Wednesday 1 June 2016

How comets break up, make up

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A new study indicates the bodies of some periodic comets -- objects that orbit the sun in less than 200 years -- may regularly split in two, then reunite down the road.
via Science Daily
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Collapsing energy bands to explore their geometric structure

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Researchers have devised a straightforward method to probe the band geometry using ultracold atoms in an optical lattice.
via Science Daily

Elliptical galaxies not formed by merging

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Using an "intuitive" approach, a new study confirms a recent hypothesis on the formation of galaxies, according to which the larger elliptical galaxies formed in very ancient times through a process of local (in situ) star formation. This contradicts the current paradigm that they formed through the merging  of spiral galaxies, a view which, despite being generally accepted by most of the scientific community, has been a source of theoretical inconsistencies. The study supports the in situ hypothesis, already proposed with theoretical models, basing itself only on the analysis and interpolation of new data collected by the Herschel instrument (in the infrared) integrated with Hubble data (in the ultraviolet), an innovative yet simple method.
via Science Daily
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CERN hosts live reddit Q&A on CMS open data

Last week, CERN conducted its fourth "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) on the social media platform reddit, to discuss the public release of 300 terabytes of data from the CMS collaboration.

The latest release of research-quality open data received a huge response from the media as well as on reddit. With a large portion of the traffic to the CERN Open Data Portal in the last month coming from reddit itself, the AMA provided an opportunity to discuss the open-data release directly with interested members of this community.

For the AMA, reddit users posed questions to a panel including: Tibor Simko from CERN’s IT department, the lead developer of the CERN Open Data Portal that serves the data; Anxhela Dani from the CERN Scientific Information Services; CMS Data Preservation Coordinator Kati Lassila-Perini; and Tom McCauley from CMS.

Questions ranged from what the biggest challenges on making 300TB of data available to the public were, to whether any of the public analysis has had surprising results.

One user wanted to know what CMS hoped the open data would be used for and how the data that were made public were selected.

“We are hoping to see scientific studies and to see them used in education. The data made open is not actually a small selection, it is approximately half of the collision data we've collected for each year of data taking.” - Kati Lassila-Perini

The CERN Open Data Portal makes public the data from experiments at the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), along with the software and documentation needed to analyse them.

For more on CERN Open Data, check out:

 


via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.cern/about/updates/2016/06/cern-hosts-live-reddit-qa-cms-open-data

Tycho's Supernova Remnant Expands

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