not a fraction as sexy as the failure you earlier quoted.
If you recall , the remnants of the BIG BANG was found when Penzias and Wilson were looking if pigeon shit caused some noise in their instrument.
I love that story and the images of the huge funnel are classic.
Unfortunately electrodynamics was my weakest paper when I was at Uni. While I loved the subject, I didn't have sufficient mastery of the equations to do anything productive in that field.
How the screams of dying black holes will be heard.
Pity we not likely to hear that as thats planned for 2028.
And by then, we will have a lot of other things to worry as global warming will hit home within 3 years and ponding on roads even without rain will likely to be a meter to 2 meters.
By then, rice growing land in Thailand will all be gone and we all can go skinny dipping at the North Pole.
This 2014 World Cup in Brazil might well be the very last World Cup.
BUT might be interesting for those who wonder how to hear those screams of dying black holes.
Imperial scientists are working on a space mission that will listen to violent cosmic events that send out ripples in the very fabric of the universe
Gaia 'billion star surveyor' set for launch
Europe is about to launch the Gaia satellite - one of the most ambitious space missions in history.
Europe is about to launch the Gaia satellite - one of the most ambitious space missions in history.
Four things you might not know about dark matter
How much do you really know about dark matter? Symmetry looks at one of the biggest remaining mysteries in particle physics.
How much do you really know about dark matter? Symmetry looks at one of the biggest remaining mysteries in particle physics.
GPS satellites suggest Earth is heavy with dark matter
http://www.newscientist.com/article...-suggest-earth-is-heavy-with-dark-matter.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article...-suggest-earth-is-heavy-with-dark-matter.html
Surely you don't believe in all the bullshit about global warming.
It is hard for me to argue with anyone when I hope, when I pray I am wrong.
But words can lie.
Footsteps never lie.
And the march of CO2 is on going and not stopping
At mid 60, my life is irrelevent and I live on borrowed time.
My main purpose of life now is to enjoy every day and week and month of time left to us.
What about the rest of you all?
YOU BETTER PRAY AND PRAY THAT I AM WRONG.
ESPECIALLY THOSE WITH LITTLE KIDS
