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I hear that CERN have found the most substantial evidence yet for physics beyond the standard model. Something to do with leptons not being as similar to each other as they should be with the known forces. But it is a tentative result at present, without the statistical substance that would make it a "discovery". http://www.rdmag.com/news/2015/08/evidence-suggests-subatomic-particles-could-defy-standard-model If confirmed, this will be the most significant thing discovered at the LHC, in my opinion (the Higgs boson was confirmation of something which most people accepted existed anyhow, as it explained so much). It may also mean the LHC is not the last particle accelerator (there was fear of a wasteland of energy scales between what the LHC can achieve and the Planck mass).

Mission objective: Send a spacecraft to the Alpha Centauri star system and collect dataPeople behind the mission: Mark Zuckerberg, Stephen Hawking, Martin Rees, Pete Worden, Avi Loeb, Freeman Dyson, Lou Friedman, Saul Perlmutter, Philip Lubin, Santa Barabara.Estimated mission launch: 2030sMission details: 1. A mothership will launch into high-Earth orbitbefore releasing many (potentially thousands) of probes, one by one. 2. Each probe contains a StarChip which has cameras, sensors, navigation and communication computers, a power supply, and photon thrusters. All this on a chip the size of a postage stamp, and surrounded by a one metre2 sail, and a combined mass of just a few grams. 3. In a dry location at high altitude will be a large array of 1 million 1 kW lasers, giving a combined power of 100 GW. 4. The momentum of the laser photons on the sail pushes the StarChip away from Earth. The high power and low mass means that after 10 minutes the StarChips will be accelerated to 20% of the speed of light. 5. The StarChips will reach Proxima Centauri in 21 years, and Alpha Centauri in 22 years.Estimated time of arrival at Proxima Centauri: 2050sSpeed of probe: 0.2cOther: This project has been awarded $100 million by the Breakthrough Foundation, which will cover the beginning of the research and development process. The entire project is expected to cost several billion dollarsSource: Astronomy Now Magazine, July 2016 edition Thought this was worth sharing, and created this thread as a place for discussion of the project.

We have a member who, in the great tradition of Internet crackpottery, is derisive of general relativity. This thread is about the evidence for General Relativity and the absence of evidence against it. Perhaps the best of all is the way that General Relativity predicts that all orbiting objects gradually radiate energy as gravitational waves, causing orbits to decay, just like accelerating charges radiate electromagnetic radiation. This effect is quite large in pulsars, leading to a precise prediction of the rate of slowing of their rotation over time. Here is the comparison between this prediction and the measured change in the rate of rotation of the Hulse-Taylor Pulsar. Ain't science beautiful?

First of all, and this is something you never hear about, the Pioneer anomaly was also shown by another spacecraft: the Ulysses spacecraft which was launched, via a gravity assist at Jupiter, into an orbit around the Sun out of the plane of the ecliptic. The Ulysses orbit could only be explained, said Anderson et al. (1998) (see ref below, page 2) if they included an unexpected acceleration of 12+/-3x10^-10 m/s^2 towards the Sun, in agreement with the Pioneer anomaly of 8.74+/-1.33x10^-10 m/s^2. The Ulysses spacecraft had a different orientation to the Pioneer craft so it's very unlikely thermal emission would apply in the same way. This supports my opinion that the Pioneer anomaly has been brushed under the carpet by a complex thermal model (that has 1000s of finite elements and two adjustable parameters) rather like the galaxy rotation anomaly has been brushed under the carpet using vague and complex dark matter models. Uncomfortable contrary data like the Ulysses data in the case of Pioneer, or dwarf galaxies in the case of dark matter, have been hidden away in a dark closet like a grumbling relative with a higher standard of cleanliness, but they are still there, muffled but more determined than ever to expose sloppy practices. Going further, the Pioneer anomaly is not only supported as an anomaly, to the standard model, by the Ulysses data, but also by the galaxy rotation anomaly, the anomalous cosmic acceleration, the flyby anomalies, dwarf galaxies, the Tajmar effect, the emdrive and many more, all of which are easily solved by the same acceleration shown by the Pioneer craft, an acceleration that appears naturally within the framework of MiHsC (see my papers below for the solutions for the Pioneer, galactic and cosmic acceleration). The fact that the same number 2(SpeedofLight)^2/(HubbleScale) ~ 8x10^-10 m/s^2 keeps cropping up all over the place, should really get massive attention. This is direct evidence for MiHsC, because only MiHsC predicts that crucial number (even in MoND for example this odd number has to be put in by hand). ReferencesAnderson et al., 1998. Indication from Pioneer

Unmissable! http://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

Slightly off topic, but I've read that atoms, or at least subatomic particles can be in two places at once. Is this true ? I know there are lots of smart people in this group; so my question is how does that hypothesis apply to me, or any human being. Can a person be in two different places at the same moment in time? I mean, hypothetically speaking...

light is the fastest thing in the universe.(maybe).light can go up to about 300,000 km a second.

Hey everybody! Glad you all seem to like the Nebula albums. I'm working up a Galaxy album as well, but I'd like feedback on the Nebulae. Let me know which Neabulae are your favorites (there are roughly 110 in the albums) so I can get a sense of what you all like to see.

Released today from Hubble

A great discussion on BBC Radio 4. If anyone doesn't have access to it (I am not sure if there is global access) and wants to hear it, ask me and I'll send the mp3. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06s8714#play

To celebrate the centenary, an entertaining two part program was recently broadcast by Brian Cox with Robin Ince: the Infinite Monkey Guide to General Relativity. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06r4wg9 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06rxqw8

Now there is a more sciency alternative to Google Earth, I guess. http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34593908 https://sentinels.copernicus.eu/web/sentinel/sentinel-data-access

I wish I'd taken this, but it was actually taken by someone who lives near me on this clear evening.

netsitechess suggested an astronomy Q&A session in the chat room. Interesting idea which might be worth trying if there is any interest. Normally such a thing might involve a small number of selected authorities and a group of people asking questions, but I feel many people here might know things about different parts of astronomy, so it would be reasonable to allow people to answer where they have some knowledge to offer. If there is enough interest in this, it will require a scheduled time at which people can arrive and enter the chat room. We would find out if there is sufficient interest.

http://amazing815.iwombo.com/nasa-discovers-asteroid-rapidly-approaching-earth-on-halloween-night/

The Higgs boson or Higgs particle is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. Observations of the particle allows scientists to explore the Higgs field—a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory,first suspected to exist in the 1960s, that unlike the more familiar electromagnetic field cannot be "turned off", but instead takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere. The presence of this field, now believed to be confirmed, explains why some fundamental particles have mass even though the symmetries controlling their interactions should require them to be massless, and also answers several other long-standing puzzles in physics, such as the reason the weak force has a much shorter range than the electromagnetic force. The Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs, one of six physicists who, in 1964, proposed the mechanism that suggested the existence of such a particle

Went out for a run last night and spent most of my time looking at a beautiful night sky in all directions. Somehow I didn't fall over, even when looking straight up at the Milky Way. But anyway, caught some interesting news about an idea to detect dark matter (if it happens to be of a specific type). May be interesting. http://phys.org/news/2015-09-dark-stars-oscillations.html

Any statements/assertions made should follow this very simply picture.

Unmissable!

Spectacular solar photography and much more in a marvelous episode: