Monday 11 April 2016

New tool refines exoplanet search

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Planet-hunting is an ongoing process that's resulting in the discovery of more and more planets orbiting distant stars. But as the hunters learn more about the variety among the tremendous number of predicted planets out there, it's important to refine their techniques. New work reports on a technological upgrade for one method of finding planets or confirming other planetary detections.
via Science Daily
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Astronomers discover mysterious alignment of black holes

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Deep radio imaging has revealed that supermassive black holes in a region of the distant universe are all spinning out radio jets in the same direction -- most likely a result of primordial mass fluctuations in the early universe.
via Science Daily
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Hot super-Earths stripped by host stars: 'Cooked' planets shrink due to radiation

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Astrophysicists have used data from the NASA Kepler space telescope to discover a class of extrasolar planets whose atmospheres have been stripped away by their host stars, according to new research.
via Science Daily
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Too quiet to hear a particle drop

An event display showing the first collisions after the 2015 year-end technical stop as seen by the CMS experiment (Image: CERN)

Since 25 March 2016 the LHC has quietly been sending bunches of particles back into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) beam pipe.

Last week, due to a number of innovative developments and impressive work from those involved in the restart, the beam was ramped up earlier than expected to an energy of 6.5 TeV.

As of Friday 8 April 2016 physicists were confident to move to the next stage of the restart – fine-tuning the set-up for colliding beams.

To do this they circulate a small number of particle bunches around the LHC and bring them into collision at top energy. Full-scale data taking by the experiments is not possible at this stage but these early tests, known as ‘quiet beams’, give the experiments their first sight of collisions.

The design of the LHC allows more than 2800 bunches of protons to circulate in each beam at a time. But the LHC Operations team will start collision tests with just one or two bunches per beam to be certain that the beams are colliding properly and that they know the exact points that the beams interact.

In the meantime, the large LHC experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb will use the test data to check specific parts of their detectors for the upcoming physics run.

The LHC Operations team plans to declare "stable beams" in the coming weeks – the signal for the LHC experiments to start taking physics data again.

 


via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.cern/about/updates/2016/04/too-quiet-hear-particle-drop

The Comet and the Star Cluster

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Past and present moons

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Space science image of the week: Did Saturn’s rings form from a moon that broke apart?
via ESA Space Science
http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/04/Saturn_s_past_and_present_moons