Friday 17 June 2016

Astrophysicists release new study of one of the first stars

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A research team has used the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope to study key regions of the ultraviolet spectrum of a star thought to have been enriched by elements from one of the first generation of stars.
via Science Daily
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NASA Unveils Plans for Electric-Powered Plane

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The agency announced plans for an all-electric airplane as part of efforts to make aviation more efficient and less of a polluter.
via New York Times

NASA's Juno spacecraft to risk Jupiter's fireworks for science

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On July 4, NASA will fly a solar-powered spacecraft the size of a basketball court within 2,900 miles (4,667 kilometers) of the cloud tops of our solar system's largest planet. During the flybys, Juno will probe beneath the obscuring cloud cover of Jupiter and study its auroras to learn more about the planet's origins, structure, atmosphere and magnetosphere.
via Science Daily
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Small asteroid is Earth's constant companion

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A small asteroid has been discovered in an orbit around the sun that keeps it as a constant companion of Earth, and it will remain so for centuries to come.
via Science Daily
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First beam enters unique AWAKE experiment

How black hole jets break out of their galaxies

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A simulation of the powerful jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centres of the largest galaxies explains why some burst forth as bright beacons visible across the universe, while others fall apart and never pierce the halo of the galaxy. About 10 per cent of all galaxies with active nuclei – all presumed to have supermassive black holes within the central bulge – are observed to have jets of gas spurting in opposite directions from the core. The hot ionized gas is propelled by the twisting magnetic fields of the rotating black hole, which can be as large as several billion suns.
via Science Daily
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Unexpected Excess of Giant Planets in Star Cluster Messier 67

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Astronomers have found that there are far more planets of the hot Jupiter type than expected in a cluster of stars called Messier 67. This surprising result was obtained using a number of telescopes and instruments. The denser environment in a cluster will cause more frequent interactions between planets and nearby stars, which may explain the excess of hot Jupiters.
via Science Daily
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Comet PanSTARRS in the Southern Fish

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Now approaching our fair planet this Comet PanSTARRS (C/2013 X1) will come closest on June 21-22, a mere 5.3 light-minutes away. By then its appearance low in northern hemisphere predawn skies (high in the south), will be affected by the light of a nearly Full Moon, though. Still the comet's pretty green coma is about the apparent size of the Full Moon in this telescopic portrait, captured on June 12 from the southern hemisphere's Siding Spring Observatory. The deep image also follows a broad, whitish dust tail up and toward the left in the frame, sweeping away from the Sun and trailing behind the comet's orbit. Buffeted by the solar wind, a fainter, narrow ion tail extends horizontally toward the right. On the left edge, the brightest star is bluish Iota Picis Austrini. Shining at about fourth magnitude, that star is visible to the unaided eye in the constellation of the Southern Fish.
Tomorrow's picture: pixels in space
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Happy Birthday SPS!

40 years ago this week, the Super Proton Synchrotron accelerated its first particles (Image: Piotr Traczyk/CERN)

The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), CERN’s second-largest accelerator, is celebrating its 40th birthday. But the 7-kilometre-circumference accelerator is not getting a break for the occasion: it will continue to supply the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and several fixed-target experiments with protons and heavy ions.

The SPS began life in a particularly spectacular fashion. On 17 June 1976, the machine, a giant among its contemporaries, accelerated protons to 300 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) for the first time. During his announcement of the successful start-up to the CERN Council, the Director-General, John Adams, who had led the design of the SPS, requested authorisation to increase the brand-new accelerator’s energy. Just a few minutes later, it reached an energy of 400 GeV.

A second key moment for the accelerator came five years later, when, in a real technological masterstroke, it was transformed into a proton-antiproton collider. This revolutionary collider allowed the discovery of the W and Z bosons two years later, an achievement for which the Nobel prize was awarded in 1984.

Now an essential link in CERN’s accelerator complex, the energy of the SPS has been increased to 450 GeV and for 40 years the machine has been supplying various types of particles to dozens of different experiments, from the heavy-ion programme to studies of charge-parity violation (the imbalance between matter and antimatter) and of the structure of nucleons. At present, for example, it supplies particles to the COMPASS, NA61/Shine, NA62 and NA63 experiments, and it will shortly start sending protons to the new AWAKE project, which will test innovative acceleration techniques. The SPS also sends particles to test areas for equipment and detectors, including the HiRadMat project. 

Since 1989, when its big brother, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), was commissioned, the SPS has served as an injector, forming the last-but-one link in the accelerator chain. It supplied LEP with electrons and positrons until the end of 2000. It now accelerates protons and lead ions for the LHC, which replaced the LEP in the 27-kilometre tunnel.

See also the article in the CERN Courier published on the occasion of the SPS’s 25th birthday.


via CERN: Updates for the general public
http://home.cern/about/updates/2016/06/happy-birthday-sps