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SciencePhysics & ChemistryRussian Scientists Drop a Telescope Into the Deepest Lake on Earth
On Saturday, a team of Russian researchers dropped a brand-new telescope into frigid Lake Baikal, the deepest lake on Earth. It wasn’t an accident; the instrument took the plunge to give the scientists a better shot at detecting neutrinos, elusive subatomic particles that are extremely difficult to spot, since they usually pass right through matter … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryWhy the U.S. Is Betting It All on the Most Puzzling Particle in the Universe
Nearly 14 billion years ago, a universe appeared in an unthinkably high-energy blast. Particles started to materialize out of that energy, as did their antiparticles, which are kind of like evil twins, a mirror image with the opposite electric charge. Each and every particle had an antiparticle, scientists believe, and they would annihilate each other … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryWhere Did All the Antimatter Go? Scientists Are Closer to Finding Out
Particle physicists have released the results of a decade-long search, taking us a crucial step closer toward understanding where all of the universe’s antimatter has gone. The universe’s matter can be divided into two classes—matter and antimatter—where each matter particle has an antimatter partner with the same mass and opposite electrical charge. But given the similarity … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryRelease the Muons! Physics Breakthrough Will Lead to a New Kind of Particle Collider
The next generation of atom smasher could be a 100-kilometer-round ring, costing over $10 billion, with no promise of finding something as glamorous as last decade’s Higgs boson. But does the future of physics need to be so large? What if researchers could probe the secrets of the smallest particles using technology that was, well, … Continued
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Tech NewsThe Future of Particle Physics Is Bright, Bleak, and Magical
Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider triumphantly announced the discovery of the Higgs boson back in the summer of 2012. Nicknamed “the God particle,” it was the last new undiscovered particle predicted by the backbone theory of particle physics. Since then, physicists have found a whole lot of, well, nothing. The Higgs high hasn’t carried … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryA Huge Experiment Has ‘Weighed’ the Tiny Neutrino, a Particle That Passes Right Through Matter
An experiment nearly two decades in the making has finally unveiled its measurements of the mass of the universe’s most abundant matter particle: the neutrino. The neutrino could be the weirdest subatomic particle; though abundant, it requires some of the most sensitive detectors to observe. Scientists have been working for decades to figure out whether … Continued
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Tech NewsAvengers: Endgame, Dark Matter, and a Fake Bear Not Named Ron: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week
It’s nearly May, and you know what that means: Game of Thrones will be ending, Divination Bot will soon return to haunt your sleep with machine-generated nightmares, and the weather will be much less depressing. But before you brush off April 2019 like all the other months you’ve left behind in your rush to the … Continued
By Tom McKay -
SciencePhysics & ChemistryHow Physicists Measured the Rarest Event Ever Directly Observed
This past week, scientists announced that they’d made an incredible physics observation using a vat of liquid xenon. It’s officially the rarest nuclear decay—and really, the rarest event of any kind—ever directly measured. How rare? As I wrote in my previous article about the result, “The average amount of time it would take half of … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryDark Matter Detector Makes Incredible Neutrino Observation
A detector designed to hunt for dark matter has made a particle physics observation that will hopefully help physicists establish important truths about our Universe. No, it didn’t spot dark matter, but the new result proves that these ultra-sensitive detectors are valuable to scientists for multiple reasons. Gravity-wise, the Universe behaves as if it contains … Continued
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SciencePhysics & ChemistryFermilab Breaks Ground on a New Particle Accelerator to Solve the Mysteries of Neutrinos
Construction began last week on a new particle accelerator at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. The new project will power Fermilab’s flagship neutrino-studying accelerator experiment. The Proton Improvement Plan II, formally approved by the Department of Energy last summer, includes plans for the highest-energy linear particle accelerator to accelerate a continuous stream of protons … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Scientists Weighed the Earth Using Ghostly Particles From Space
Scientists have to use some roundabout methods to weigh the Earth and measure what’s inside it—typically, they’ve used sound waves and the strength of gravity to make their calculations. But one team has weighed the Earth in a whole new way: by measuring mysterious cosmic particles that pass through it. A team of Spanish researchers … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Astronomers Propose Huge New Telescope System to Understand the Most Energetic Particles Ever Detected
Astronomers have proposed a truly enormous telescope consisting of 200,000 radio receivers around the world, which added together would cover an area the size of Nebraska. They hope to spot incredibly energetic but difficult to detect neutrinos coming from distant astrophysical sources. The Giant Radio Array for Neutrino Detection, or GRAND, would hunt for these … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
New Particle Could Explain ‘Unusual’ Antarctic Weather Balloon Detection
An enormous weather balloon in Antarctica spotted what looked like a high-energy particle from outer space striking the ice back in 2006. Except the particle didn’t hit from above—it somehow traveled all the way through the planet. Eight years later, it happened again. Once is happenstance, but two events like this mean that it’s something … Continued
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ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
See the South Pole Message That Alerted Astronomers to the Cosmic-Ray-Spewing Blazar
Today, scientists made a huge announcement: Telescopes around the world recorded a source of mysterious, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, the highest-energy particles that hit the Earth. It all started with a text message. The recent discovery has, at least partially, solved a hundred-year-mystery—the identity of a space object that could possibly send particles with energies a … Continued
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ScienceSpace & Spaceflight
Cosmic Ray Mystery Finally Cracked Thanks to Supermassive Black Hole Beaming Energy Straight at Earth
Every so often, protons and even entire atomic nuclei strike the Earth with extremely high energies—much higher than what scientists can produce in their most powerful physics experiments. Since the discovery of “cosmic rays” a hundred years ago, no one knew for sure where the most energetic of these particles came from—until now. On Thursday, … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Physicists Are Excited About Fresh Evidence for a New ‘Sterile’ Fundamental Particle
Neutrinos are ghostly, mysterious shape-shifters. New evidence bolsters the existence of an even ghostlier, “sterile” version of this strange particle. There are three types of neutrinos in the Standard Model, the blueprint of particle physics. But in past experiments, scientists have thought there could be a fourth, more mysterious type. Results from an experiment called … Continued
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SciencePhysics & Chemistry
Shuttered Experiment Shares New View of Ghostly Neutrino’s Shape-Shifting Behavior
Can we take a minute to appreciate just how weird neutrinos are? The second most abundant known particle in the universe passes right through most regular matter like a ghost—you get hit with around a quadrillion of them from the Sun every second. Not only that, but neutrinos can even change between three different identities. … Continued
