nothingistobefeared

[nothingistobefeared]

A team of researchers has built an array of light detectors sensitive enough to register the arrival of individual light particles, or photons, and mounted them on a silicon optical chip. Such arrays are crucial components of devices that use photons to perform quantum computations.

[nothingistobefeared]

NASA just launched its Orion spacecraft! (You can watch the whole thing here)

It looks a bit like the Apollo 11 capsule, but it has a whole new mission: first, meeting an asteroid towed to earth’s orbit by a robot sometime in the 2020s, and maybe, eventually, traveling to Mars.

There weren’t any astronauts on board today’s test flight - just instruments and some mementos from the monsters on Sesame Street. The goal is to measure radiation levels as the craft passes through the Van Allen radiation belts. Read more here.

Launch picture: Bill Ingalls / NASA, Orion video: NASA, Apollo II capsule image: Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Orion Capsule image: Bernt Rostad

[nothingistobefeared]

New revelations on dark matter and relic neutrinos

The Planck collaboration, which notably includes the CNRS, CEA, CNES and several French universities, has disclosed, at a conference in Ferrara, Italy, the results of four years of observations from the ESA’s Planck satellite.

Between 2009 and 2013, the satellite observed relic radiation (the most ancient light in the Universe). This light has been measured precisely across the entire sky for the first time, in both intensity and polarisation1, thereby producing the oldest image of the Universe. This primordial light lets us “see” some of the most elusive particles in the Universe: dark matter and relic neutrinos.

Temperature map of the relic radiation (bottom left), and close-ups showing, in relief, the polarisation of light in the 353 GHz channel (the colors correspond to the intensity of the thermal emission from galactic dust.

Credit: © ESA - Planck collaboration

read more

[nothingistobefeared]

NASA’s Orion spacecraft roars into space atop a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket, December 5, 2014, from Space Launch Complex 37 at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

(NASA)

[nothingistobefeared]

An algorithm proposed two decades ago that demonstrated the benefit of using quantum mechanics to solve certain problems has finally been run on a quantum computer.

[nothingistobefeared]

!!!!!!!!

[nothingistobefeared]

so here is CERN’s compact muon solenoid (CMS) event displayer and you can load a whole bunch of particle collision data from the LHC and view it in 3D! go check it out 

[nothingistobefeared]

A quote from Sarah William’s ‘The Old Astronomer’  Read the poem in full here. 

[nothingistobefeared]

Are Nasty Comments Like These Keeping Women Out Of Science?

"It’s death by a thousand cuts. Every day you’re faced with some comment, some snide remark, some inability to get a name on a research paper. And with an accumulation of those experiences, women tend to walk with their feet."

Go here to read more infuriating stories about women in science. 

[nothingistobefeared]

The Tadpole Nebula

Nebulas don’t get much more picturesque than this. IC 410, or the Tadpole Nebula, lies about 12,000 light-years away from Earth. The massive cloud of glowing gas is over 100 light-years across. It was formed by intense stellar winds and radiation from embedded star cluster NGC 1893 which can be seen all around the star-forming nebula. This particular image was taken in infrared light by NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite. (Image Credit: WISE, IRSA, NASA)

[nothingistobefeared]

Over the Bahamas

[nothingistobefeared]

Galaxies may be aligned across 1 billion light-years

The cores of several distant galaxies, spread out across roughly 1 billion light-years, appear to mysteriously align with one another. If confirmed, the new observations could be a hint of some unknown mechanism that shapes the largest structures in the universe.

Damien Hutsemékers, an astrophysicist at the University of Liège in Belgium, and colleagues used the Very Large Telescope in northern Chile to measure the orientations of 19 quasars, blazing disks of gas that swirl around supermassive black holes in the centers of some galaxies. Each of the quasars lives in one of four groups that are about 13 billion light-years away and centered on the constellation Leo. Within the groups, powerful jets of charged particles that spew from the quasars seem to point in nearly the same direction, the researchersreport November 19 in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The conclusions are on shaky ground, says Mike DiPompeo, an astrophysicist at the University of Wyoming. With only 19 quasars, the alignments could be just a coincidence. But even with a small sample, he finds the results intriguing and worthy of further investigation. It would be surprising, he says, if quasars knew how their neighbors were aligned. 

Read More: D. Hutsemékers et al. Alignment of quasar polarizations with large-scale structures. Astronomy & Astrophysics. Published online November 19, 2014. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361/201424631.

[nothingistobefeared]

Even if you’re not a scientist, these are good rules for anyone to live by.  Get your FQTQ science shirt here: http://www.booster.com/quarks-to-quasars-1 Via asapscience

[nothingistobefeared]

Swedish materials researchers at Linköping and Uppsala University and Chalmers University of Technology, in collaboration with researchers at the Swiss Synchrotron Light Source (SLS) in Switzerland investigated the superconductor YBa2Cu3O7-x (abbreviated YBCO) using advanced X-ray spectroscopy.

[nothingistobefeared]

[nothingistobefeared]

Harvard researchers Robert Kirshner, Christopher Stubbs, and Peter Challis have been named co-recipients of the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their role in the 1998 discovery of dark energy and the accelerated expansion of the universe. This discovery fundamentally changed ...