A new result from the LHCb experiment could be an early indicator of an inconsistency in the Standard Model.
The subatomic universe is an intricate mosaic of particles and forces. The Standard Model of particle physics is a time-tested instruction manual that precisely predicts how particles and forces behave. But it’s incomplete, ignoring phenomena such as gravity and dark matter.
Today the LHCb experiment at CERN European research center released a result that could be an early indication of new, undiscovered physics beyond the Standard Model.
However, more data is needed before LHCb scientists can definitively claim they’ve found a crack in the world’s most robust roadmap to the subatomic universe.
“In particle physics, you can’t just snap your fingers and claim a discovery,” says Marie-Hélène Schune, a researcher on the LHCb experiment from Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Orsay, France. “It’s not magic. It’s long, hard work and you must be obstinate when facing problems. We always question everything and never take anything for granted.”
The LHCb experiment records and analyzes the decay patterns of rare hadrons—particles made of quarks—that are produced in the Large Hadron Collider’s energetic proton-proton collisions. By comparing the experimental results to the Standard Model’s predictions, scientists can search for discrepancies. Significant deviations between the theory and experimental results could be an early indication of an undiscovered particle or force at play.
This new result looks at hadrons containing a bottom quark as they transform into hadrons containing a strange quark. This rare decay pattern can generate either two electrons or two muons as byproducts. Electrons and muons are different types or “flavors” of particles called leptons. The Standard Model predicts that the production of electrons and muons should be equally favorable—essentially a subatomic coin toss every time this transformation occurs.
“As far as the Standard Model is concerned, electrons, muons and tau leptons are completely interchangeable,” Schune says. “It’s completely blind to lepton flavors; only the large mass difference of the tau lepton plays a role in certain processes. This 50-50 prediction for muons and electrons is very precise.”
But instead of finding a 50-50 ratio between muons and electrons, the latest results from the LHCb experiment show that it’s more like 34 muons generated for every 66 electrons.
“If this initial result becomes stronger with more data, it could mean that there are other, invisible particles involved in this process that see flavor,” Schune says. “We’ll leave it up to the theorists’ imaginations to figure out what’s going on.”
However, just like any coin-toss, it’s difficult to know if this discrepancy is the result of an unknown favoritism or the consequence of chance. To delineate between these two possibilities, scientists wait until they hit a certain statistical threshold before claiming a discovery, often 5 sigma.
“Five sigma is a measurement of statistical deviation and means there is only a 1-in-3.5-million chance that the Standard Model is correct and our result is just an unlucky statistical fluke,” Schune says. “That’s a pretty good indication that it’s not chance, but rather the first sightings of a new subatomic process.”
Currently, this new result is at approximately 2.5 standard deviations, which means there is about a 1-in-125 possibility that there’s no new physics at play and the experimenters are just the unfortunate victims of statistical fluctuation.
This isn’t the first time that the LHCb experiment has seen unexpected behavior in related processes. Hassan Jawahery from the University of Maryland also works on the LHCb experiment and is studying another particle decay involving bottom quarks transforming into charm quarks. He and his colleagues are measuring the ratio of muons to tau leptons generated during this decay.
“Correcting for the large mass differences between muons and tau leptons, we’d expect to see about 25 taus produced for every 100 muons,” Jawahery says. “We measured a ratio of 34 taus for every 100 muons.”
On its own, this measurement is below the line of statistical significance needed to raise an eyebrow. However, two other experiments—the BaBar experiment at SLAC and the Belle experiment in Japan—also measured this process and saw something similar.
“We might be seeing the first hints of a new particle or force throwing its weight around during two independent subatomic processes,” Jawahery says. “It’s tantalizing, but as experimentalists we are still waiting for all these individual results to grow in significance before we get too excited.”
More data and improved experimental techniques will help the LHCb experiment and its counterparts narrow in on these processes and confirm if there really is something funny happening behind the scenes in the subatomic universe.
“Conceptually, these measurements are very simple,” Schune says. “But practically, they are very challenging to perform. These first results are all from data collected between 2011 and 2012 during Run 1 of the LHC. It will be intriguing to see if data from Run 2 shows the same thing.”
While driven by the desire pursue curiosity, fundamental investigations are the crucial first step to innovation.
When scientists announced their discovery of gravitational waves in 2016, it made headlines all over the world. The existence of these invisible ripples in space-time had finally been confirmed.
It was a momentous feat in basic research, the curiosity-driven search for fundamental knowledge about the universe and the elements within it. Basic (or “blue-sky”) research is distinct from applied research, which is targeted toward developing or advancing technologies to solve a specific problem or to create a new product.
But the two are deeply connected.
“Applied research is exploring the continents you know, whereas basic research is setting off in a ship and seeing where you get,” says Frank Wilczek, a theoretical physicist at MIT. “You might just have to return, or sink at sea, or you might discover a whole new continent. So it’s much more long-term, it’s riskier and it doesn’t always pay dividends.”
When it does, he says, it opens up entirely new possibilities available only to those who set sail into uncharted waters.
Most of physics—especially particle physics—falls under the umbrella of basic research. In particle physics “we’re asking some of the deepest questions that are accessible by observations about the nature of matter and energy—and ultimately about space and time also, because all of these things are tied together,” says Jim Gates, a theoretical physicist at the University of Maryland.
Physicists seek answers to questions about the early universe, the nature of dark energy, and theoretical phenomena, such as supersymmetry, string theory and extra dimensions.
Perhaps one of the most well-known basic researchers was the physicist who predicted the existence of gravitational waves: Albert Einstein.
Einstein devoted his life to elucidating elementary concepts such as the nature of gravity and the relationship between space and time. According to Wilczek, “it was clear that what drove what he did was not the desire to produce a product, or anything so worldly, but to resolve puzzles and perceived imperfections in our understanding.”
In addition to advancing our understanding of the world, Einstein’s work led to important technological developments. The Global Positioning System, for instance, would not have been possible without the theories of special and general relativity. A GPS receiver, like the one in your smart phone, determines its location based on timed signals it receives from the nearest four of a collection of GPS satellites orbiting Earth. Because the satellites are moving so quickly while also orbiting at a great distance from the gravitational pull of Earth, they experience time differently from the receiver on Earth’s surface. Thanks to Einstein’s theories, engineers can calculate and correct for this difference.
There’s a long history of serendipitous output from basic research. For example, in 1989 at CERN European research center, computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee was looking for a way to facilitate information-sharing between researchers. He invented the World Wide Web.
While investigating the properties of nuclei within a magnetic field at Columbia University in the 1930s, physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi discovered the basic principles of nuclear magnetic resonance. These principles eventually formed the basis of Magnetic Resonance Imaging, MRI.
It would be another 50 years before MRI machines were widely used—again with the help of basic research. MRI machines require big, superconducting magnets to function. Luckily, around the same time that Rabi’s discovery was being investigated for medical imaging, scientists and engineers at the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory began building the Tevatron particle accelerator to enable research into the fundamental nature of particles, a task that called for huge amounts of superconducting wire.
“We were the first large, demanding customer for superconducting cable,” says Chris Quigg, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab. “We were spending a lot of money to get the performance that we needed.” The Tevatron created a commercial market for superconducting wire, making it practical for companies to build MRI machines on a large scale for places like hospitals.
Doctors now use MRI to produce detailed images of the insides of the human body, helpful tools in diagnosing and treating a variety of medical complications, including cancer, heart problems, and diseases in organs such as the liver, pancreas and bowels.
Another tool of particle physics, the particle detector, has also been adopted for uses in various industries. In the 1980s, for example, particle physicists developed technology precise enough to detect a single photon. Today doctors use this same technology to detect tumors, heart disease and central nervous system disorders. They do this by conducting positron emission tomography scans, or PET scans. Before undergoing a PET scan, the patient is given a dye containing radioactive tracers, either through an injection or by ingesting or inhaling. The tracers emit antimatter particles, which interact with matter particles and release photons, which are picked up by the PET scanner to create a picture detailed enough to reveal problems at the cellular level.
As Gates says, “a lot of the devices and concepts that you see in science fiction stories will never come into existence unless we pursue the concept of basic research. You’re not going to be able to construct starships unless you do the research now in order to build these in the future.”
It’s unclear what applications could come of humanity’s new knowledge of the existence of gravitational waves.
It could be enough that we have learned something new about how our universe works. But if history gives us any indication, continued exploration will also provide additional benefits along the way.
Experiments at CERN investigate antiparticles.
What do shrimp, tennis balls and pulsars all have in common? They are all made from matter.
Admittedly, that answer is a cop-out, but it highlights a big, persistent quandary for scientists: Why is everything made from matter when there is a perfectly good substitute—antimatter?
The European laboratory CERN hosts several experiments to ascertain the properties of antimatter particles, which almost never survive in our matter-dominated world.
Particles (such as the proton and electron) have oppositely charged antimatter doppelgangers (such as the antiproton and antielectron). Because they are opposite but equal, a matter particle and its antimatter partner annihilate when they meet.
Antimatter wasn’t always rare. Theoretical and experimental research suggests that there was an equal amount of matter and antimatter right after the birth of our universe. But 13.8 billion years later, only matter-made structures remain in the visible universe.
Scientists have found small differences between the behavior of matter and antimatter particles, but not enough to explain the imbalance that led antimatter to disappear while matter perseveres. Experiments at CERN are working to solve that riddle using three different strategies.
Antimatter under the microscope
It’s well known that CERN is home to Large Hadron Collider, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator. Less known is that CERN also hosts the world’s most powerful particle decelerator—a machine that slows down antiparticles to a near standstill.
The antiproton decelerator is fed by CERN’s accelerator complex. A beam of energetic protons is diverted from CERN’s Proton Synchrotron and into a metal wall, spawning a multitude of new particles, including some antiprotons. The antiprotons are focused into a particle beam and slowed by electric fields inside the antiproton decelerator. From here they are fed into various antimatter experiments, which trap the antiprotons inside powerful magnetic fields.
“All these experiments are trying to find differences between matter and antimatter that are not predicted by theory,” says Will Bertsche, a researcher at University of Manchester, who works in CERN’s antimatter factory. “We’re all trying to address the big question: Why is the universe made up of matter these days and not antimatter?”
By cooling and trapping antimatter, scientists can intimately examine its properties without worrying that their particles will spontaneously encounter a matter companion and disappear. Some of the traps can preserve antiprotons for more than a year. Scientists can also combine antiprotons with positrons (antielectrons) to make antihydrogen.
“Antihydrogen is fascinating because it lets us see how antimatter interacts with itself,” Bertsche says. “We’re getting a glimpse at how a mirror antimatter universe would behave.”
Scientists in CERN’s antimatter factory have measured the mass, charge, light spectrum, and magnetic properties of antiprotons and antihydrogen to high precision. They also look at how antihydrogen atoms are affected by gravity; that is, do the anti-atoms fall up or down? One experiment is even trying to make an assortment of matter-antimatter hybrids, such as a helium atom in which one of the electrons is replaced with an orbiting antiproton.
So far, all their measurements of trapped antimatter match the theory: Except for the opposite charge and spin, antimatter appears completely identical to matter. But these affirmative results don’t deter Bertsche from looking for antimatter surprises. There must be unpredicted disparities between these particle twins that can explain why matter won its battle with antimatter in the early universe.
“There’s something missing in this model,” Bertsche says. “And nobody is sure what that is.”
Antimatter in motion
The LHCb experiment wants to answer this same question, but they are looking at antimatter particles that are not trapped. Instead, LHCb scientists study how free-range antimatter particles behave as they travel and transform inside the detector.
“We’re recording how unstable matter and antimatter particles decay into showers of particles and the patterns they leave behind when they do,” says Sheldon Stone, a professor at Syracuse University working on the LHCb Experiment. “We can’t make these measurements if the particles aren’t moving.”
The particles-in-motion experiments have already observed some small differences between matter and antimatter particles. In 1964 scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory noticed that neutral kaons (a particle containing a strange and down quark) decay into matter and antimatter particles at slightly different rates, an observation that won them the Nobel Prize in 1980.
The LHCb experiment continues this legacy, looking for even more discrepancies between the metamorphoses of matter and antimatter particles. They recently observed that the daughter particles of certain antimatter baryons (particles containing three quarks) have a slightly different spatial orientation than their matter contemporaries.
But even with the success of uncovering these discrepancies, scientists are still very far from understanding why antimatter all but disappeared.
“Theory tells us that we’re still off by nine orders of magnitude,” Stone says, “so we’re left asking, where is it? What is antimatter’s Achilles heel that precipitated its disappearance?”
Antimatter in space
Most antimatter experiments based at CERN produce antiparticles by accelerating and colliding protons. But one experiment is looking for feral antimatter freely roaming through outer space.
The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is an international experiment supported by the US Department of Energy and NASA. This particle detector was assembled at CERN and is now installed on the International Space Station, where it orbits Earth 400 kilometers above the surface. It records the momentum and trajectory of roughly a billion vagabond particles every month, including a million antimatter particles.
Nomadic antimatter nuclei could be lonely relics from the Big Bang or the rambling residue of nuclear fusion in antimatter stars.
But AMS searches for phenomena not explained by our current models of the cosmos. One of its missions is to look for antimatter that is so complex and robust, there is no way it could have been produced through normal particle collisions in space.
“Most scientists accept that antimatter disappeared from our universe because it is somehow less resilient than matter,” says Mike Capell, a researcher at MIT and a deputy spokesperson of the AMS experiment. “But we’re asking, what if all the antimatter never disappeared? What if it’s still out there?”
If an antimatter kingdom exists, astronomers expect that they would observe mass particle-annihilation fizzing and shimmering at its boundary with our matter-dominated space—which they don’t. Not yet, at least. Because our universe is so immense (and still expanding), researchers on AMS hypothesize that maybe these intersections are too dim or distant for our telescopes.
“We already have trouble seeing deep into our universe,” Capell says. “Because we’ve never seen a domain where matter meets antimatter, we don’t know what it would look like.”
AMS has been collecting data for six years. From about 100 billion cosmic rays, they’ve identified a few strange events with characteristics of antihelium. Because the sample is so tiny, it’s impossible to say whether these anomalous events are the first messengers from an antimatter galaxy or simply part of the chaotic background.
“It’s an exciting result,” Capell says. “However, we remain skeptical. We need data from many more cosmic rays before we can determine the identities of these anomalous particles.”
The group brought their on-site drawing practice to the particle physics laboratory.
In March, about 30 participants in the Chicago chapter of the artist network Urban Sketchers visited Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located in west Chicagoland, and sketched their hearts out. They drew buildings, interiors and scenes of nature from the laboratory environment, capturing the laboratory's most iconic building, Wilson Hall, along with restored prairie land and the popular bison herd on site.
Urban Sketchers holds monthly “sketch crawls,” as they’re called. Their mission is to “show the world, one drawing at a time.”
Sketcher Harold Goldfus drew scenes of art and architecture.
“I regard myself as primarily a figurative artist. At the Urban Sketchers Chicago outing, I expected to sketch figures at Fermilab with hints of the environment in the background,” Goldfus said. “Instead, I found myself taken with the architecture and aesthetics of the interior of Wilson Hall, and decided on a more unconventional approach.”
The sketch crawl was organized by Peggy Condon and Wes Douglas from Urban Sketchers Chicago along with Fermilab Art Gallery curator Georgia Schwender.
“I was very inspired by Fermilab’s strong commitment to the arts. I didn’t expect this for a world-renowned scientific research institution,” said sketcher Lynne Fairchild. “I really appreciated that they found so many ways to honor the arts and culture: the art gallery, lecture series, the awe-inspiring sculptures on the campus, and the design of Wilson Hall, especially the beauty of the atrium.”
Editor's note: Fermilab previously posted a version of this article.
We know which way the dark matter wind should blow. Now we just have to find it.
Picture yourself in a car, your hand surfing the breeze through the open window. Hold your palm perpendicular to the wind and you can feel its force. Now picture the car slowing, rolling up to a stop sign, and feel the force of the wind lessen until it—and the car—stop.
This wind isn’t due to the weather. It arises because of your motion relative to air molecules. Simple enough to understand and known to kids, dogs and road-trippers the world over.
This wind has an analogue in the rarefied world of particle astrophysics called the “dark matter wind,” and scientists are hoping it will someday become a valuable tool in their investigations into that elusive stuff that apparently makes up about 85 percent of the mass in the universe.
In the analogy above, the air molecules are dark matter particles called WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles. Our sun is the car, racing around the Milky Way at about 220 kilometers per second, with the Earth riding shotgun. Together, we move through a halo of dark matter that encompasses our galaxy. But our planet is a rowdy passenger; it moves from one side of the sun to the other in its orbit.
When you add the Earth’s velocity of 30 kilometers per second to the sun’s, as happens when both are traveling in the same direction (toward the constellation Cygnus), then the dark matter wind feels stronger. More WIMPs are moving through the planet than if it were at rest, resulting in greater number of detections by experiments. Subtract that velocity when the Earth is on the other side of its orbit, and the wind feels weaker, resulting in fewer detections.
Astrophysicists have been thinking about the dark matter wind for decades. Among the first, way back in 1986, were theorist David Spergel of Princeton and colleagues Katherine Freese of the University of Michigan and Andrzej K. Drukier (now in private industry, but still looking for WIMPs).
“We looked at how the Earth’s motion around the sun should cause the number of dark matter particles detected to vary on a regular basis by about 10 percent a year,” Spergel says.
At least that’s what should happen—if our galaxy really is embedded in a circular, basically homogeneous halo of dark matter, and if dark matter is really made up of WIMPs.
The Italian experiment DAMA/NaI and its upgrade DAMA/Libra claim to have been seeing this seasonal modulation for decades, a claim that has yet to be conclusively supported by any other experiments. CoGeNT, an experiment in the Soudan Underground Laboratory in South Dakota, seemed to back them up for a time, but now the signals are thought to be caused by other sources such as high-energy gamma rays hitting a layer of material just outside the germanium of the detector, resulting in a signal that looks much like a WIMP.
Actually confirming the existence of the dark matter wind is important for one simple reason: the pattern of modulation can’t be explained by anything but the presence of dark matter. It’s what’s called a “model-independent” phenomenon. No natural backgrounds—no cosmic rays, no solar neutrinos, no radioactive decays—would show a similar modulation. The dark matter wind could provide a way to continue exploring dark matter, even if the particles are light enough that experiments cannot distinguish them from almost massless particles called neutrinos, which are constantly streaming from the sun and other sources.
“It’s a big, big prize to go after,” says Jocelyn Monroe, a physics professor at Royal Holloway University of London, who currently works on two dark matter detection experiments, DEAP-3600 at SNOLAB, in Canada, and DMTPC. “If you could correlate detections with the direction in which the planet is moving you would have unambiguous proof” of dark matter.
At the same time Spergel and his colleagues were exploring the wind’s seasonal modulation, he also realized that this correlation could extend far beyond a twice-per-year variation in detection levels. The location of the Earth in its orbit would affect the direction in which nucleons, the particles that make up the nucleus of an atom, recoil when struck by WIMPs. A sensitive-enough detector should see not only the twice-yearly variations, but even daily variations, since the detector constantly changes its orientation to the dark matter wind as the Earth rotates.
“I had initially thought that it wasn’t worth writing up the paper because no experiment had the sensitivity to detect the recoil direction,” he says. “However, I realized that if I pointed out the effect, clever experimentalists would eventually figure out a way to detect it.”
Monroe, as the leader of the DMTPC collaboration, is a member of the clever experimentalist set. The DMTPC, or Dark Matter Time-Projection Chamber, is one of a small number of direct detection experiments that are designed to track the actual movements of recoiling atoms.
Instead of semiconductor crystals or liquefied noble gases, these experiments use low-pressure gases as their target material. DMTPC, for example, uses carbon tetrafluoride. If a WIMP hits a molecule of carbon tetrafluoride, the low pressure in the chamber means that molecule has room to move—up to about 2 millimeters.
“Making the detector is super hard,” Monroe says. “It has to map a 2-millimeter track in 3D.” Not to mention reducing the number of molecules in a detector chamber reduces the chances for a dark matter particle to hit one. According to Monroe, DMTPC will deal with that issue by fabricating an array of 1-cubic-meter-sized modules. The first module has already been constructed and a worldwide collaboration of scientists from five different directional dark matter experiments (including DMTPC) are working on the next step together: a much larger directional dark matter array called the CYGNUS (for CosmoloGY with NUclear recoilS) experiment.
When and if such directional dark matter detectors raise their metaphorical fingers to test the direction of the dark matter wind, Monroe says they’ll be able to see far more than just seasonal variations in detections. Scientists will be able to see variations in atomic recoils not on a seasonal basis, but on a daily basis. Monroe envisions a sort of dark matter telescope with which to study the structure of the halo in our little corner of the Milky Way.
There’s always a chance that this next generation of dark matter detectors, or the generation after, still won’t see anything.
Even that, Monroe says, is progress.
“If we’re still looking in 10 years we might be able to say it’s not WIMPs but something even more exotic As far as we can tell right now, dark matter has got to be something new out there.”
Artist Chris Henschke’s latest piece inspired by particle physics machinery is the closest he’s gotten to the real thing.
Artist Chris Henschke has spent more than a decade exploring the intersection of art and physics. His pieces bring invisible properties and theoretical concepts to light through still images, sound and video.
His latest piece, called “Song of the Phenomena,” gives new life to a retired piece of equipment once used by a long-time collaborator of Henschke, University of Melbourne and Australian Synchrotron physicist Mark Boland.
The story of “Song of the Phenomena” begins in the 1990s. In 1991, Henschke enrolled in the University of Melbourne to study science, but he turned to sound design instead. Boland entered the same university to study physics.
Personal computers were just entering the market. Sound designers and animators began coding basic programs, and Henschke joined in. “I was always interested in making sounds and music, interested in light and art and physics and nature and how it all combines—either in our heads or the devices that mediate between us and nature,” he says.
Boland completed his thesis in physics at the Australian Radiation Laboratory (now called the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency). He was testing a new type of electron detector in a linear accelerator, or linac. The linac used radio waves to guide electrons through a series of accelerator cavities, which imparted more and more energy to the particles as they moved through.
That particular linac spent more than 20 years with the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency, where medical physics professionals used it to accelerate electrons to different energies to create calibration standards for radiation oncology treatments. Once they no longer needed it, Boland’s former advisor contacted him to ask if he’d like the accelerator or any of its still-working parts. He said yes, though he was unsure what he would do with it.
An artist’s view
In 2007 Henschke came to the Australian Synchrotron as part of an artist-in-residence program. Boland was familiar with his artwork; he had seen Henschke’s first piece exploring particle physics in the pages of Symmetry. Boland grew up with an appreciation for art; he says his parents made sure of that by “dragging” him through many galleries in his youth.
When Henschke and Boland met, they got into an hours-long conversation about physics. “We hit it off, we resonated,” Boland says, “and we’ve been working together ever since.”
Since that first residency program, Henschke has spent significant time at the Australian Synchrotron facility and at CERN European research center and has taken shorter trips to the DESY German national research center.
His process of creating artwork echoes the scientific process and the setup of an experiment, Boland says. Henschke thinks through the role that each piece of the artwork plays. Everything is where it is for a reason.
“He’s a perfectionist, he doesn't settle for second best,” Boland says. “He has the same level of professionalism and tenacity as an artist as a physicist does. It’s as if there’s a five-sigma quality test on his work as well.”
Once accelerator, now art
Boland mentioned the linac he had to Henschke during a conversation in early 2016. “Chris ran with it,” Boland says. “He took it and made it into his installation.”
Henschke discovered the machine hums at 220 hertz—the musical note of A—as it produces its resonant waves. “In a sense, particle accelerators are gigantic, high-energy synthesizers because they are creating high-energy waves at very specific frequencies and amplitudes,” Henschke says.
Henschke explored different aspects of the machine, still unsure how each part would come together as a final piece of art. “I have to let it speak to me, I have to let it speak for itself,” he says.
Finally it dawned on him; the art could be an echo of the accelerator’s past.
The accelerator no longer accelerates electrons. Instead Henschke feeds it a steady supply of electrons and their antimatter partners, positrons. He does this by placing it beside a pile of bananas, which release the particles as their potassium decays. (Using decaying fruit was a nod to Dutch still-life vanitas paintings, Henschke says.)
Observers cannot see the electrons and positrons in the piece, but they can hear them. Henschke ensured this by adding a Geiger counter, which emits a chirp each time it detects a particle.
Visitors can also hear the accelerator itself. Henschke attached speakers and pumped up the sound of the machine’s natural hum with a stereo amp (a bit too much at first; they blew up an oscilloscope they were using to measure the frequency). He used an AM radio coil to amplify the sound of the accelerator’s electromagnetic field.
“Song of the Phenomena” plays upon resonance, amplification and decay, Henschke says. “It creates this tension between the constant hum of the device versus the unpredictability of the subatomic emission.”
The idea of playing with the analogy between the linac’s resonance and sound resonance is one that Australian Synchrotron Director Andrew Peele appreciates. “A lot of science communication is about how you find analogies that people can engage with, and this is a great example,” Peele says.
Henschke displayed “Song of the Phenomena” at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Gallery from November 17, 2016, to February 18, 2017. Since then, the apparatus has returned to the Australian Synchrotron, where it sits in a vast, open room where some of the facility’s synchrotron beamline stations used to stand. Scientists meet nearby for a weekly social coffee break.
Henschke is currently writing his thesis for his PhD in experimental art (with Boland as his advisor). In his next project, he hopes to tackle the subject of quantum entanglement.
Particle physics is a dance between theory and experiment.
Meenakshi Narain, a professor of physics at Brown University, remembers working on the DZero experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago in the winter of 1994. She would bring blankets up to her fifth-floor office to keep warm as she sat at her computer going through data in search of the then-undiscovered top quark.
For weeks, her group had been working on deciphering some extra background that originally had not been accounted for. Their conclusions contradicted the collaboration’s original assumptions.
Narain, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the time, talked to her advisor about sharing the group’s result. Her advisor told her that if she had followed the scientific method and was confident in her result, she should talk about it.
“I had a whole sequence of logic and explanation prepared,” Narain says. “When I presented it, I remember everybody was very supportive. I had expected some pushback or some criticism and nothing like that happened.”
This, she says, is the scientific process: A multitude of steps designed to help us explore the world we live in.
“In the end the process wins. It’s not about you or me, because we’re all going after the same thing. We want to discover that particle or phenomenon or whatever else is out there collaboratively. That’s the goal.”
Narain’s group’s analysis was essential to the collaboration’s understanding of a signal that turned out to be the elusive top quark.
The modern hypothesis
“The scientific method was not invented overnight,” says Joseph Incandela, vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “People used to think completely differently. They thought if it was beautiful it had to be true. It took many centuries for people to realize that this is how you must approach the acquisition of true knowledge that you can verify.”
For particle physicists, says Robert Cahn, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the scientific method isn’t so much going from hypothesis to conclusion, but rather “an exploration in which we measure with as much precision as possible a variety of quantities that we hope will reveal something new.
“We build a big accelerator and we might have some ideas of what we might discover, but it’s not as if we say, ‘Here’s the hypothesis and we’re going to prove or disprove it. If there’s a scientific method, it’s something much broader than that.”
Scientific inquiry is more of a continuing conversation between theorists and experimentalists, says Chris Quigg, a distinguished scientist emeritus at Fermilab.
“Theorists in particular spend a lot of time telling stories, making up ideas or elaborating ideas about how something might happen,” he says. “There’s an evolution of our ideas as we engage in dialogue with experiments.”
An important part of the process, he adds, is that the scientists are trained never to believe their own stories until they have experimental support.
“We are often reluctant to take our ideas too seriously because we’re schooled to think about ideas as tentative,” Quigg says. “It’s a very good thing to be tentative and to have doubt. Otherwise you think you know all the answers, and you should be doing something else.”
It’s also good to be tentative because “sometimes we see something that looks tantalizingly like a great discovery, and then it turns out not to be,” Cahn says.
At the end of 2015, hints appeared in the data of the two general-purpose experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that scientists had stumbled upon a particle 750 times as massive as a proton. The hints prompted more than 500 scientific papers, each trying to tell the story behind the bump in the data.
“It’s true that if you simply want to minimize wasting your time, you will ignore all such hints until they [reach the traditional uncertainty threshold of] 5 sigma,” Quigg said. “But it’s also true that as long as they’re not totally flaky, as long as it looks possibly true, then it can be a mind-expanding exercise.”
In the case of the 750-GeV bump, Quigg says, you could tell a story in which such a thing might exist and wouldn’t contradict other things that we knew.
“It helps to take it from just an unconnected observation to something that’s linked to everything else,” Quigg says. “That’s really one of the beauties of scientific theories, and specifically the current state of particle physics. Every new observation is linked to everything else we know, including all the old observations. It’s important that we have enough of a network of observation and interpretation that any new thing has to make sense in the context of other things.”
After collecting more data, physicists eventually ruled out the hints, and the theorists moved on to other ideas.
The importance of uncertainty
But sometimes an idea makes it further than that. Much of the work scientists put into publishing a scientific result involves figuring out how well they know it: What’s the uncertainty and how do we quantify it?
“If there’s any hallmark to the scientific method in particle physics and in closely related fields like cosmology, it’s that our results always come with an error bar,” Cahn says. “A result that doesn’t have an uncertainty attached to it has no value.”
In a particle physics experiment, some uncertainty comes from background, like the data Narain’s group found that mimicked the kind of signal they were looking for from the top quark.
This is called systematic uncertainty, which is typically introduced by aspects of the experiment that cannot be completely known.
“When you build a detector, you must make sure that for whatever signal you’re going to see, there is not much possibility to confuse it with the background,” says Helio Takai, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory. “All the elements and sensors and electronics are designed having that in mind. You have to use your previous knowledge from all the experiments that came before.”
Careful study of your systematic uncertainties is the best way to eliminate bias and get reliable results.
“If you underestimate your systematic uncertainty, then you can overestimate the significance of the signal,” Narain says. “But if you overestimate the systematic uncertainty, then you can kill your signal. So, you really are walking this fine line in understanding where the issues may be. There are various ways the data can fool you. Trying to be aware of those ways is an art in itself and it really defines the thinking process.”
Physicists also must think about statistical uncertainty which, unlike systematic uncertainty, is simply the consequence having a limited amount of data.
“For every measurement we do, there’s a possibility that the measurement is a wrong measurement just because of all the events that happen at random while we are doing the experiment,” Takai says. “In particle physics, you’re producing many particles, so a lot of these particles may conspire and make it appear like the event you’re looking for.”
You can think of it as putting your hand inside a bag of M&Ms, Takai says. If the first few M&Ms you picked were brown and you didn’t know there were other colors, you would think the entire bag was brown. It wouldn’t be until you finally pulled out a blue M&M that you realized that the bag had more than one color.
Particle physicists generally want their results to have a statistical significance corresponding to at least 5 sigma, a measure that means that there is only a 0.00003 percent chance of a statistical fluctuation giving an excess as big or bigger than the one observed.
The scientific method at work
One of the most stunning recent examples of the scientific method – careful consideration of statistical and systematic uncertainties coming together – was announced in 2012 at the moment the spokespersons for the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC revealed the discovery of the Higgs boson.
More than half a century of theory and experimentation led up to that moment. Experiments from the 1950s on had accumulated a wealth of information on particle interactions, but the interactions were only partially understood and seemed to come from disconnected sources.
“But brilliant theoretical physicists found a way to make a single model that gave them a good description of all the known phenomena, says Incandela, who was spokesperson for the CMS experiment during the Higgs discovery. “It wasn’t guaranteed that the Higgs field existed. It was only guaranteed that this model works for everything we do and have already seen, and we needed to see if there really was a boson that we could find that could tell us in fact that that field is there.”
This led to a generation-long effort to build an accelerator that would reach the extremely high energies needed to produce the Higgs boson, a particle born of the Higgs field, and then two gigantic detectors that could detect the Higgs boson if it appeared.
Building two different detectors would allow scientists to double-check their work. If an identical signal appeared in two separate experiments run by two separate groups of physicists, chances were quite good that it was the real thing.
“So there you saw a really beautiful application of the scientific method where we confirmed something that was incredibly difficult to confirm, but we did it incredibly well with a lot of fail-safes and a lot of outstanding experimental approaches,” Incandela says. “The scientific method was already deeply engrained in everything we did to the greatest extreme. And so we knew when we saw these things that they were real, and we had to take them seriously.”
The scientific method is so engrained that scientists don’t often talk about it by name anymore, but implementing it “is what separates the great scientists from the average scientists from the poor scientists,” Incandela says. “It takes a lot of scrutiny and a deep understanding of what you’re doing.”
This month scientists embedded sophisticated new instruments in the heart of a Large Hadron Collider experiment.
Sometimes big questions require big tools. That’s why a global community of scientists designed and built gigantic detectors to monitor the high-energy particle collisions generated by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland. From these collisions, scientists can retrace the footsteps of the Big Bang and search for new properties of nature.
The CMS experiment is one such detector. In 2012, it co-discovered the elusive Higgs boson with its sister experiment, ATLAS. Now, scientists want CMS to push beyond the known laws of physics and search for new phenomena that could help answer fundamental questions about our universe. But to do this, the CMS detector needed an upgrade.
“Just like any other electronic device, over time parts of our detector wear down,” says Steve Nahn, a researcher in the US Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the US project manager for the CMS detector upgrades. “We’ve been planning and designing this upgrade since shortly after our experiment first started collecting data in 2010.”
The CMS detector is built like a giant onion. It contains layers of instruments that track the trajectory, energy and momentum of particles produced in the LHC’s collisions. The vast majority of the sensors in the massive detector are packed into its center, within what is called the pixel detector. The CMS pixel detector uses sensors like those inside digital cameras but with a lightning fast shutter speed: In three dimensions, they take 40 million pictures every second.
For the last several years, scientists and engineers at Fermilab and 21 US universities have been assembling and testing a new pixel detector to replace the current one as part of the CMS upgrade, with funding provided by the Department of Energy Office of Science and National Science Foundation.
Maral Alyari of SUNY Buffalo and Stephanie Timpone of Fermilab measure the thermal properties of a forward pixel detector disk at Fermilab. Almost all of the construction and testing of the forward pixel detectors occurred in the United States before the components were shipped to CERN for installation inside the CMS detector.
Stephanie Timpone consults a cabling map while fellow engineers Greg Derylo and Otto Alvarez inspect a completed forward pixel disk. The cabling map guides their task of routing the the thin, flexible cables that connect the disk's 672 silicon sensors to electronics boards.
The CMS detector, located in a cavern 100 meters underground, is open for the pixel detector installation.
Postdoctoral researcher Stefanos Leontsinis and colleague Roland Horisberger work with a mock-up of one side of the barrel pixel detector next to the LHC’s beampipe.
Leontsinis watches the clearance as engineers slide the first part of the barrel pixel just millimeters from the LHC’s beampipe.
The first half-moon of the innermost part of the pixel detector, called the Barrel, or BmO, is inserted along the beam pipe.
The second half-moon of the innermost barrel pixel is inserted.
Scientists and engineers connect the cooling pipes of the forward pixel detector. The pixel detector is flushed with liquid carbon dioxide to keep the silicon sensors protected from the LHC’s high-energy collisions.
Leontsinis carefully removes cables to make room for the forward pixel. Even a single cable slightly out of place can make it impossible to cleanly insert the new forward pixel detector.
Scientist John Conway of the University of California, Davis prepares to remove the second half of the forward pixel detector from its container.
The pixel detector consists of three sections: the innermost barrel section and two end caps called the forward pixel detectors. The tiered and can-like structure gives scientists a near-complete sphere of coverage around the collision point. Because the three pixel detectors fit on the beam pipe like three bulky bracelets, engineers designed each component as two half-moons, which latch together to form a ring around the beam pipe during the insertion process.
Over time, scientists have increased the rate of particle collisions at the LHC. In 2016 alone, the LHC produced about as many collisions as it had in the three years of its first run together. To be able to differentiate between dozens of simultaneous collisions, CMS needed a brand new pixel detector.
The upgrade packs even more sensors into the heart of the CMS detector. It’s as if CMS graduated from a 66-megapixel camera to a 124-megapixel camera.
Each of the two forward pixel detectors is a mosaic of 672 silicon sensors, robust electronics and bundles of cables and optical fibers that feed electricity and instructions in and carry raw data out, according to Marco Verzocchi, a Fermilab researcher on the CMS experiment.
The multipart, 6.5-meter-long pixel detector is as delicate as raw spaghetti. Installing the new components into a gap the size of a manhole required more than just finesse. It required months of planning and extreme coordination.
“We practiced this installation on mock-ups of our detector many times,” says Greg Derylo, an engineer at Fermilab. “By the time we got to the actual installation, we knew exactly how we needed to slide this new component into the heart of CMS.”
The most difficult part was maneuvering the delicate components around the pre-existing structures inside the CMS experiment.
“In total, the full three-part pixel detector consists of six separate segments, which fit together like a three-dimensional cylindrical puzzle around the beam pipe,” says Stephanie Timpone, a Fermilab engineer. “Inserting the pieces in the right positions and right order without touching any of the pre-existing supports and protections was a well-choreographed dance.”
For engineers like Timpone and Derylo, installing the pixel detector was the last step of a six-year process. But for the scientists working on the CMS experiment, it was just the beginning.
“Now we have to make it work,” says Stefanos Leontsinis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “We’ll spend the next several weeks testing the components and preparing for the LHC restart.”


I am a researcher and PhD student at Klaus Wehrle‘s Chair of Communication and Distributed Systems (COMSYS) at RWTH Aachen University since 2012. After having finished my Diploma studies (equiv. M.Sc.) of Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University in 2011, I interned at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg. In early 2012 I returned to RWTH Aachen University.
My research focuses on security and privacy in communication systems and especially the cloud. Currently, I am working within the projects IPACS and SensorCloud on the secure and privacy-aware storage and processing of sensor data in the cloud. In my spare time I am volunteering as chairman of the alumni club of the students representation for Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University (VAMPIR e.V.). In 2011, I received the award of the Computer Science Department at RWTH Aachen University for outstanding achievements as students representative.


Computer Sciences and Information Technology
In a managers’ meeting between the information technology administrator, the lead for the consultant group, and the dean of information technology, it is apparent that a review of the computer and network infrastructure has not been done for a year concerning the use of cryptography and distributed system authentication. The dean of IT has asked for a checklist provided to the university recommending the security hardware and software needed to secure organizational computer systems. The recommendation should include the correct cryptographic algorithms and devices that must be deployed to secure the organizational network. The checklist should address the following:
Hardware and software
Skill sets needed for the implementation of security and authentication mechanisms
Policies needed relative to encryption and decryption
Comparisons between cryptography, hashing, symmetric encryption, asymmetric encryption, and public key infrastructure (PKI)
Be sure to document your references using APA format.
The security of network distributions can be achieved through various options f security mechanism. Network security promotes privacy of information which is made available to only the authorized users. Data is compromised when it is exposed to unauthorized persons for modification in improper ways. Guaranteed security can be enforced by various kind of controls such as authentication and identification of different machines and users. Encryption techniques can also be used to protect the network or data storage mechanisms as well as audit and control. The different protection measures can be done in an organization through regular practices and user training.
To protect the software, protection methods like authentication is used which ensure the validity of the message being transmitted. The authentication protection measure can also be used to protect the hardware because the procedure establishes the validity of two parties which can be between a user to another user or from a computer to another (Welch et al.2013). Hardware security is the protection of the physical device while software security is the protection of the installed internal devices. The access control measure can be applied in evaluating a request by the user in the system for data and resources access. Softwares can be installed to establish the necessary policies of denial or access to the system. The audit measure examines the policies, controls and procedures that ensure compliance and the examination of the system’s activities hence adequacy of the system controls. The authentication process can be applied on the both the software and the hardware because it establishes identity between one party to another. Other hardware security modules include cryptographic keys for encryption and decryption.
The authentication mechanisms can be based on the information that the user knows such as password or PIN identification. The PIN or password can be in encrypted form and the user is expected to enter the required encryption that matches the stored encryption in the system for successful authentication. Passwords are considered as the easiest way and the cheapest way for authentication. However, passwords are meant to be private to avoid attacks and compromise of the various accounts. Also, authentication can be based on what the user possesses such as a token which has a unique cryptographic key in it hence making it easily identifiable by the computer. Moreover, authentication through cryptographic tokens is stronger than password authentication hence control of identity (Stallings,2016). Cryptographic enabled security enables a complex authentication over an insecure channel in which a potential adversary cannot comprehend. End to end cryptography maximizes the data protection of a system regardless of the location of the data. The basics of encryption and cryptography are based on a cipher also known as mathematical algorithm that makes the authentic information a secret. For a cryptographic algorithm to work it requires a code or key to make the needed information accessible (Karygiannis and Owens,2012). Encryption development should be a big part of the whole organizational network risk management. However, encryption authentication such as tokens may be risky because the authentication only requires token based identification and not the users. Therefore, the token maybe forged, stolen or lost hence risking another user to masquerade as the legitimate user.
The policies that govern encryption includes he decision ton what to encrypt. The decision is based on the structured and unstructured data sets depending on the storage data method and the risk level of the particular organization’s information (Stallings,2016). The data in motion, data at rest and the data in use are the basic of data states that may require encryption through their life cycle hence requiring different methodologies for security. Encrypting a system takes time because of the various techniques and data sets at hand hence it is key to build a strategy before the encryption. The strategy should include the data classification, collaboration with the management team and key management.
Cryptography is a confidential message that can be transmitted through encryption using meaningless keys that can be converted or reversed to be meaningful again using the same keys in a process called decryption. The process of encryption involves a plain text which is formatted for the encryption process by using a block cipher. Then key sequences extracted from it hence transforming the plain text into cipher text. Symmetric encryption is the shared keys or encryption that can be used to decrypt or encrypt traffic. Some of the common algorithms used in symmetric encryption include DES, AES, 3DES and RC4 (Welch et al.2013).The algorithms are easy to implement due to their low complexity. On the other hand, asymmetric encryption differs from symmetric encryption because it uses two keys for encryption and decryption. One of the algorithms used in this type of encryption is RSA. Also, asymmetric encryption is much slower and complex compared to symmetrical encryption. The major strength of asymmetric encryption is its ability to secure non secure mediums such as the internet. Hashing differs from all these types of encryption because it does not follow the two step process of encryption and encryption. Instead, hashing condenses the message into a hash which is an irreversible and fixed length value. Some of the common hashing algorithms include SHA-1 and MD5.However, it is impossible to retrieve the original message from hash; therefore, harsh is only used to verify data. Hash secret keys and algorithms are mainly used for error checking.
Karygiannis, T., & Owens, L. (2012). Wireless network security. NIST special publication, 800, 48.
Stallings, W. (2016). Cryptography and Network Security, 4/E. Pearson Education India.
Welch, V., Siebenlist, F., Foster, I., Bresnahan, J., Czajkowski, K., Gawor, J., … & Tuecke, S. (2013). Security for grid services. arXiv preprint cs/0306129.


Smart items using the latest technology can make life easy at home for you and your family.
Here are some suggestions:
- Ensure your home is secure with an intercom or with an all-inclusive security kit. Any home will feel safer with an audio-video intercom connected to the Internet and to your smartphone. Besides, the gadget’s Internet connection enables users in different rooms, cities or even countries to hear and see each other in real time.Alternatively, consider a home security kit with multiple functions to monitor and secure your home. The device boasts features like smoke detection, and motion monitoring with sensors that can be adjusted to various sensitivity levels. Moreover, it is equipped with an alarm system and an HD camera and flash that can take pictures when the alarm goes on. Using the latest technology, the gadget enables you to call the police or switch the alarm off via the app. It might be better to choose a kit that runs on batteries so that it is not electricity-dependent.
- A smart thermostat enables you to control home temperature with the touch of a button or with your voice. The thermostat even connects to your iOS device so that you are able to turn the heat up or down in each room individually, and even while you are away so that you get a warm welcome home when you get back. Look for devices with few buttons and that are easy to install and use even by children.
- A high tech vacuum cleaner for your floors is able to clean up effortlessly no matter how great the mess. There even are floor cleaners with self-cleaning function so that you finish chores much faster. It is better to purchase one that can handle both dry and liquid items; robot cleaners typically combine wet and dry technologies to provide complete cleaning via vacuum, mop, brush and water. More advanced robots are even able to map the room due to their built-in vision sensors.
- A smart scale that you can connect to your iPad will help you rescale recipes and replace ingredients easily. To enhance your kitchen experience, some scales come with apps that walk you through baking recipes, while other models even show the calories and total proteins, carbohydrates, fibres, fat (saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, total) and sugars, fatty acids and cholesterol in your food, and weighs it in both grams and ounces. The gadget is ideal not only for athletes and diabetics, but also for people on a diet, as well as for those who are mindful of what they eat; it is a gadget for the whole family.
- A smart home automation system is in fact one single gadget to connect, monitor and control all of your smart home appliances, such as high tech vacuum cleaners, washing machines, air conditioners, motion sensors, etc. The communication with smart sensors and appliances is done by connecting the LCD display to your smartphone. You can also synchronize the console to your personal calendar via dedicated apps, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.


Frequently Asked Questions
- Do I have to have line of sight to use these remote controls?
- Is it possible to keep a relay energized so the operator does not have to hold the button down for the equipment to run?
- How many remotes can “talk” to a receiver and do I have to do any programming to add remotes later on?
- If I have multiple pieces of equipment to control but they are in separate areas in my facility, can I use one transmitter to control them?
- I’d like to send a signal to a remote receiver but the signal would be automatically generated by a piece of equipment rather than manually generated by a person pressing a button – can I do that?
- How can I be sure the signal went through to the receiver if I can’t see what I am operating?
- What if I need more systems than the maximum number of operating frequencies allows?
Do I have to have line of sight to use these remote controls?
While the max ranges we say we can get is based on having clear line of sight, it is not necessary to have it when using our 2.4GHz or 900MHz RF remote controls. When your application involves obstacles, it simply means you probably won’t achieve the max range.
The RF signal can go around and/or penetrate many obstacles and different materials have varying effects. For instance, glass, wood and drywall have little effect on distance. Brick and block are harder to get through and solid metal is nearly impossible. Vegetation and ground don’t block signal, but they absorb the RF. Sometimes as much as 50% of the range is lost when transmitting through heavy vegetation.
There are several things we can do when obstacles pose a problem. One is to add strategically placed external high gain antennas. Another option is to choose a more powerful system. The other is to add a repeater between the transmitter and receiver. In some cases a combination of these options is necessary.
As always, we are happy to review the details of your application and provide suggestions for the most cost-effective solution.
Note: Ranges are estimates, based on free-air terrain with limited sources of interference. Actual range will vary based on transmitting power, orientation of transmitter and receiver, height of transmitting antenna, height of receiving antenna, weather conditions, interference sources in the area, and terrain between receiver and transmitter, including, but not limited to, indoor and outdoor structures such as walls, metal objects, trees, buildings, hills, and mountains.
Is it possible to keep a relay energized so the operator does not have to hold the button down for the equipment to run?
Yes indeed! In most receivers, there are some user-selectable relay modes. We also offer custom relay programming at no additional charge.
The default relay operation is “maintained momentary”. This means the relay is energized the entire time the corresponding is depressed or contact input is closed. When the button is released or the input opens, the relay will de-energize.
The relays in all models can be changed by the user to be “toggle latching”. A toggle latching relay is controlled by a single button on the transmitter. The relay changes and holds its state each time the button is momentarily depressed. So press and release once – relay is energized and latched closed. Press and release a second time, relay de-energizes and remains de-energized until the button is depressed again. Note we only recommend using this type of relay operation if it will be clear to the user what state the relay is in. Otherwise there is too much room for human error.
Which brings us to our third option – “latching”. A latching relay is controlled by two separate buttons. Momentarily pressing “button 1” energizes and latches the relay. Momentarily pressing “button 2” de-energizes the relay.
Although these are the most common choices for relay operation, they are only a portion of what we can offer. Here are a few more options:
- Timed relay activation – both on-delay and off-delay
- Dual relay activation
- Disabled relay options (relay(s) can’t be energized unless another condition has occurred
- Passcode required relays
- Plus many more options!
How many remotes can “talk” to a receiver and do I have to do any programming to add remotes later on?
As long as the frequency of all the units that are operating together as a system is the same, a virtually unlimited number of remotes can communicate with the receiver. You can also have different types of remotes (handheld or stationary) talking to the receiver. In fact, you can have any number of remotes AND receivers working together as a system. And the same is true of our 900Mhz controls.
Often people confuse the operating frequency with the RF channels. When using a four button transmitter with a four relay receiver, each button is sending a different RF channel code, but the units are operating on the same frequency. The only time you need to concern yourself with frequency is if you are adding a second SYSTEM that will be used in the same vicinity as an existing system and you wish to have no interference between the two.
The Air-Eagle SR has 8 operating frequencies. Any time a system is ordered it is shipped from the factory at the default of frequency #1. In most cases when adding remotes to a system, nothing needs to be done because most people don’t change the frequency of their original units when they install them. So unless you know for sure that the system you are adding units to is a different frequency, you need do nothing in the way of programming. .
If I have multiple pieces of equipment to control but they are in separate areas in my facility, can I use one transmitter to control them?
Yes you can! And you can control them either simultaneously or independently based on how the receivers are wired or in some cases by requesting free programming from us.
For example, say you have 4 lights at different points on your property and you wish to press a single button and have all of them come on at the same time. Simply purchase four single relay receivers, that by default respond to a “button 1” command and one single button transmitter. Wire each light to the single relay in the receiver and when the button on the transmitter is depressed, the relay in all four receivers will energize at once turning all the lights on simultaneously.
Now, say you have the four lights but you want to be able to turn them on separately. In this case you would purchase a four button transmitter and four 4-relay receivers. Each relay responds to the corresponding button on the transmitter, so by wiring light #1 to relay 1 in the first receiver, light #2 to relay 2 in the second receiver, light #3 to relay 3 in the third receiver etc. you can turn each light on independently by pressing the button number of the light you wish to operate.
Another example would be if you had two pieces of equipment, each needing to have four functions performed and they are not near each other. In this case, the most cost effective set-up would be to use one 8-button transmitter and two 4-relay receivers. The second of the two 4-relay receivers would be factory programmed to respond to commands from buttons 5 thru 8. (Programming like this is done at no charge). It would be assigned a separate model number for identification. Now you can use buttons 1-4 for receiver #1 and buttons 5-8 for receiver number two.
These are just a few examples of ways to use our remote controls effectively. We are always available to help you set up a system that is tailored to your needs so you can accomplish your goal using the least amount of equipment!
I’d like to send a signal to a remote receiver but the signal would be automatically generated by a piece of equipment rather than manually generated by a person pressing a button – can I do that?
Absolutely! We make stationary transmitters that can be triggered by a dry contact input device such as an external switch, relay or PLC. The transmission occurs automatically when there is closure on the input. These “contact input transmitters” models are available with one, four, eight or twenty independent channels. In some cases, the customer may prefer to supply voltage as a trigger. For these applications we can make the units accept either 120VAC or 5-24VDC to the terminal strip and when the voltage appears across the input the transmission goes out.
All of our stationary units can be customized to include manual controls for some or all of the channels. That gives a nice option for manual control when there is concern that a handheld transmitter may be too easily lost or destroyed.
The contact or voltage input transmitters can be powered by 120VAC, 9-36VDC or internal battery, and come equipped with a portable TNC “rubber duck” antenna. .
How can I be sure the signal went through to the receiver if I can’t see what I am operating?
There are two types of signal receipt feedback we can provide with our remote controls. One is a “confirmation only” feedback, the other is “true” feedback.
The confirmation only feedback tells you that the relay in the remote receiver energized. It doesn’t tell you that whatever the relay is controlling is actually running, just that the relay got the signal. We can give this type of feedback with a handheld transmitter, by means of a brief vibration or flashing LED or with a stationary transceiver, typically by way of a flashing LED.
The “true” feedback tells you that the relay in the remote receiver energized AND that the equipment is running. This type of feedback requires two transceivers. Transceivers have both dry contact inputs and relay outputs in one unit. In input command from the control transceiver transmits to energize the relay in the remote transceiver. At the remote transceiver, a dry contact “run” input from the equipment being operated is wired into the unit. When the equipment starts, it creates a closure on that input that automatically transmits back to the control transceiver and energizes the corresponding relay output. That relay output can be used to drive any audible or visual indicator of your choice, thus letting you know the remote equipment has indeed been actuated.
What if I need more systems than the maximum number of operating frequencies allows?
In addition to multiple frequencies, some units also have user-selectable digital addressing. The default digital address on every BWI Eagle model is “0”. So with all units, you would have either 7 (900MHz models) or 8 (2.4GHz models) frequencies available under digital address “0”. To add more than that, you would set the digital address of the next group of units to “1”. You then will have another 7 or 8 frequencies under digital address “1”. Each time you increment the digital address you have 7 or 8 additional frequencies. The user-selectable digital address models have 16 addresses so ultimately you can have 116 “900MHz” units (7 x 16) or 128 “2.4GHz” units operating side by side with no interference!


Chaotic behaviour in simulated planktonic successions, I: Discrete temporal maps
Jordi Bascompte, Ricard V. Solé, Joaquim Valls
Planktonic successions are short ones, truncated by inputs of external energy. Thus, long-term data can involve different stages with different interaction rules. Any model used to describe planktonic dynamics must take this variation in growth and interaction rates into account. In this paper we study a simple two-dimensional discrete map of predator-prey interaction and explore how the variation of parameters can affect the dimensionality of the system. Implications for the characterization of real planktonic time series in the light of dynamical systems theory are also discussed.


Clevo is a Taiwanese manufacturer of notebook computers and other computer hardware. The Clevo NH70 is a laptop designed for gaming and high performance. It has a sleek design and powerful hardware, making it a popular choice among gamers and professionals.
One of the standout features of the Clevo NH70 is its display. It has a 17.3-inch Full HD IPS display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. The display has good viewing angles and color accuracy, making it suitable for gaming, video editing, and other graphics-intensive tasks. The display also has a high refresh rate of 120Hz, which helps reduce motion blur and improve the overall gaming experience.
Under the hood, the Clevo NH70 is powered by an Intel Core i7-10750H processor, which is a six-core processor with a base clock speed of 2.6GHz. It can be boosted up to 5GHz with Intel Turbo Boost technology. The processor is paired with 16GB of DDR4 RAM, which can be upgraded to 32GB if needed. For storage, the NH70 has a 1TB hard drive and a 512GB solid-state drive (SSD), providing plenty of space for games, files, and other applications.
In terms of graphics, the Clevo NH70 comes with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 graphics card with 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM. This powerful graphics card can handle most modern games at high settings and resolutions, making it a great choice for gamers. It also has ray tracing capabilities, which can provide realistic lighting, shadows, and reflections in supported games.
The Clevo NH70 also has a number of connectivity options, including WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.1, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. It has a full-sized keyboard with backlighting and a numeric keypad, as well as a touchpad with support for multi-touch gestures. The laptop has a webcam and microphone built-in, making it easy to use for video calls and streaming.
One of the drawbacks of the Clevo NH70 is its weight and size. It weighs about 6.4 pounds and has a thickness of about 1.5 inches, making it somewhat bulky and not as portable as some other laptops. However, this is to be expected with a laptop designed for gaming and high performance.
Overall, the Clevo NH70 is a powerful and well-designed laptop that is suitable for gaming and other demanding tasks. Its Full HD display, powerful processor and graphics card, and ample storage make it a great choice for those who need a high-performance laptop. While it may be on the heavier side, its impressive specs and features make it a worthwhile investment for those who need a laptop that can keep up with their demanding workload.


ET-485 is a microprocessor device designed to exchange data between Ethernet and Modbus RTU (RS-485) networks.
The device provides the functionality of the Modbus server to connect Modbus clients via Ethernet. It transfers Modbus requests from the clients to the devices in the Modbus network and returns responses from them.
- flexible addressing over Ethernet (static or dynamic IP address)
- MAC-address overriding
- access protection via Ethernet (password-protected settings, configuration, or MODBUS network connection IP address filter)
- various modes of exchange via MODBUS RTU or ASCII: with parity checking — EVEN, ODD, NONE, the wide range of transfer speeds, adjustable delay times
RS-485 Interface Converter ET-485
- Brand: Novatek-Electro
- Product Code: ET-485
- Availability: In Stock
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Now a group of astronomers led by Örs H. Detre of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy has succeeded in determining physical properties of the five main moons of Uranus with the Herschel Space Observatory. As a result, it can reveal the initial conditions for the evolution of the Universe. Its results rendered the Planck Collaboration worthy of the 2018 Royal Astronomical Society Award. The results published so far established a homogeneous and isotropic cosmological model that, with only 6 parameters, is able to truly reproduce the Planck observations of the primordial and most remote radiation in the Universe. Planck became an important source of astrophysical data and helped test theories about the early Universe and the origin of the cosmic structure. Story. More than 230 years ago the astronomer William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus and two of its moons. Generated by observations from the Planck spacecraft, the map revealed fluctuations in temperature in the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang—what we call … After just over four years of remarkable operation, the mission was turned off on October 23rd 2013. This relic radiation provides scientists with a snapshot of the universe 370,000 years after the big bang. Einstein@Home aggregates the computer power of hundreds of thousands of volunteers from 192 countries to "mine" large data sets. This blog is intended to be a collection of interesting ideas and personal reflections. The observatory was capable of seeing the coldest and dustiest objects in space; for example, cool cocoons where stars form and dusty galaxies just starting to bulk up with new stars. In particular, this has been key for the Instituto de Física de Cantabria (IFCA) having the highest impact relative to the world of all CSIC centres between the years 2012-2014. After the successful conclusion of th… •McGill University Bravo - 2013 •Centre for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec Best Presentation Award ($100), 78 participants •Canadian Astronomical Society Best Presentation Award ($200), 226 participants, “for outstanding demonstration of knowledge and determination" During the Spring of 2013, the first set of data resulting of the Planck mission was released. An early period of rapid inflation explains many things, such as why the universe is so big and why the universe is so flat (with the exception of curvature caused by super heavy objects, such as black holes). The observations from Planck complement those made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) which was launched in 2001. NASA/ESA and the COBE, WMAP and Planck teams It's been more than 50 years since humanity discovered a uniform bath of low-energy, microwave radiation originating from all … The European Space Agency unveiled the best map ever of the cosmic microwave background, the last relics of the Big Bang, on March 21, 2013. More specifically, Planck has been designed to detect the anisotropy of this radiation, which refers to the fact that there is an uneven distribution of this radiation in the Universe. Colonising Mars: A Colossal Feat of Human …. The inflationary model of the universe, which says that CMB should be evenly distributed across the universe, may have to be revised due to Planck’s findings (which were previously hinted by the WMAP). In September 2009, the European Space Agency announced the preliminary results from the Planck First Light Survey, which was performed to demonstrate the stability of the instruments and the ability to calibrate them over long periods. Hi, welcome to my blog. After the end of the mission, Planck had contributed to the most precise measurements of key cosmological parameters, including the age of the Universe, or the density of matter and dark matter. Planck was launched on May 14th 2009 and during four years it collected data. CRG Planck was launched jointly with the Herschel Space Observatory aboard an Ariane 5 rocket, on May 14, 2009. The frontpage picture of Max Planck is in the public domain and was downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. Planck has discovered that the universe is expanding at a slightly slower rate than that revealed by the data of the WMAP. It is a space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA) and its purpose is to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation – the radiation that has been left over from the Big Bang. That was followed in 2015 by a second release, together with a cautionary note about the precision of some data. What’s more, Planck was the first prominent physicist to champion Albert Einstein ’s special theory of relativity (1905). Here I cover a range of subjects, including philosophy, ethics, psychology, mental health, psychedelics, and travel. He and the rest of the members of the cosmology group at IFCA who participate in Planck, hold the status of Planck Scientist and belonging to the LFI Core Team and have played a relevant role in the achievement of the important legacy left by Planck. The most cited papers are the cosmological publications included in the Planck Core Science Program (focused on the study of the CMB), two of them being the most cited in physics in the years 2014 and 2016, respectively. In the final set of publications leveraging those data will complete the Planck legacy with the new and more precise results included. At 3.5-metres in diameter the mirror collected long-wavelength radiation from some of the coldest and most distant objects in the Universe. The Planck Collaboration, made up of some 200 scientists, has published 136 articles in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics with an average of about 200 citations per article. Planck became an important source of astrophysical data and helped test theories about the early Universe and the origin of the cosmic structure. Back to top. Diving into the details of the Planck project. The spacecraft consists of a telescope and two instruments which operate at radio to sub-millimetre wavelengths. By 2018, a new set, the “Legacy” data of Planck had been re-processed by the Planck consortium was to be released with enhanced temperature and polarisation determinations. Science & Exploration Planck finds no new evidence for cosmic anomalies. Planck has cost the ESA 700 million Euros or $904 million. The Planck Telescope is Leading to Some Fascinating Discoveries About the Universe. This discovery will help astronomers to understand the cosmic cycle of matter in and around the Milky Way, and other galaxies. In terms of the contents of the universe, Planck has found out that dark energy makes up 69.3% of the total energy of the universe, which is a slightly smaller proportion than that found by the WMAP. The water was discovered in the Clavius Crater in a "relatively surprising concentration," according to NASA, by the space agency's Stratospheric Observatory for … In the year 1996, the Planck mission was selected as a medium-size mission for obtaining an all-sky image of the temperature and polarisation fluctuations of the CMB, with an accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits. This theory revolutionized our understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. The European Space Agency has released the first results of the Planck space observatory. Planck launched in 2009 and has been scanning the skies ever since, mapping the cosmic microwave background, the afterglow of the theorized big bang that created our universe. This would allow to chart the most accurate maps yet of the CMB. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests primarily on his role as originator of the quantum theory. The second half of the award will be given to Dr. Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany and Dr. Andrea Ghez from the University of California Los Angeles for their discovery that a supermassive black hole resides at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. It has now found a 40.8-hertz isolated pulsar in radio survey data from the Arecibo Observatory taken in February 2007. On this date, Planck revealed the most detailed picture we currently have of the CMB (pictured below). Category: News releases; Published on: 10 Jul 2014. The European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory (formerly called Far Infrared and Sub-millimetre Telescope or FIRST) flew the largest single mirror ever built for a space telescope. The newest Planck data will be essential to complement those obtained by the next cosmological experiments starting during the following decade, such as the ESA Euclid satellite (to be launched in 2021) aimed to study the nature and properties of the dark energy and dark matter through a deep and precise mapping of galaxies; or KATRIN, which will study the mass and properties of neutrinos. The image is based on the initial 15.5 months of data from Planck … It was a space-based satellite-observatory that observed the “relic” cosmic microwave background (CMB). Planck is a European Space Agency mission with significant participation from NASA. In relation to the scientific exploitation of the data, it has significantly contributed to the two sets of publications of the Planck Core Science Program published in 2014 and 2016, respectively, leading three papers in each set: on the isotropy and statistics of the CMB, on the catalogue of point sources and on the detection of the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. These kinds of observations will help to verify (and falsify) theories that describe the universe’s birth and cosmic evolution. Rudolf Kippenhahn, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, passed away in Göttingen on 15 November 2020 at the age of 94. Additional timing observations indicate that this pulsar is likely a disrupted recycled pulsar. … Max Planck Institute . Planck can measure tiny fluctuations in the radiation with unprecedented accuracy, providing a clear and telling picture of the early universe – when it was a mere 380,000 years old. These new data were to be fully suitable for performing cosmology work with, significantly improving on the two earlier datasets. In addition, the group has led two papers on the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect due to the hot gas in the Virgo cluster and in filaments of the cosmic web, respectively, and another one on the recently produced multi-frequency catalogue of non-thermal sources. The improved results are a consequence of a revision in the calibration of data and in the reduction of systematic effects that prevented the extraction of all the available information in certain data (that of polarisation). The all-sky map was made by ESA's Planck space observatory. The European Space Agency (ESA) operated the Planck observatory starting in the year 2009. 1)the planck observatory to map the cosmic microwave background radiation in greater detail then its predecessors - cobe and wmap 2)THE HERSCHEL OBSERVATORY WHICH WILL STUDY THE UNIVERSE WITH UNPRECEDENTED ACCURACY IN THE INFRARED PART OF THE SPECTRUM WITH A 3.5 METER MIRROR UNTIL THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE WITH A 6.5 METER MIRROR IS LAUNCHED IN … Enrique Martínez-González, head of the Observational Cosmology and Instrumentation group, participated in the proposal of the mission to the ESA scientific program in 1993 as well as in the subsequent activities of instrumental development, data analysis and derivation of the cosmological results, being Co-investigator of the Planck Low Frequency Instrument (LFI). Most of the ordinary (baryonic) matter in the Universe is invisible to our eyes, with all the stars and galaxies that we observe with optical telescopes comprising less than 10% of … the proportions of matter, dark matter, and dark energy). The images "Front view of the Planck satellite" and "Planck and the cosmic microwave background" are copyright of the European Space Agency and were used according to their usage policy. Images like this help us to understand exactly how old the universe is – scientists say that these images point to a universe which is 13.82 billion years old which is slightly older (about 50 million years older) than we previously thought. These data would be useful for understanding better the Universe, but also the properties of the components of our own, and other galaxies, as well as their clustering. PRBB Building - View in map, Change in the presidency of SOMMa: Maria A. Blasco substitutes Luis Serrano, Leading scientific associations and innovative companies demand to place R&D at the heart of our country’s strategy, SOMMa community: training for more successful ERC AdG writing, Observational Cosmology and Instrumentation, Planck and the cosmic microwave background, Walther Nernst, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Robert Millikan and Max Von Laue in 1931, The Legacy of Plank (original article at IFCA website), From an almost perfect Universe to the best of both worlds (supplemental relat…, Maths, Experimental Sciences and Engineering. The results indicated that the data quality is excellent. Planck made the discoveries during its on-going survey of the "oldest light" in the cosmos. Read. Planck differs from WMAP in that its main mission is to measure the cosmic background radiation. This final “legacy” round of results will imply an even more precise determination of the cosmological parameters and of the properties of the components of our galaxy. The results reinforce the existence of an inflationary period in the very early Universe in which it expanded exponentially, and when appeared the quantum seeds that gave rise to galaxies and other structures that form what is known as the “cosmic web”. The impact that Planck publications have had on the scientific community has been very remarkable. Also, the amount of dark energy in the universe has increased from the 22.7% found by the WMAP to 26.8%. A sophisticated cryogenic system keeps the detectors of the spacecraft at temperatures close to absolute zero. Planck will give us the best view yet of the early moments of cosmic history. The first images of Planck observatory, which was sent into outer space to collect data about the origins of the universe, have been finally received, providing some clues about the past.. In relation to its composition, it has been possible for the first time to map the all-sky distribution of dark matter and determine its abundance with sub-percent precision. Regarding the instrumental aspect, the IFCA group coordinated the project for the development of the back-end modules of the radiometers of the LFI at 30 and 44 GHz, in close collaboration with the group at the Department of Communication Engineering (DICOM) of the University of Cantabria (UC), and contributed to their posterior simulation and characterization. •“Top 10 Discoveries of the year”, by Québec Science magazine. Named after the German Nobel laureate Max Planck (1858-1947), the Planck mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) was the first European space observatory whose main goal was to study the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the relic radiation from the Big Bang. It has been possible to strongly constrain the alternative models to the cosmological constant for the dark energy. Although Planck has been making observations since 2009, the most significant of them came very recently, on the 21st March 2013. The satellite is the most sensitive telescope ever designed to study the cosmic microwave background--the remnants of radiation from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Coordinator of the Alliance Launch: May 14, 2009 Status: Mission Completed . Planck started its First All-Sky Survey on 13 August 2009. Contact. The Planck telescope, or usually referred to simply as Planck, was launched in 2009. It was a space-based satellite-observatory that observed the “relic” cosmic microwave background (CMB). Astronomers, underscoring Tyson’s observation, unveiled a surprisingly unchaotic, extremely distant, and therefore very young galaxy that looks … Channels … Another consequence derived from the Planck data is the stringent upper limit imposed on the neutrino mass that, together with the lower limit obtained from neutrino experiments, imply a narrow window of around a tenth of electron-volt (value that, on the other hand, demands an explanation within the standard model of particle physics). Much like Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, Max Planck is regarded as one of the most influential and groundbreaking scientists of his time, a man whose discoveries helped to … The Planck satellite was launched along with the Herschel satellite on 14th May 2009 from Kourou, French Guiana, on an Ariane 5 rocket. Dr. Aiguader, 88 08003, Barcelona ESA / Science & Exploration / Space Science / Planck. The picture of Walther Nernst, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Robert Millikan and Max Von Laue in 1931 is in the public domain and was downloaded from Wikipedia. 31 August 2016 ESA's Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. 06/06/2019 9768 views 79 likes. Looking back in time with Herschel and Planck. Also in relation to both sets of publications, temperature and polarisation maps of the CMB have been produced by means of the component separation code SEVEM developed by the group, one of the four official codes of the mission. Radio-burst discovery deepens astrophysics mystery. ESA and the Planck Collaboration This image unveiled March 21, 2013, shows the cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by the European Space Agency's Planck space observatory. It is a space observatory of the European Space Agency (ESA) and its purpose is to observe the cosmic microwave background radiation – the radiation that has been left over from the Big Bang. The satellite, which was launched in 2009, has provided the most detailed image yet of the universe as it appeared just 380,000 years after the Big Bang.. CTC members James Fergusson and Paul Shellard are part of the Planck Consortium and have contributed to the recent data release. ... Kaspi, Arecibo, Cordes, fast radio burst, Max Planck Institute, Parkes Observatory, Spitler. The European Space Agency (ESA) operated the Planck observatory starting in the year 2009. This means that normal matter (the matter which we are made from and can see) makes up only 4.9% of the entire universe. This new age of the universe was calculated based on the rate of expansion that was measured (also called the Hubble constant). The observatory sifted through star-forming clouds—the "slow cookers" of star ingredients—to trace the path by which potentially life-forming molecules, such as water, form. On 15 January 2010 the mission was extended by 12 months, with observation continuing until at least the end of 2011. View. The legacy of Planck, this third and last release, has much to do with the knowledge of the physical properties of the Universe. George Efstathiou one of Planck’s lead researchers was quoted as saying that, “For cosmologists, this map is a gold mine of information.” These results from Planck also strongly support the idea that the very early stages of the universe were characterised by rapid inflation. Department and University Information. Brief pulse detected by Arecibo telescope appears to come from far beyond our galaxy The discovery of a split-second burst of radio waves by scientists using the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico provides important new evidence of mysterious pulses that appear to come from deep in outer space. Planck is Europe's first mission to study the birth of the Universe. Among the results the most worth pointing out, one is the best determination of age, composition and shape of the Universe to date. The results obtained from the two first datasets, as well as the products on which they were based on, were made public in 2013 and later in 2015. The CMB preserves a picture of the Universe as it was about 380 000 years after the Big Bang. The ESA website claims that “Planck is measuring the fluctuations of the CMB [Cosmic Microwave Background] with an accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits.” This “accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits” means that it may be impossible to ever take better images of this radiation – to do so is not currently in the realm of physical possibility. It provided high quality data from which an enormous amount of results in the areas of cosmology and astrophysics were derived. The Planck telescope, or usually referred to simply as Planck, was launched in 2009. This theory revolutionized our understanding of atomic and subatomic processes, just as Albert Einstein ’s theory … Story. Communications Manager at IFCA Acquired by ESA’s Planck space telescope, the most detailed map ever created of the cosmic microwave background – the relic radiation from the Big Bang – was released today revealing the existence of features that challenge the foundations of our current understanding of the Universe. 17/07/2018 19504 views 146 likes. The mission of the Planck observatory was put to a final end on October 2013. Science & Exploration From an almost perfect Universe to the best of both worlds. The three radio telescopes that were used to to discover, to confirm or investigate the 24 pulsars: The Parkes radio telescope of the Australian research organization CSIRO (above), the Lovell telescope at the English Jodrell Bank Observatory (bottom left) and the 100-m radio telescope in Effelsberg, part of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. 28/05/2020 2547 views 72 likes. The researchers came to this conclusion after looking at data from the Planck space observatory that showed a discrepancy between the concentration of dark matter and … The telescope was named after the German Nobel-Prize winning physicist, Max Planck. Important results from WMAP include a universe dominated by dark energy (the cosmological constant which drives the acceleration of expansion), the age of the universe, the expansion rate of the universe, the shape of the universe, and the contents of the Universe (e.g.


NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS): Primary astronomical source for abstracts and links to research papers.
arXiv: Primary source for pre-print and accepted papers in physics and astronomy.
Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST): The primary online open-access repository for space telescope data.
Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD): Amazing astronomy picture each day with an interesting description.
"Getting into Grad School for Physics": A must read for any undergraduate student interested in becoming an astronomer.
A Guide to Publishing in Astronomy: An excellent read that describes the ins and outs of journals and the publishing process.