LHC Machine Outreach The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. The first beams were circulated successfully on 10th September 2008. Unfortunately on 19th September a serious fault developed damaging a number of superconducting magnets. The repair required a long technical intervention. First collisions took place on 30th March 2010 with the rest of the year mainly devoted to commissioning. 2011 was the first production year with over 5 inverse femtobarns delivered to both ATLAS and CMS. 2012 started well with over 6 inverse femtobarns delivered by the time of the summer conferences - these data paved the way for the announcement of a/the Higgs on 4th July 2012. The LHC is designed to collide two counter rotating beams of protons or heavy ions. The beams move around the LHC ring inside a continuous vacuum guided by magnets.
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a 'mini-Big Bang' 8 November 2010Last updated at 11:12 ET By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News Dr David Evans: "From conception to design and building this, it's taken about 20 years." The Large Hadron Collider has successfully created a "mini-Big Bang" by smashing together lead ions instead of protons. The scientists working at the enormous machine achieved the unique conditions on 7 November. The experiment created temperatures a million times hotter than at the centre of the Sun. The LHC is housed in a 27km-long circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border near Geneva. Up until now, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator - which is run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) - has been colliding protons, in a bid to uncover mysteries of the Universe's formation. Continue reading the main story Proton collisions could help spot the elusive Higgs boson particle and signs of new physical laws, such as a framework called supersymmetry. 'Strong force'
Space Today Online -- Solar System Planet Earth -- Ancient Astro A European researcher has interpreted carvings in a 32,500-year-old ivory tablet as a pattern of the same stars that we see in the sky today in the constellation Orion. The tablet is a sliver of ivory from the tusk of a mammoth — a large woolly animal like an elephant. Mammoths are extinct today. Carved into the ivory is what appears to be a carving of a human figure with outstretched arms and legs. The pose suggests the stars of Orion, according to Michael Rappenglueck, formerly of the University of Munich, known for his interpretation of ancient star charts painted on walls of prehistoric caves. The ivory tablet has notches carved on its sides and back, which are not understood but might be an ancient pregnancy calendar to estimate when a woman would give birth. The tiny piece of ivory was in a cave in the Ach Valley in the Alb-Danube region of Germany when it was discovered in 1979. Stone Age people. The Orion constellation is known to stargazers today as "the hunter." Summer Triangle.
Welcome to Earth and Sky - New Zealand's Sanctuary for the Stars Earth & Sky is a local business situated in the small township of Lake Tekapo , a lovely community in the heart of New Zealand's South Island. Our friendly, knowledgeable staff offer visitors guided daytime tours around Mount John Observatory as well as nighttime stargazing tours at Mount John and Cowan's Observatory. Located in the Mackenzie District, the region is renowned for the clarity of its sky and freedom from light pollution, which is why the area was declared a gold-level International Dark Sky Reserve in mid-2012. People in their tens of thousands flock here annually to see the southern stars and transient phenomena such as aurorae, meteor showers and the zodiacal light in all their pristine glory. If you wish to capture a permanent record of our night sky, we can help with astrophotography too. (The taking of photographs and video footage on Mount John is permitted for personal use only. See our Earth & Sky Day Tours or Earth & Sky Night Tours pages for further details.
Science - News for Your Neurons Hunt for Higgs Particle Enters Endgame By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Bill Murray is a man with secrets. Along with a handful of other scientists based at CERN, Europe's particle-physics facility near Geneva, Switzerland, Murray is one of the few researchers with access to the latest data on the Higgs boson -- the most sought-after particle in physics. Looking at his laptop, he traces a thin black line that wiggles across a shaded area at the centre of a graph. Despite Murray's coyness, there are few places left for the Higgs to hide. At a conference in Paris on November 18, teams from ATLAS and the CMS experiments presented a combined analysis that wipes out a wide swathe of potential masses for the Higgs particle. Analysis of the very latest data from this autumn--which Murray isn't yet ready to share -- will scour the range that remains. Waiting for God Four fundamental forces are at work in nature: gravity, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. If there is no Higgs, then what?
LIVE REAL TIME SATELLITE AND SPACE SHUTTLE TRACKING AND PREDICTIONS LHC_Homepage The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way. Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre.