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. Ned Wright's Cosmology Tutorial - (Build 20100401064631) News of the UniverseFrequently Asked QuestionsEnter the tutorial or the Italian version or the French version Cosmological fads and fallacies CMB SpectrumCMB AnisotropyBig Bang NucleosynthesisSupernova ObservationsCosmology, Religion & KansasSend me your comments Exhibits Collection New Englanders have a saying: "If you don't like the weather, just wait a minute." Weather forecasts may be more stable in other parts of the world, but the basic idea stands. Weather is dynamic, the product of interacting forces we are only beginning to understand. Witness the weather extremes caused by El Niño in 1997 and 1998. El Niño raised water temperatures in the Pacific and the effects were felt worldwide: crop failures, disease outbreaks, excess snow, or too little rain. Journalists have painted a picture of El Niño as an isolated event, a freak weather occurrence.
Solar System Planet Earth 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.
Geeked on Goddard » The birth, life, and death of alien planets: Goddard exoplanet scientists give you an update on what we (think) we know The official count of candidate planets around other stars recently hit a whopping 500. But when the first extrasolar planets — often called exoplanets — were discovered, many scientists weren’t sure if they should believe their own data. The first confirmed exoplanets were found around a stellar corpse called a pulsar, born of a supernova explosion of a star.
Other Web Cam Options for Viewing the Lunar Eclipse Other Web Cam Options for Viewing the Lunar Eclipse Cloudy skies over much of the U.S. might make for challenging viewing tonight for the solstice lunar eclipse. To help work around the mercurial weather, here’s a list of web sites that are offering live web views. Many of these are located in parts of the country where the weather is clear – and you can still check out the Marshall Space Flight Center Web cam. We’ve had some breaks in the clouds, and we’re hoping for the best as the eclipse time draws closer. Vatican Joins Search For Alien Life VATICAN CITY -- E.T. phone Rome. Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church. "The questions of life's origins and of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe are very suitable and deserve serious consideration," said the Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, an astronomer and director of the Vatican Observatory.
NASA spots smallest planet yet discovered outside Sun's solar system The object is the first rocky planet discovered by NASA's Kepler spacecraftThe discovery has scientists optimistic about what else could be foundKepler is capable of finding Earth-size planets in a habitable zone, NASA says (CNN) -- A NASA spacecraft has detected a rocky planet that is the smallest ever discovered outside the Sun's solar system, the agency announced Monday. The exoplanet -- so named because it orbits a star other than the Sun -- has been dubbed Kepler-10b. It measures 1.4 times the Earth's diameter and was confirmed after more than eight months of data collection, the agency said. It is the first rocky, or Earth-like, planet discovered by Kepler.
Researchers Find Evidence of Other Universes Lurking in the Cosmic Background Just when the search for exoplanets looked like the undisputed fashionable field of study for 2010, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) is stepping to the forefront of astronomy and cosmology. Last month, it was Oxford's Roger Penrose claiming that he'd found evidence of a cyclical universe in patterns of concentric circles in the CMB, suggesting our universe is just one of many that have come before it (and will come after it). Now, another group of researchers are claiming the CMB contains evidence of other universes that exist concurrently (and outside of) our own. The new evidence, put forth by a group of researchers at University College London, is based upon the model of "eternal inflation," which is predicated on the idea that our universe is part of a larger and ever-expanding multiverse. But that's a big "if." If the earlier CMB findings by Penrose are any indicator, proving or disproving these sorts of claims rooted in WMAP data is extremely difficult.