Monthly Archives: January 2011

2011 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics

This summer Ralph Engel (KIT-Karlsruhe), Patrick Dekowski (NIKHEF) and I will act as conveners for the parallel session “Astroparticle Physics” of the 2011 Europhysics Conference on High Energy Physics, organized by the European Physical Society’s High Energy Particle Physics Division Board. The Conference will take place in the charming city of Grenoble, from July 21 to 27, 2011. 

Solar Sail Stunner

From NASA Science News :

In an unexpected reversal of fortune, NASA’s NanoSail-D spacecraft has unfurled a gleaming sheet of space-age fabric 650 km above Earth, becoming the first-ever solar sail to circle our planet.
“We’re solar sailing!” says NanoSail-D principal investigator Dean Alhorn of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. “This is a momentous achievement.”
Read more here..

Mt. Etna erupts

Directly from Bad Astronomy, gorgeous images of Mt Etna (and other volcanoes) as seen from space. As a kid I used to watch Etna’s eruptions “live” from the windows of our home in Reggio Calabria.

There are a handful of volcanoes in the world that evoke an immediate recognition, dormant or not. Vesuvius, Krakatoa, Mt. St. Helens. Certainly, Sicily’s Mt. Etna is another. At 3300 meters in elevation, it’s the largest active volcano in Italy… and by active, I do mean active.

In 2002, Etna erupted in a relatively large display of lava and ash. This view was taken by Expedition 5 about the International Space Station, looking southeast at a low angle. This eruption let loose a river of lava down the flank of the volcano which set fire to pine trees there; the dark plume is from the eruption, but the whiter ones are from burning pine trees. The plume from this eruption blew south and was reported as far away as Libya, nearly 600 km distant.

Unlike Earth observing satellites, which point straight down, astronauts on the ISS have the luxury of seeing things at an angle, providing a more natural – and in this case, more spectacular – view to our human eyes and brain.


http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/01/20/mt-etna-erupts/

Surprise of the day



Can you guess what the mechanism above is?


Answer (directly from Wikipedia): Antikythera mechanism fragment. The mechanism consists of a complex system of 32 wheels and plates with inscriptions relating to the signs of the zodiac and the months. The study of the fragments suggests that this was a kind of astrolabe used for marine navigation. The interpretation now generally accepted dates back to studies by Professor Derek de Solla Price, who was the first to suggest that the mechanism is a machine to calculate the solar and lunar calendar, that is to say, an ingenious machine to determine the time based on the movements of the sun and moon, their relationship (eclipses) and the movements of other stars and planets known at that time. The mechanism was probably built by an ingenious mechanic school Posidonius in Rhodes. Cicero, who visited the island in a. 79/78 C. reported that such devices were indeed designed by the Stoic philosopher Posidonius of Apamea. The design of the Antikythera mechanism appears to follow the tradition of Archimedes’ planetarium, and may be related to sundials. His modus operandi is based on the use of gears. The machine is dated 89 a. C. around and comes from the wreck found off the island of Antikythera. National Archaeological Museum, Athens, No. 15987.

Fermilab: Tevatron shut down in 2011

A message from Fermilab’s director Piero Oddone, appeared on “Fermilab Today” (see also this Nature article):


Yesterday we received the news that we will not receive funding for the proposed Tevatron extension and consequently the Tevatron will close at the end of FY2011 as was previously planned. The present budgetary climate did not permit the DOE to secure the additional funds needed to run the Tevatron for three more years as recommended by the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. Both Tevatron collaborations did a splendid job articulating the physics case and all the relevant issues to both our Physics Advisory Committee and the national advisory committees, which led to the recommendation to extend the Tevatron.
We plan to extract every bit of physics we can from this final Tevatron running period. The Tevatron has already exceeded all expectations, and given the large datasets we will continue to find new results and discoveries in the Tevatron data for years to come. The life of this legendary machine has been marked by historic discoveries made possible by its innovative accelerator and detector technologies. The experience gained during its operation has also immensely helped the development of the LHC accelerator and detectors. Fermilab is and will remain a very strong part of the LHC program and will continue to pursue physics at the high-energy frontier together with our collaborators at CERN.
As you can imagine I have answered many questions from the press over the last 24 hours. They are interested in the future of Fermilab, what may happen with jobs on our site and whether or not there will be any layoffs. There are about 100 jobs connected with the operations and maintenance of the colliding beam program. At this point the situation is very fluid because we do not have all the information we need to make decisions. In particular:

    a) We do not know the budget for FY11 since we are in a Continuing Resolution and Congress has not acted on any of the appropriations bills.
    b) We do not know the President’s budget request for the following year, FY12. We will know this only in mid February.

When the Tevatron concludes operations, we plan to move as many employees as possible to jobs on several new experiments and projects, many of which are already well underway and in need of extra help. Of course, this depends on the budget for FY11 and FY12 and on how fast the new projects ramp up. It will be a complex transition for the laboratory, and soon we will set up a Q&A website to answer questions about the issues that this transition entails.
The Office of Science and Fermilab are committed to maintaining our laboratory as a world leader for particle physics research. We have the Office of Science’s strong support to develop into the foremost laboratory at the Intensity Frontier with new neutrino experiments NOvA, MicroBooNE and the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE); the muon-to-electron conversion experiment (Mu2e); and ongoing experiments MINOS, MINERvA and MiniBooNE. Underlying our Intensity Frontier program we have the Office of Science’s support for the development of Project X. In addition we have leading programs at the Cosmic Frontier with the Dark Energy Survey, the dark-matter experiments CDMS and COUPP, and Pierre Auger. While we would have liked to run the Tevatron for three more years, our life going forward is full of promising projects and great opportunities for major discoveries.