Image of the Day - CERN Still Looking

Today's Image of the Day for 8/10/11 - CERN Still Looking

CERN detector courtesy of zastavki

The long-sought after Higgs boson particle will be found in the next 12 months if it exists, said the leader of the CERN facility in Geneva. The three scientists, one from each of CERN, the U.S. Fermilab and Japan's KEK - also stated their scepticism of recent claims that particles had recently broken the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). 'I think by this time next year I will be able to bring you either the Higgs boson or the message that it doesn't exist,' said Rolf Heuer, director general of CERN, whose LHC is at the focus of the search. He was echoed by KEK's Atsuto Suzuki and Pier Oddone of Fermilab, which last weekend shut off - after 26 years - its Tevatron accelerator, which has also been seeking the Higgs in the debris of billions of particle collisions. Oddone said analysis of the data gathered in the Tevatron, which for nearly a decade led the search, would be under analysis for several more months but at best could only now reveal where the Higgs was not hiding. Existence of the particle - believed to have given shape to the universe after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago - was proposed some four decades ago. 'Last month Guido Tonelli, a spokesman for the Compact Muon Solenoid Detector, a huge particle detector at CERN, said that even if the LHC was able to rule out the existence of the Higgs boson, that would be a major achievement in itself. Another CERN spokesman said that the Higgs boson was not the only solution to the mystery of the universe.But even if the elusive particle is not found, the experiments, which use the 'ring' to smash streams of protons together at nearly the speed of light, creating billions of 'miniature Big Bangs', will still expand human knowledge - even if it is simply by exposing flaws in the Standard Model of physics, accepted since the Seventies as a system to 'explain' matter. Speaking earlier this year, Tonelli said, 'We've reached the edge of the unknown. It's all new physics from now.'

Image of the Day - Draconid Meteor Shower

Today's Image of the Day for 7/10/11 - Draconid meteor shower

Draconid meteor shower courtesy of dailymirror

The meteors become visible as the earth crosses the orbit of the 21P/Giacobini-Zinner comet. The comet's orbit path is filled with tiny particles - the size of a grain of sand. When our planet zips through this cosmic dust storm the particles disintegrate in our atmosphere and create streaks of light across the sky. However, because this year's schedule of meteor showers happens to coincide with the full moon cycle, they may be difficult to spot with the sky so brightly lit. Because the Draconids move relatively slowly in stellar terms - 12 miles per second - they're faint and the moonlight tends to wash them out. The meteor shower is named after the constellation from which they appear to emerge, which in this case is Draco, the dragon. The Draconids have previously put on some spectacular shows. In 1933 and 1946 observers reported an astounding rate of 20,000 shooting stars an hour, leading one Irish astronomer to describe the 1933 episode as being like a flurry of snowflakes. If this Draconid shower isn't visible, there won't be another chance to catch it until 2018. Instead you will have to satisfy yourself with the arrival of the Orionids on October 22 - remnants from Halley's Comet - which are expected to number a rather more sedate 20 meteors an hour. Then there are the Leonids in mid-November - with as many as 100 meteors an hour - but it may not be any easier to glimpse those to showers either.

'Next year will be better.'

Image of the Day - Apple II Motherboard

Today's Image of the Day for 6/10/11 - Apple 2 Motherboard

(Steve Jobs Tribute)

Apple 2 motherboard courtesy of willegal

The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and introduced in 1977. It is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until Apple IIe production ceased in November 1993. The first Apple II computers went on sale on June 5, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 kB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. To reflect the computer's colour graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998. An external 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached via a controller card that plugged into one of the computer's expansion slots (usually slot 6), was used for data storage and retrieval to replace cassettes. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, it was regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components.

This IotD is a tribute to Steve Jobs.

He will be remembered forever.

A tribute to Steve Jobs

A tribute to Steve Jobs

Image from apple.com

October the 5th 2011 brought the sad news that Steve Jobs; co-founder of Apple Inc. had passed away. After a long battle with pancreatic cancer and an operation that would remove the tumour, the cancerous cells won and sadly ended the life of one of the greatest innovators to ever live. Among the millions of people world wide to honour Jobs' wonderful life; world leaders like Barack Obama and David Cameron, Bill gates and Google co-founder Larry Page would join the celebrations of what he has achieved.

Image courtesy Jonathon Mak

A visual tribute to Steve Jobs has re-imagined the classic Apple logo with Jobs’ silhouette as the bite in the Apple. The image’s caption simply reads, “Thanks, Steve.”

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

A quote from Steve Jobs

Image of the Day - End of ROSAT

Today's Image of the Day for 5/10/11 - End of ROSAT

ROSAT all-sky survey sourtesy of xray.mpe.mpg.de

ROSAT (short for Röntgensatellit, in German X-rays are called Röntgenstrahlen, in honour of Wilhelm Röntgen) is a defunct German Aerospace centre-led satellite X-Ray telescope, with instruments built by Germany, the UK and the US. It was launched on 1 June 1990, on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, on what was initially designed as an 18 month mission, with provision for up to 5 years of operation. ROSAT actually operated for over 8 years, finally shutting down on 12 February 1999.
       ROSAT is expected to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at some point between October and December. In February, it was reported that the 2,400 kg satellite was unlikely to burn up entirely while re-entering the earth atmosphere due to the large amount of ceramics and glass used in construction. Parts as heavy as 400 kg could impact the surface intact. If you thought that Nasa's odds of one in 3,200 that someone somewhere on the Earth would be struck by a piece of the falling UARS satellite were worrying, then the next major satellite decay poses even more of a risk. The German Aerospace Center puts the equivalent odds for Rosat, the Roentgen Satellite, at one in 2,000. In fact, your personal odds of being hit are more like 1 in 14 trillion, so it is probably safe to put away that tin hat. If you live north of the Wash, then you are out of the "danger zone" which extends to 53° N and S of the equator. Equipped with an 84cm mirror, it completed an X-ray survey of the sky, finding more than 150,000 objects.
         It followed up with targeted observations of interesting objects from galaxies, to neutron stars and even comets. It is about three weeks away from re-entry as it's orbit decays, though it could survive into November. Rosat is less than half as massive as UARS, but more than half of it is thought likely to survive re-entry. The expectation is that this will drop harmlessly into an ocean. The US tracking authorities took more than two days to confirm the details of UARS' plunge into the Pacific, so let us hope that they do better with ROSAT.

Image of the Day - ALMA's first image

Today's Image of the Day for 4/10/11 - ALMA's first image

ALMA pictures antennae galaxies courtesy of feltworks

This is the remarkable first picture taken by the new $1.3 billion radio telescope sitting high in the Chilean Andes - using only a quarter of the antennae it will have when it comes into full operation in 2013. Even now, this shot of the Antennae Galaxies taken by the Atacama Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is astonishing - showing two galaxies colliding in a view no other telescope on Earth or in space could capture. The $1 billion radio telescope is the most expensive ground-based telescope ever built - and the highest-altitude, at 16,000ft. Chile's Atacama desert was chosen for its dryness and clarity - and this test view shows off the telescope's exceptional power at detecting 'cold' matter using radio waves. The combined image shown would not be visible at all to visible-light and infrared telescopes.

Image of the Day - Tevatron

Today's Image of the Day for 3/10/11 - Tevatron

Tevatron courtesy of visualmedia.fnal

One of the world's most powerful "atom smashers", at the leading edge of scientific discovery for a quarter of a century, has been shut down. The Tevatron facility near Chicago fired its last particle beams on Friday after federal funding ran out. Housed in a 6km-long circular tunnel under the Illinois prairie, the Tevatron leaves behind a rich scientific legacy. Since 1985, engineers have been accelerating bunches of proton and antiproton particles around the Tevatron's main ring at close to the speed of light, then smashing them together in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe. This includes finding nature's heaviest elementary particle: the top quark. But the Tevatron has been superseded by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - located on the French-Swiss border - which is capable of getting to much higher energies than the US machine. The Tevatron's main ring is likely to be used in other experiments, and components may be transferred to other accelerators, with Fermilab concentrating on smaller-scale experiments such as Project X - an effort to develop ever more intense particle beams.

Image of the Day - Waxing Moon

Today's Image of the Day for 2/10/11 - Waxing Moon

The Moon exhibits different phases as the relative position of the Sun, Earth and Moon changes, appearing as a full moon when the Sun and Moon are on opposite sides of the Earth and as a new moon when they are on the same side. Lunar phases are the result of looking at the illuminated half of the Moon from different viewing geometries; they are not caused by the shadow of the Earth or umbra falling on the Moon's surface.  As the Moon waxes (the amount of illuminated surface as seen from Earth is increasing), the lunar phases progress from new moon, crescent moon, first-quarter moon, gibbous moon and full moon phases, before returning through the gibbous moon, third-quarter (or last quarter) moon, crescent moon and new moon phases. In the northern hemisphere, if the left side of the Moon is dark then the light part is growing, and the Moon is referred to as waxing (moving towards a full moon). When a crescent Moon occurs, the phenomenon of Earthshine may be apparent, where the night side of the Moon faintly reflects light from the Earth.

Image of the Day - Launch of Tiangong-1

Today's Image of the Day for 1/10/11 - Launch of Tiangong-1

Launch of Tiangong-1 courtesy of 2.bp

Tiangong means "heavenly palace" in Chinese.

A rocket carrying China's first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, has launched from the north of the country. The Long March vehicle lifted clear from the Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert at 21:16 local time (13:16 GMT). The rocket's ascent took the lab out over the Pacific, and on a path to an orbit some 350km above the Earth. The 10.5m-long, cylindrical module will be unmanned for the time being, but the country's astronauts, or yuhangyuans, are expected to visit it next year. The immediate plan is for the module to operate in an autonomous mode, monitored from the ground. Then, in a few weeks' time, China will launch another unmanned spacecraft, Shenzhou 8, and try to link the pair together. This rendezvous and docking capability is a prerequisite if larger structures are ever to be assembled in orbit.

Image of the Day - Crab Nebula

Today's Image of the Day for 30/9/11 - Crab Nebula

Crab Nebula courtesy of eso.org

The Crab Nebula is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. The nebula was observed by John Bevis in 1731; it corresponds to a bright supernova recorded by Chinese and Arab astronomers in 1054. Located at a distance of about 6,500 light-years from Earth, the nebula has a diameter of 11 light-years and expands at a rate of about 1,500 kilometers per second. It is part of the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. At the center of the nebula lies the Crab Pulsar, a neutron star (or spinning ball of neutrons), 28–30 km across, which emits pulses of radiation from gamma rays to radio waves with a spin rate of 30.2 times per second.

Image of the Day - Keyhole Nebula

Today's Image of the Day for 29/9/11 - Keyhole Nebula

Keyhole Nebula courtesy of WallpaperCavern

Located around 8000 light years away in the Carina Nebula this portion is known as the Keyhole Nebula, a name given to it by John Herschel in the 19th century. The Keyhole Nebula is actually a much smaller and darker cloud of cold molecules and dust, containing bright filaments of hot, fluorescing gas, silhouetted against the much brighter background nebula. The diameter of the Keyhole structure is approximately 7 light years.