Category Astronomy/Space

A simulation of a lead ion collision in ALICE. Credit: CERN

CERN: Most precise measurement of mass and charge of Light Nuclei and Snti-Nuclei. Why did anti-matter disappear almost completely from our universe, whereas matter did not? Scientists are attempting to solve this mystery at the European research institute at CERN. Now they published the most precise measurement of the properties of light atomic nuclei and anti-nuclei ever made.

At the LHC, researchers let lead nuclei and protons collide at the highest beam energies to date. The temperatures created are 100,000X higher than those in the center of the Sun. “A state is created that is very similar to the one after the Big Bang,” explains Prof Laura Fabbietti...

The rich patchwork of gas clouds in this new image make up part of a huge stellar nursery nicknamed the Prawn Nebula (also known as Gum 56 and IC 4628). Taken using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile, this may well be one of the best pictures ever taken of this object. It shows clumps of hot new-born stars nestled in among the clouds that make up the nebula. Credit: ESO

Deeply immersed in this huge stellar nursery are 3 clusters of hot young stars – only a few million years old – which glow brightly in UV light. It is the light from these stars that causes the nebula’s gas clouds to glow. The radiation strips electrons from atoms ie ionisation, – and when they recombine they release energy in the form of light...

Results of the analyses by individual experiments (coloured) and both experiments together (black), showing the improvement in precision resulting from the combination of results. Read more at:

3 years after the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson, the ATLAS and CMS Collaborations present for the first time combined measurements of many of its properties, at the third annual Large Hadron Collider Physics Conference (LHCP 2015). By combining their analyses of the data collected in 2011 and 2012, ATLAS and CMS draw the sharpest picture yet of this novel boson. The new results provide in particular the best precision on its production and decay and on how it interacts with other particles...

The crystal structure of magnesium peroxide, MgO2, courtesy of Sergey Lobanov, created using K. Momma’s program for drawing crystal structures. Credit: Sergey Lobanov 

New Carnegie research demonstrates different magnesium compounds could be abundant inside other planets as compared to Earth. O and Mg are the two most-abundant elements in Earth’s mantle. However, when predicting the chemical compositions of rocky, terrestrial planets outside of our own Solar System, they shouldn’t assume that other rocky planets would have Earth-like mantle mineralogy, according to Carnegie’s Sergey Lobanov, Nicholas Holtgrewe, and Alexander Goncharov.

Eg. elevated oxygen contents have been observed in stars that host rocky planets...