Is There Sound In Space?

Cutting water with a hydrophobic knife. 

Youngster Galaxy Magnified by Abell 383

Hubble was first to spot this galaxy, one of the youngest in the distant universe. Its stars formed 13.5 billion years ago, a mere 200 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy’s image is magnified by the gravity of a massive cluster of galaxies (Abell 383) parked in front of it, making it appear eleven times brighter. This phenomenon is called gravitational lensing.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Richard (Centre for Astronomical Research/Observatory of Lyon, France), and J.-P Kneib (Astrophysical Laboratory of Marseille, France).

The Science of Balloon Popping: Fragmentation vs. Opening.

Soon to be published in Physical Review Letters, the research identifies how differing levels of stress affect rubber and latex.

The first depicts a moderately inflated balloon that splits uniformly into two pieces.

The second depicts a highly inflated balloon that is under a larger level of stress, which fragments into smaller pieces when popped.

(The authors of this work are Sébastien Moulinet and Mokhtar Adda-Bedia)

Looks like they could kill you but is actually a cinnamon roll: W Boson

Looks like a cinnamon roll but could actually kill you: Photon

Looks like they could kill you and can actually kill you: Z Boson

Looks like a cinnamon roll and is actually a cinnamon roll: Gluon

Spinnamon Roll: Higgs Boson

Physicists Set a New Speed Record for Light-Emitting Quantum Dots

Photonic computing is closer than ever.

Researchers at Duke University have developed a light-emitting device that can be switched on and off up to 90 billion times per second. This 90 GHz is roughly twice the speed of the fastest laser diodes in existence, potentially offering a whole new level of optoelectronic computing. Central to the technology are the infinitesimal crystal beads known as quantum dots.

The computing devices we’re used to are based on shuttling electrons around via wires and switches. This has worked out pretty well through the history of computing, but electronics have limits, both in speed and in scale. Optoelectronics swap out electrons for pure light: photons. A computer based on information carried via photon is just by definition optimal, offering the literal fastest thing in the universe. Other advantages over electronic systems: less heat, less power, less noise, less information loss, less wear.

Continue Reading.

Star-forming region Gum 29

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What is the mass of the Central Black Hole of the Phoenix Cluster?

Here’s a nice animation to blow your mind.

20 BILLION of our SUNS.

Associated Press

GENEVA — Physicists on the team that measured particles traveling faster than light said Friday they were as surprised as their skeptics about the results, which appear to violate the laws of nature as we know them.

Hundreds of scientists packed an auditorium at one of the world’s foremost laboratories on the Swiss-French border to hear how a subatomic particle, the neutrino, was found to have outrun light and confounded the theories of Albert Einstein.

“To our great surprise we found an anomaly,” said Antonio Ereditato, who participated in the experiment and speaks on behalf of the team.

An anomaly is a mild way of putting it.

Going faster than light is something that is just not supposed to happen, according to Einstein’s 1905 special theory of relativity. The speed of light — 186,282 miles per second (299,792 kilometers per second) — has long been considered a cosmic speed limit.

The team — a collaboration between France’s National Institute for Nuclear and Particle Physics Research and Italy’s Gran Sasso National Laboratory — fired a neutrino beam 454 miles (730 kilometers) underground from Geneva to Italy.

They found it traveled 60 nanoseconds faster than light. That’s sixty billionth of a second, a time no human brain could register.

“You could say it’s peanuts, but it’s not. It’s something that we can measure rather accurately with a small uncertainty,” Ereditato told The Associated Press.

If the experiment is independently repeated — most likely by teams in the United States or Japan — then it would require a fundamental rethink of modern physics.

“Everybody knows that the speed limit is c, the speed of light. And if you find some matter particle such as the neutrino going faster than light, this is something which immediately shocks everybody, including us,” said Ereditato, a researcher at the University of Bern, Switzerland.

Physicists not involved in the experiment have been understandably skeptical.

Alvaro De Rujula, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research outside Geneva from where the neutron beam was fired, said he blamed the readings on a so-far undetected human error.

If not, and it’s a big if, the door would be opened to some wild possibilities.

The average person, said De Rujula, “could, in principle, travel to the past and kill their mother before they were born.”

But Ereditato and his team are wary of letting such science fiction story lines keep them up at night.

“We will continue our studies and we will wait patiently for the confirmation,” he told the AP. “Everybody is free to do what they want: to think, to claim, to dream.”

He added: “I’m not going to tell you my dreams.”

The liquid oxygen/liquid methane engine, developed by Armadillo Aerospace with help from NASA, is tested in the vacuum chamber at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility, August 2009. (NASA)