Husband; Associate Professor of Physics; I teach at SMU in Dallas, TX; I study the Higgs Particle with the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN; writer and blogger; drummer; programmer; teacher; scientist; traveler; runner; gardener; open-source aficionado.
Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Explanation: Messier 15 is
an immense swarm of over 100,000 stars.
A 13 billion year old relic of the early formative years
of our galaxy it's one of about 170 globular star clusters that
still roam the halo of the Milky Way.
Centered in this
sharp telescopic view,
M15 lies about 35,000
light
years away toward the constellation Pegasus,
well beyond the spiky foreground stars.
Its diameter is about 200 light-years.
But more than half its stars are packed into the central 10
light-years or so, one of the densest concentrations of stars known.
Hubble-based
measurements of the increasing velocities of M15's central stars
are evidence that a massive black hole resides at the center of
dense
globular cluster M15.
Researchers’ Night is the first event to take place on the Esplanade des Particules, a new reception area at CERN. (Image: Julien Ordan/CERN)
What do scientists do at night? More often than not, just like you and me, they have a rest. But, on 28 September, they will open the doors to their laboratories for Researchers’ Night, an event that will be taking place across Europe.
Scientists will be at CERN ready to welcome you from 5 p.m. until 11 p.m. and will provide tours and activities. You can even join in from the comfort of your own home by streaming the event as it happens on Facebook Live.
Take your first steps into the realm of artificial intelligence by programming robots, build a detector and observe particles from the cosmos. Discover matter in all of its states and the wonder of electricity during fun physics demonstrations. Visit CERN’s first accelerator and discover an underground experiment through virtual reality headsets. And, above all, meet scientists who will share their passion and answer your questions. See the full programme here.
Researchers’ Night at CERN is the first event to take place on the brand new Esplanade des Particules, the area in front of the entrance to the Laboratory, which has been refurbished following an urban planning competition. Inaugurated for Researchers’ Night, the Esplanade des Particules was completed with joint funding from the Swiss Confederation, the Republic and Canton of Geneva, the Commune of Meyrin and CERN. The esplanade provides a large space for sustainable modes of transport and improves the welcome area for visitors, establishing itself as a meeting point for science and society.
Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2018 September 25
Highlights of the North Autumn Sky Illustration Credit & Copyright:
Universe2go.com
Explanation: What can you see in the night sky this season?
The featured graphic gives a few highlights for Earth's northern hemisphere.
Viewed as a clock face centered at the bottom, early (northern) autumn sky events fan out toward the left, while late autumn events are projected toward the right.
Objects relatively close to
Earth
are illustrated, in general, as nearer to the cartoon figure with the telescope at the bottom center -- although almost everything pictured can be
seen without a telescope.
As happens during any season, constellations appear the same year to year, and, as usual, the
Leonids meteor shower will peak in mid-November.
Also as usual, the
International Space Station (ISS)
can be seen, at times, as a bright spot
drifting across the sky after sunset.
Planets visible after sunset this autumn include
Jupiter and Mars, and during late autumn,
Saturn.
Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2018 September 26
The Sun's Spectrum with its Missing Colors Image Credit:
Nigel Sharp (NSF),
FTS,
NSO,
KPNO,
AURA,
NSF
Explanation:
It is still not known why the Sun's light is missing some colors.
Here are all the
visible
colors of the
Sun,
produced by passing the Sun's light through a
prism-like device.
The spectrum was created at the
McMath-PierceSolar Observatory
and shows, first off, that although our
white-appearing
Sun emits light of nearly every color, it does indeed appear brightest in yellow-green light.
The dark patches in the
above spectrum arise from gas at or above the
Sun's surface
absorbing sunlight emitted below.
Since different types of gas
absorb different colors of light,
it is possible to determine what gasses compose the Sun.
Helium, for example, was
first discovered
in 1870 on a solar spectrum and only
later found here on
Earth.
Today, the majority of
spectral absorption lines have been identified - but
not all.
Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Explanation:
Two small robots have begun hopping around the surface of asteroid Ryugu.
The rovers, each the size of a small
frying pan,
move around the low gravity of kilometer-sized
162173 Ryugu by hopping,
staying aloft for about 15 minutes and
typically landing again several meters away.
On Saturday, Rover 1A returned an
early picture of its
new home world, on the left,
during one of its first hops.
On Friday, lander
MINERVA-II-1 detached from its mothership
Hayabusa2,
dropped Rovers 1A and 1B, and
then landed on Ryugu.
Studying Ryugu could
tell humanity
not only about Ryugu's surface and interior,
but about what materials were available in the early
Solar System for the
development of life.
Two more hopping rovers are
planned for release, and Hayabusa2 itself is scheduled to collect a surface sample from
Ryugu and return it to
Earth for detailed analysis before 2021.
Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Explanation: The recognizable stars
of the Teapot asterism in the constellation
Sagittarius posed with the Milky Way over Death Valley, planet Earth
on this quiet, dark night.
The surreal scene was appropriately captured from
Teakettle Junction,
marked by the wooden sign adorned with
terrestrial teapots and kettles on the rugged road to
Racetrack Playa.
Shining against the luminous starlight of the central Milky Way
is bright planet
Saturn,
just above the star at the
celestial teapot's peak.
But the brightest celestial beacon, high above the southern horizon, is
an orange tinted
Mars at upper left
in the frame.
Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
Explanation:
There is much more to the familiar
Ring Nebula (M57),
however, than can be seen through a small telescope.
The easily visible
central ring is about one
light-year across,
but this remarkably deep exposure -
a collaborative effort combining data from three different large telescopes -
explores
the looping filaments of glowing gas extending much farther from
the nebula's central star.
This remarkable
composite image includes narrowband hydrogen image,
visible light emission, and
infrared light emission.
Of course, in this well-studied example of a
planetary nebula,
the glowing material does not come from planets.
Instead, the
gaseous shroud represents
outer layers expelled from a dying, sun-like star.
The Ring Nebula is about 2,000 light-years away toward the musical
constellation
Lyra.
Timepix3, one of the read-out chips of Medipix (Image: CERN)
What if, instead of a black and white X-ray picture, a doctor of a cancer patient had access to colour images identifying the tissues being scanned? This colour X-ray imaging technique could produce clearer and more accurate pictures and help doctors give their patients more accurate diagnoses.
This is now a reality, thanks to a New-Zealand company that scanned, for the first time, a human body using a breakthrough colour medical scanner based on the Medipix3 technology developed at CERN. Father and son scientists Professors Phil and Anthony Butler from Canterbury and Otago Universities spent a decade building and refining their product.
Medipix is a family of read-out chips for particle imaging and detection. The original concept of Medipix is that it works like a camera, detecting and counting each individual particle hitting the pixels when its electronic shutter is open. This enables high-resolution, high-contrast, very reliable images, making it unique for imaging applications in particular in the medical field.
Hybrid pixel-detector technology was initially developed to address the needs of particle tracking at the Large Hadron Collider, and successive generations of Medipix chips have demonstrated over 20 years the great potential of the technology outside of high-energy physics.
MARS Bioimaging Ltd, which is commercialising the 3D scanner, is linked to the University of Otago and Canterbury. The latter together with more than 20 research institutes forms the third generation of Medipix collaboration. The Medipix3 chip is the most advanced chip available today and Professor Phil Butler recognises that “this technology sets the machine apart diagnostically because its small pixels and accurate energy resolution mean that this new imaging tool is able to get images that no other imaging tool can achieve.”
MARS’ solution couples the spectroscopic information generated by the Medipix3 enabled detector with powerful algorithms to generate 3D images. The colours represent different energy levels of the X-ray photons as recorded by the detector hence identifying different components of body parts such as fat, water, calcium, and disease markers.
A 3D image of a wrist with a watch showing part of the finger bones in white and soft tissue in red. (Image: MARS Bioimaging Ltd)
So far, researchers have been using a small version of the MARS scanner to study cancer, bone and joint health, and vascular diseases that cause heart attacks and strokes. “In all of these studies, promising early results suggest that when spectral imaging is routinely used in clinics it will enable more accurate diagnosis and personalisation of treatment,” Professor Anthony Butler says.
CERN's Knowledge Transfer group has a long-standing expertise in transferring CERN technologies, in particular for medical applications. In the case of the 3D scanner, a license agreement has been established between CERN, on behalf of Medipix3 collaboration and MARS Bioimaging Ltd. As Aurélie Pezous, CERN Knowledge Transfer Officer states, “It is always satisfying to see our work leveraging benefits for patients around the world. Real-life applications such as this one fuels our efforts to reach even further.”
In the coming months, orthopaedic and rheumatology patients in New Zealand will be scanned by the revolutionary MARS scanner in a clinical trial that is a world first, paving the way to a potentially routine use of this new generation equipment.
François Englert (left) and Peter Higgs at CERN on 4 July 2012, on the occasion of the announcement of the discovery of a Higgs boson (Image: Maximilien Brice/CERN)
It is six years ago that the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced, to great fanfare in the world’s media, as a crowning success of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The excitement of those days now seems a distant memory, replaced by a growing sense of disappointment at the lack of any major discovery thereafter.
While there are valid reasons to feel less than delighted by the null results of searches for physics beyond the Standard Model (SM), this does not justify a mood of despondency. A particular concern is that, in today’s hyper-connected world, apparently harmless academic discussions risk evolving into a negative outlook for the field in broader society. For example, a recent news article in Natureled on the LHC’s “failure to detect new particles beyond the Higgs”, while The Economistreported that “Fundamental physics is frustrating physicists”. Equally worryingly, the situation in particle physics is sometimes negatively contrasted with that for gravitational waves: while the latter is, quite rightly, heralded as the start of a new era of exploration, the discovery of the Higgs is often described as the end of a long effort to complete the SM.
Let’s look at things more positively. The Higgs boson is a totally new type of fundamental particle that allows unprecedented tests of electroweak symmetry breaking. It thus provides us with a novel microscope with which to probe the universe at the smallest scales, in analogy with the prospects for new gravitational-wave telescopes that will study the largest scales. There is a clear need to measure its couplings to other particles – especially its coupling with itself – and to explore potential connections between the Higgs and hidden or dark sectors. These arguments alone provide ample motivation for the next generation of colliders including and beyond the high-luminosity LHC upgrade.
So far the Higgs boson indeed looks SM-like, but some perspective is necessary. It took more than 40 years from the discovery of the neutrino to the realisation that it is not massless and therefore not SM-like; addressing this mystery is now a key component of the global particle-physics programme. Turning to my own main research area, the beauty quark – which reached its 40th birthday last year – is another example of a long-established particle that is now providing exciting hints of new phenomena (see Beauty quarks test lepton universality). One thrilling scenario, if these deviations from the SM are confirmed, is that the new physics landscape can be explored through both the b and Higgs microscopes. Let’s call it “multi-messenger particle physics”.
How the results of our research are communicated to the public has never been more important. We must be honest about the lack of new physics that we all hoped would be found in early LHC data, yet to characterise this as a “failure” is absurd. If anything, the LHC has been more successful than expected, leaving its experiments struggling to keep up with the astonishing rates of delivered data. Particle physics is, after all, about exploring the unknown; the analysis of LHC data has led to thousands of publications and a wealth of new knowledge, and there is every possibility that there are big discoveries waiting to be made with further data and more innovative analyses. We also should not overlook the returns to society that the LHC has brought, from technology developments with associated spin-offs to the training of thousands of highly skilled young researchers.
The level of expectation that has been heaped on the LHC seems unprecedented in the history of physics. Has any other facility been considered to have produced disappointing results because only one Nobel-prize winning discovery was made in its first few years of operation? Perhaps this reflects that the LHC is simply the right machine at the right time, but that time is not over: our new microscope is set to run for the next two decades and bring physics at the TeV scale into clear focus. The more we talk about that, the better our long-term chances of success.
_____________
This text first appearedin the March 2018 issue of the CERN Courier.
"456: High Energy Physicist Studying Particle Collisions and Cosmic Rays - Dr. Daniel Whiteson"
Dr. Daniel Whiteson is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is also co-author of the book We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe. As a particle physicist, Daniel is working to discover how the universe began and what things are made of at their most fundamental levels. When not in the lab, Daniel engages in experimental baking to create a wide variety of desserts. He’s currently perfecting his recipe for chocolate babka, a type of sweet bread. Regardless of how his kitchen experiments turn out, it’s fun to share them with his wife and two kids. Daniel received his B.S. in Physics and Computer Science from Rice University, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and he went on to earn his PhD in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted postdoctoral research afterwards at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty at UC, Irvine. Daniel has received various awards and honors in his career, including an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an Outstanding Junior Investigator award from the U.S. Department of Energy, the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research from UC, Irvine, and a Webby Award in Experimental and Innovation sites for developing a smartphone app called Cosmic Rays Found in Smartphones which uses a cell phone’s camera to detect ultra high-energy cosmic rays. Daniel has also been named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Daniel joined us for an interview to talk more about his life and science.
Discover the cosmos!
Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is
featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2018 July 3
An Airplane in Front of the Moon Image Credit & Copyright: Ji-Hoon Kim
Explanation:
If you look closely at the Moon, you will see a large airplane in front of it.
Well, not always.
OK, hardly ever.
Actually,
to capture an
imagelikethis takes
precise timing,
an exposure fast enough to freeze the airplane and not overexpose
the Moon -- but slow enough to see both, a steady camera, and luck -- because not every plane that approaches
the Moon crosses in front.
Helpful equipment includes a camera with
fast continuous video mode and a mount that automatically
tracks the Moon.
The
featured fleeting superposition was captured from
Seoul,
South Korea
two weeks ago during a daytime
waxing gibbous
moonrise.
Within 1/10th of a second, the airplane crossing
was over.
I've decided to shut down my home server at the end of August (i.e., in about two months). This also means, unfortunately, that my pump.io server pump.saz.im will go down, thus ending my presence on pump.io. I know I could move to one of the public pump.io servers out there, but I'm also trying to consolidate my "social media" presence - and Mastodon seems to be winning out for me. You can find me on Mastodon as sazius@soc.ialis.me. (I've also recently deleted my Twitter and Facebook accounts, of course for even better reasons...)
This decision also means that I'm no longer actively maintaining or developing Pumpa, the Qt-based pump.io client that I created. It doesn't make sense for me to work on something that I don't use anymore. If anyone is interested in continuing Pumpa development, I would definitely be open to transferring maintainership. Anyway, the source code will always be out there if anyone wants to use it. For a good and actively maintained pump.io desktop client, I recommend people instead use Dianara by @JanKusanagi.
It has been fun over here, and I still love the community. Perhaps we can link up again once the ActivityPub flows (or pumps) all around :-)
