Scientists at CERN had said all along that they planned to activate the Larger Hadron Collider this summer. Now it looks like they’ll slide in just before the official end of the season. The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, aimed at unlocking secrets of the universe, will be launched on September 10 [Reuters].
“We’re finishing a marathon with a sprint,” said project leader Lyn Evans. “It’s been a long haul, and we’re all eager to get the LHC research program under way” [San Jose Mercury News].
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The exact mechanism that triggers the colorful auroras that dance across the night sky near the Earth’s two poles has been revealed by a quintet of NASA satellites. Scientists already knew that disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field, called “substorms,” bring charged particles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, where they collide with gas particles. Those gas particles then release energy as light, which flickers across the sky in waves of greens, reds, and blues.
Now, researchers with NASA’s THEMIS mission say they’ve discovered what sets off those magnetic disturbances. The substorms begin far out in space, roughly a third of the way to the Moon, where magnetic fields from the Earth are thrown together and reconnect to sling charged particles back toward the planet, they say [New Scientist].
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Well, that’s a relief. After a long safety review, physicists have declared that the enormous atom smasher that’s expected to go online this fall won’t create tiny black holes that will “eat” our planet. So that’s one less thing to worry about.
The Large Hadron Collider, which is being built near Geneva, Switzerland, will do things with subatomic particles that humans have never done before, causing some people to worry that scientists might be unwittingly building a doomsday devise. The $8 billion machine is designed to accelerate protons, the building blocks of ordinary matter, to energies of 7 trillion electron volts and then bang them together to produce tiny primordial fireballs, miniature versions of the Big Bang. Physicists will comb the detritus from those fireballs in search of forces and particles and even new laws of nature that might have prevailed during the first trillionth of a second of time [The New York Times].
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