Two of the most reliable changes in the sky are the daily rising of the sun in the east and setting of the sun in the west. But if you lived on a couple of Pluto's moons you wouldn't know when the day would begin, or even what direction the sun would rise. That's because, unlike Earth's moon, at least two of Pluto's small moons, Hydra and Nix, are tumbling chaotically through space. Why? Because they orbit inside a dynamically shifting gravitational field caused by the system's two central bodies, Pluto and Charon, that are whirling around each other. The moons are also football shaped, and this contributes to the chaotic rotation.
Imaging of Earth from satellites in space has vastly improved in recent years. But the opposite challenge—using Earth-based
The post Brainstorm with DARPA on a “100x Zoom Lens” for Seeing Distant Space Objects More Clearly has been published on Technology Org.
In the CERN Control Centre, the LHC operations team as well as members of CERN management applaud the announcement of stable beams this morning at 10.40am (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN) more images
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) started delivering physics data today for the first time in 27 months. After an almost two year shutdown and several months re-commissioning, the LHC is now providing collisions to all of its experiments at the unprecedented energy of 13 TeV, almost double the collision energy of its first run. This marks the start of season 2 at the LHC, opening the way to new discoveries. The LHC will now run round the clock for the next three years.
“With the LHC back in the collision-production mode, we celebrate the end of two months of beam commissioning,” said CERN Director of Accelerators and Technology Frédérick Bordry. “It is a great accomplishment and a rewarding moment for all of the teams involved in the work performed during the long shutdown of the LHC, in the powering tests and in the beam commissioning process. All these people have dedicated so much of their time to making this happen.”
Today at 10.40am, the LHC operators declared “stable beams”, the signal for the LHC experiments that they can start taking data. Beams are made of “trains” of proton bunches moving at almost the speed of light around the 27 kilometre ring of the LHC. These so-called bunch trains circulate in opposite directions, guided by powerful superconducting magnets. Today the LHC was filled with 6 bunches each containing around 100 billion protons. This rate will be progressively increased as the run goes on to 2808 bunches per beam, allowing the LHC to produce up to 1 billion collisions per second.
For more information see the live blog that covered events as they unfolded.
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Today's the day! The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is set to start delivering physics data to its experiments for the first time in 27 months.
After nearly two years of maintenance and repair, as well as several months of re-commissioning, the experiments at the world's largest particle accelerator are now ready to take data at the unprecedented energy of 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) – almost double the collision energy of the LHC's first, three-year run. Data taking will mark the start of season 2 at the LHC, opening the way to new frontiers in physics.
For all the day's action, follow our Live Blog "LHC Season 2: New frontiers in physics" where we'll be posting all the latest from the CERN Control Centre.
