Earth rising

Check out this astonishing clipof the Earth rising and setting over the surface of the Moon. It was taken by the KAGUYA orbiter from about 100km above the Moon’s surface. The images are so good because they were shot in high definition - the first time gthe Earth has been caught from space in such detail. Makes me want to go there and enjoy it for myself.

Exotic meson spotted at Belle

Particle physicists on the Belle experiment at the KEK electron-positron collider in Japan, have just announced something exciting - the first meson with non-zero electrical charge. Mesons are particles that experience the strong force and until now, everyone thought they were made up of a quark and a matching anti-quark. Since quarks and their anti-quarks have opposite electrical charge this means they should always be electrically neutral.The catchily named Z(4430) was seen in the decays of the B mesons that Belle produces and scientists there have found 120 cases where the B decays into a Z(4430) and a K-meson. The Z(4430) then instantly decays into a “Psi-prime” (Psi-prime) particle and a pi-meson. The Z(4430) has a mass of 4.7 times that of the proton.

Just when we thought we were on the verge of discovering the final part of the Standard Model with the hoped-for sighting of a Higgs at LHC, something new comes along to show we don’t know everything about the subatomic world.

Venus rising

Having children who don’t ever sleep past 6.30 in the morning has one important benefit - you get to see the pre-sunrise sky.  Venus looks particularly lovely in the east at 5.15am, with the glow of soon-to-rise sun just below it. A couple of weeks back, there was a particularly nice juxtaposition of Venus and a thin crescent Moon. It makes getting up that early worth it…well, almost.

Completing the circle

I hear that CERN has today finally joined together all the sections of the new Large Hadron Collider (LHC). They’ll now be able to start cooling the thing down to 1.9 degrees above absolute zero (–271.3°C). That’s pretty chilly when you consider that most of space simmers away at a relatively warm 2.73 degrees above absolute zero - the temperature of the cosmic microwave background that most scientists believe is the best evidence for the Big Bang.LHC’s cryogenic system uses 10,000 tonnes of liquid nitrogen and 130 tonnes of liquid helium to bring down the temperature of the collider. CERN reckons that if all goes well, “the first beams could be injected into the LHC in May 2008, and circulating beams established by June or July”.

CERN director general Robert Aymar adds a note of caution though and says that if there is a problem cooling down any of the eight separate sectors of the LHC, it might not start doing anything useful until the end of next summer.

CERN is hoping that when the LHC does start doing some physics, they will discover the elusive Higgs boson - the missing member of the toolkit from which the Universe and everything in it is constructed. The Higgs is supposed to explain why lightweight electrons have a different mass from heavyweight protons. That might not sound too exciting to the man (or woman) in the street but the geek in me just can’t wait. LHC’s switch-on can’t come a moment too soon.

Life on other planets?

This interesting looking piece of equipment is called SuperWASP. Or more correctly, it’s one of two SuperWASPs. One is on the island of La Palma in the northern hemisphere while the second is in South Africa.

Despite looking like something a mad inventor might have cobbled together in his garden shed, it’s actually a very sophisticated piece of gear and earlier this week it was announced that it had done something rather clever - finding planets outside our solar system.

In fact, it found three such planets, which have been dubbed Wasp 3b, Wasp 4b and Wasp 5b. These are all planets about the size of Jupiter and they orbit three different stars, all of which are around 700 and 900 light years away. The team behind the project has already found two so-called exoplanets around other stars so that’s quite some haul given that there are only around 250 known ones.

So how do they find them? The SuperWASP looks for transits - the periods in which a planet passes directly in front of its parent star. Since the planet does not emit any light itself, it blocks out some of the starlight, causing an observable dip in the light measured by SuperWASP. The variation is tiny - perhaps just 1% of the total light output - so the technique is best used for huge planets like these.

I think it’s safe to assume that there’ll be some Earth-like planets near these big boys although it may be some time before we can prove their existence. Is it too much to wonder whether there’s life on one of them?

Tracking ghosts

Neutrinos are one of the most elusive particles around. For a long time, scientists didn’t think they had mass, traveled at the speed of light and really didn’t like interacting with anything else very much. Billions of the things pass through your body every second of every day without causing you to flinch. This has meant that the neutrino has become known as the ghost particle.

Except that know we’re going to get a much better look at them. A clever experiment generates neutrinos at the CERN nuclear physics lab in Geneva and then detects them in an underground cavern hundreds of miles away in Italy has just detected its first neutrinos. It doesn’t detect the neutrinos directly but looks for the tell-tale signs of other particles created when the neutrinos interact in the Italian detector.

Given that the neutrinos take just 2.4 milliseconds to travel the 450 miles between the source and the detector at the Gran Sasso LaboratoryI think they’ve done a stunning job. What they really want to find are so-called tau neutrinos. Neutrinos come in theee “flavours” - electron, muon and tau - and scientists reckon that somehow they oscillate between these flavours by some as yet unexplained mechanism.  All the neutrinos produced at CERN are of the muon type so if they spot anything that looks like a tau neutrino, there’s a good chance that the oscillation theory is correct. It may not sound important but if they are observed, these oscillations will help explain what happens deep in the heart of stars.

Galaxy spotting

I have just spent an evening in the far reaches of the universe. I had my I-Spy Book of Galaxies to classify them as ellipticals, spirals or mergers. It is incredibly compulsive.

I haven’t lost my marbles or invented a fast-than-light drive but been looking at the Galaxy Zoo project. Researchers from Oxford University and Portsmouth University and Johns Hopkins University in the US have taken images of a million galaxies and are asking members of the public to classify them. They reckon a human can do it better than a computer. Tens of thousand of people have already signed up, spurred on by the thought that they might see something no-one else has. The researchers will then use the results to decide which galaxies are worth another look. Every now and again, you come across an image of galaxy that’s really beautiful and there are active forums showing the best found so far. It’s truly addictive - I want to find something to show everyone else. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m heading back to the deep, dark reaches of space.

Two eyes are better than one

Get the most powerful telescopes in the world and point them at the same thing - what do you get? Well, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck telescopes on the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii have been looking at an object called SDSS J0737+3216.

You can’t actually see it directly as there’s a massive galaxy in the way but thanks to Mr Einstein, you can see it indirectly in the form of an Einstein ring. Massive objects, like stars and galaxies, bend light because of their gravity. When the object bending the light is really massive and the thing you want to see is directly behind it, as in this case, the light from the distant object gets bent into a telltale ring.

Astronomers have taken that joint image to piece together what the distant galaxy looks like and it turns out it’s very small and not too dissimilar to small galaxies in our own neighbourhood. The thing is, SDSS J0737+3216 is six billion light years away so this image shows it as it was six billion years ago.  They now reckon that this tiny galaxy could be what big spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way, are built from.

Albert would have been very proud.

The space race 50 years on

It’s astonishing to realise we have only been in space for the past 50 years. The Universe has been around for 13.7 billion years, the Earth for 4.5 billion and homo sapiens for a few hundred thousand but it was only with the launch of Sputnik, 50 years ago today, that we finally made it off our ball of rock and water.

There seems to be an awful lot of space nostalgia around at the moment as a result and lots of talk about a new space race. Having only been born in 1968, I don’t really remember much about the Apollo and Soyuz programmes, apart from what I have seen in films and on TV and read in books (including the gripping  Two Sides of the Moon by David Scott and Alexei Leonov).

Now it seems, there’s a new race for space. Last year, President Bush vowed that Americans would return to the Moon by 2020 and hinted at manned Mars missions (without giving a date). China and Russia are planning a Mars mission too, unmanned but they are definitely testing the water for sending cosmonauts and taikonauts at some time in the future. I am very excited.

The music of the spheres

I just spotted this review of a new musical composition called Aleph, which attempts to recreate in music the first moments of the universe. There seems to be a real craze for this sort of thing at the moment.  A couple of weeks ago, I read about some Cambridge astronomers who were trying to make music out of dark energy, the spooky stuff that is supposed to make up much of the universe.

Am I the only one to think this is a bit pointless? I like classical music but this just sounds like an excuse to compose some dreadful cacophony and dress it up as culture.

Music of the spheres? I can think of a couple of spherical things that this sort of thing strikes me as.