Cosmic Frontier
July 2012
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July 23, 2012breaking: Precious cargo: Dark matter experiment set to move undergroundFor the past two years, COUPP-4, a 4-kilogram bubble chamber experiment, has searched for signs of dark matter a mile underground at SNOLAB in Sudbury, Ontario. Now that experiment is about to get company – its big brother is moving in.
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July 20, 2012breaking: Most sensitive dark-matter detector constrains search for WIMPsThe XENON collaboration announced this week that they detected no signs of potential dark matter particles during the last 13 months. Their results will be used to narrow the search for the unseen particles that scientists think make up most of the matter in the universe.
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July 18, 2012breaking: Large Synoptic Survey Telescope nears final design phaseThe Large Synoptic Survey Telescope just received another boost. The National Science Foundation announced today that it will advance the giant telescope to the final design stage.
June 2012
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June 14, 2012breaking: High-energy X-ray telescope lifts offIn a scene straight out of a James Bond film, NASA’s newest high-energy telescope launched into orbit yesterday after being dropped from the underbelly of a Lockheed airplane.
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June 12, 2012breaking: Beating the odds in the study of ultra-high-energy cosmic raysIt’s a mystery where ultra-high-energy cosmic rays come from and what they’re made of. But a new technique, currently in the works, could drastically improve scientists’ chances of finding out.
May 2012
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May 17, 2012breaking: Scientists celebrate completion of underground physics laboratoryThe elevator that sinks into the Vale Creighton Mine near Sudbury, Ontario, is a gateway to two different worlds. One is Canada’s largest nickel mine, opened at the turn of the last century and still in operation. The other is SNOLAB, a large underground particle physics laboratory, the grand opening of which will take place today.
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May 15, 2012breaking: Researchers developing underwater neutrino experiment make oceanographic discoveryResearchers deciding where to place the planned Neutrino Mediterranean Observatory, or NEMO, were measuring water currents and temperatures when they stumbled upon unexpected patterns in the water.
April 2012
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April 26, 2012breaking: Citizen scientists find new purpose in pulsar searchA project that lets citizen volunteers contribute to scientists' search for gravitational waves, theoretical ripples in the fabric of space-time, has expanded its efforts -- with impressive results.
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April 24, 2012breaking: World’s largest digital camera one step closer to realityPerched high atop Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will take the largest, fastest, most detailed pictures of the Southern Hemisphere’s night sky. With these images, researchers around the world will seek to reveal the nature of dark matter and dark energy—and to answer a host of other questions in astronomy and physics.
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April 20, 2012breaking: Fermi uses gamma rays to unearth clues about "empty" spaceThe team working on the Large Area Telescope has discovered that most gamma rays detected by LAT cannot be attributed to individual point sources.
January 2012
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January 10, 2012breaking: Clearest picture yet of dark matter points the way to better understanding of dark energyTwo teams of physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermilab and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have independently made the largest direct measurements of the invisible scaffolding of the universe, building maps of dark matter using new methods that, in turn, will remove key hurdles for understanding dark energy with ground-based telescopes.
December 2011
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December 20, 2011breaking: U.S. ships world’s largest digital camera to ChileA four-ton digital camera landed safely in Chile this month on its way to making history by enabling the world’s largest galaxy survey, starting next year. Getting the camera there was a worldwide feat of technology and transportation prowess.
October 2011
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October 18, 2011breaking: LAGUNA large neutrino observatory design moves forwardThe kick-off meeting for the second phase of the LAGUNA's design study starts today at CERN. The principal goal of LAGUNA (Large Apparatus for Grand Unification and Neutrino Astrophysics) is to assess the feasibility of a new pan-European research infrastructure able to host the next generation, very large volume, deep underground neutrino observatory. The scientific goals of such an observatory combine exciting neutrino astrophysics with research addressing several fundamental questions such as proton decay and the existence of a new source of matter-antimatter asymmetry in Nature, in order to explain why our Universe contains only matter and not equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
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October 14, 2011breaking: Bubble chamber gets more precise in dark matter searchThe 1970s were a thriving time in the world of physics, heralding such milestones as the development of the Standard Model and the discovery of the bottom quark. Now scientists at Fermilab are bringing some experimental pieces of that era back – bubble chambers and fixed-target physics. Peter Cooper, a Fermilab physicist, is heading a new experiment calibrating the classic bubble chamber technology, which is used today to search for dark matter.
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October 13, 2011breaking: Gamma-ray telescope designer awarded 2012 Panofsky PrizeWilliam Atwood, a leading member of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope collaboration, will receive the 2012 W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics from the American Physical Society for his work as co-designer of the Large Area Telescope, the main instrument on Fermi, and for using the LAT to investigate the universe in gamma rays.
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October 12, 2011breaking: Future of deep underground science discussed at congressional roundtableRepresentatives Randy Hultgren and Judy Biggert met at Fermilab on Sept. 28 to lead a discussion about the future of underground science and the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL). Under increasing pressure to tighten the federal budget, the Congress members asked how world-class particle physics research could be maintained, while providing the best value for taxpayers.
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October 4, 2011breaking: International committee maps future of particle physicsThis week an international organization made public their vision for the future of particle physics across the globe. The International Committee for Future Accelerators have placed on the web their report, "Beacons of Discovery."
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October 4, 2011breaking: Astronomers win Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the accelerating expansion of the universeThe 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to three scientists: Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess. Their observations of distant exploding stars led them to the startling discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This discovery laid the groundwork for the idea that a mysterious force called dark energy, which makes up 75 percent of the universe – yet has never been detected – is fueling the acceleration
September 2011
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September 9, 2011breaking: EXO releases first resultsTurns out physicists have their own expression to convey the concept of "slow," and now, thanks to the Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO), they know how slow "slow" really is: The flurry of activity during the 13.75 billion years from the Big Bang to us was positively hasty in comparison.
July 2011
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July 7, 2011breaking: Turning data into wild rides through dark domesThanks to scientists at SLAC and Stanford, planetarium audiences can fly through an increasingly realistic cosmos. You can see their handiwork in shows now playing in San Francisco and New York City.
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