July 4th 2012 - Higgs Day

This is a big deal.

Today, scientists at CERN announced the discovery of a particle that is consistent with the predicted Higgs Boson particle.

Essentially, there is a Standard Model of particle physics, which says that there should be 12 fields that make up everything in the universe, and that there is a particle associated with each field. There have so far been observations made of 11 of the 12 fields/particles. And for about 45 years, scientists have been hunting for the missing 12th field.

Professor Peter Higgs, at the University of Edinburgh, predicted the existence of this 12th field, the so-called Higgs field in the 1960s. This idea is that interactions between the Higgs field and the other 11 fields give things mass. The Higgs field explains why things are solid, why our feet don't just go straight through the floor, why things have mass.

It is this particle that physicists working on the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN have been searching for. They have basically been banging particles together really hard, hoping that one of the explosions caused would spit out a Higgs particle. And this morning it seems that their search may be nearing it's conclusion. 

(Source)

The particle discovery announced earlier today is not definitively the Higgs particle, but it is definitely something new - a new boson. And the likelihood is that it is the missing Higgs boson. The director-general of Cern, Professor Rolf Heuer, said this morning - "As a layman I would now say I think we have it." 

It is a very exciting day for science. Watching the announcement unfold online was thrilling, and I am very glad that I am alive to witness it.

This Is Our Planet

This is a really cool time-lapse video, created using images from the International Space Station.

   

(Video source; image source)

 Very very awesome!

Moon Landing

Todays xkcd comic deals with the moon landing. And it's brilliant!

(Click for full comic!)

MRI of a Flower

This is an MRI of a flower, as the title says. And it's super nifty.

(Source - check out the entire blog, there's some amazing images!)

Reminds me a little of a firework.

Go Voyager, Go!!

Official word from NASA this week is that Voyager 1 has just about reached the edge of the solar system!

(Source)

This is really exciting news, Voyager 1 will be the first man-made object to exit the solar system. It is completely amazing to me that we can still communicate with the spacecraft, and receive data from it... I sometimes can't get phone reception in Tesco!

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FYI, it takes the information sent by Voyager 1 16 hours and 38 minutes to get back to Earth, travelling a distance of about 17.8 billion km. Amazing.

Voyager 1 is the probe that took the 'Pale Blue Dot' photo and also carries Carl Sagan's 'Golden Record'. And it's one of my very favourite spacecrafts!

Welcome to Science - Zen Pencils

Tuesdays Zen Pencils featured the words of the brilliant Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy. It's all kinds of wonderful...

(Click image to view)

Check out the full comic here!

Falcon 9 has cleared the tower!

Got up really early today to watch a rocket launch. And by really early, I mean 8.30. But it was my day off, so it counts as early.

It was the historic launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. If the mission is successful, in the next few days SpaceX will become the first private company to rendezvous with the ISS (Check out the mission plan here). It's a pretty big deal for space exploration and is paving the way for future manned missons, which SpaceX are already planning. Huzzah!

It was very exciting watching it live, especially after the last minute abort on Saturday. The atmosphere at mission control was obviously electric, and there was much cheering from the crowd gathered at SpaceX. I have to admit I welled up a bit seeing the solar array deploy, such was the excitement onscreen. I also may have cheered out loud when the guy said 'Falcon 9 has cleared the tower.'

This is one of my favourite pictures I've come across so far. I love the guy cheering! It's exactly what I was doing, except I was in bed in Ireland...

(Source)

Massive congratulations to all the folks at SpaceX and NASA!

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Also hugely deserving of congratulations today is my little sister (one of only 2 people who actively read this blog) who graduated from secondary school today! Congrats Roisin! 

We Are Star Dust

New Symphony of Science video!

Lots of the wonderful Neil DeGrasse Tyson, along with Richard Feynman and Lawrence Krauss. Brilliant stuff!

I'm not sure it quite tops World of the Dinosaurs, but it's great nonetheless!

Again, you can check out the rest of the series here and downloads are available here!

Scale

I just came across this nifty video showing how some of the other planets in our solar system would look in the sky if they orbited the Earth at the same distance as the moon does. It's really interesting to see...

Lovely stuff!

By the way, it's been super cloudy here the last few days, so it's strictly virtual astronomy for me at the moment... 

Science is Awesome: Reason #845

This is a video of a 29 year old woman, who was born deaf, hearing her own voice for the first time after receiving a hearing implant.

I challange you to watch it without grinning/welling up! 

There's a follow up interview here!

High Five Science!

DNA Day

59 years ago today, the 25th April 1953, molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick published a paper in Nature which suggested a structure for DNA.

(Source, via Wikipedia)

Their paper 'Molecular structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid' provided a brilliantly simple answer to the question of how genetic instructions were both stored inside organisms and passed from one generation to the next. It described Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the structure of DNA, and had a major impact on the field of biology, and genetics in particular.

(Watson and Crick with Maclyn McCarty. Source, via Wikipedia)

Watson and Crick, along with Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

(Source)

The full paper has been made available online and can be viewed here, with an annotated version here.

Earth Day 2012

In honour of Earth Day 2012, here is the most distant image ever taken of our beautiful home, photographed by the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Carl Sagan said it best:

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. 

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. 

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

This picture is currently making me really happy.

(Source)

This is a press shot of the interior of a prototype crew vehicle for the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. 

And it looks totally awesome!

(Source)

Seeing this launch with humans on-board will be so fantastic!

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In other exciting news, I ordered my first telescope a couple of days ago! After much deliberation, I decided on this gorgeous thing, the Skywatcher Explorer 130p! Unfortunately there is apparently a telescope shortage at the moment, so I'm not sure when I will actually get it... Fingers crossed it's soon though, I'm dying to get out there! 

The World of the Dinosaurs

It's that time again! A new Symphony of Science video!! And this one's about dinosaurs!

I've been looking forward to this one for ages, and it certainly didn't disappoint! 

Check out the rest of the series here! Downloads available here!

FUCK YEAH DINOSAURS!!

Science, beer and a green bow tie

This is awesome!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

Inspiration

So for my first blog post, I guess I should explain where the current title and header of the blog come from. Well simply enough, it's a sunset on Mars. A sunset on another planet. A planet that, at it's closest point, is 54 million kilometers away. And that picture was taken by a robot that we put there.

Every time I see it, it just blows my mind.

It's beautiful.

     (source)

There's also an amazing video of the sunset:

More information about the image can be found here and more about the Mars Rovers here and here.

So that's it. A Martian Sunset.