The Indian Panorama

Tag: Fermilab

  • Scientists release the most accurate map of all the matter in universe

    Scientists release the most accurate map of all the matter in universe

    We are all made of matter. This matter was first thrown outwards in the moments after the Big Bang when our universe came into existence. Over centuries it all packed together to form planets and eventually our Solar System and Earth as well. Scientists have now revealed a map of the matter in the universe to better understand the story of evolution.

    Researchers have released one of the most precise measurements ever made of how matter is distributed across the universe today. The team from the University of Chicago and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) have tried to understand the forces that shaped the evolution of the universe. The team combined data from two major telescope surveys of the universe, the Dark Energy Survey and the South Pole Telescope, which looks for the faint traces of radiation that are still traveling across the sky from the first few moments of the universe. The team of 150 researchers has released the details of their findings in a series of three different papers in Physical Review D.

    They found that matter in the universe is not as clumpy as was expected in the current model of the universe. The current model indicates that at the time of the Big Bang, the universe was condensed into a single point of infinite density and extreme heat that bursts suddenly and combined to form protons, neutrons, and nuclei. A few thousand years later, hydrogen and helium atoms originated. “The analysis indicates that matter is not as “clumpy” as we would expect based on our current best model of the universe, which adds to a body of evidence that there may be something missing from our existing standard model of the universe,” researchers said in a release.

    Scientists are interested in tracing the path of the matter, as by seeing where all the matter ended up, they could try to recreate what happened and what forces would have had to have been in play after the Big Bang.

    Chihway Chang, one of the lead authors of the studies said that the data from two different telescopes functions like a cross-check, so it becomes a much more robust measurement than if you just used one or the other. The team looked at gravitational lensing, the slight bending of light as it passes objects with lots of gravity, like galaxies.

    By rigorously analyzing these two sets of data, scientists could infer where all the matter ended up in the universe. It is more precise than previous measurements—that is, it narrows down the possibilities for where this matter wound up—compared to previous analyses, the authors said.

    The analysis is a landmark as it yielded useful information from two very different telescope surveys. “I think this exercise showed both the challenges and benefits of doing these kinds of analyses. There’s a lot of new things you can do when you combine these different angles of looking at the universe,” Chang added.   Source: India Today

  • A tiny particle’s wobble could upend the known laws of Physics

    Evidence is mounting that a tiny subatomic particle seems to be disobeying the known laws of physics, scientists announced Wednesday, a finding that would open a vast and tantalizing hole in our understanding of the universe. The result, physicists say, suggests that there are forms of matter and energy vital to the nature and evolution of the cosmos that are not yet known to science. “This is our Mars rover landing moment,” said Chris Polly, a physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois, who has been working toward this finding for most of his career. The particle célèbre is the muon, which is akin to an electron but far heavier and is an integral element of the cosmos. Polly and his colleagues — an international team of 200 physicists from seven countries — found that muons did not behave as predicted when shot through an intense magnetic field at Fermilab.

    The aberrant behavior poses a firm challenge to the Standard Model, the suite of equations that enumerates the fundamental particles in the universe (17, at last count) and how they interact.

    “This is strong evidence that the muon is sensitive to something that is not in our best theory,” said Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky.

    The results, the first from an experiment called Muon g-2, agreed with similar experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2001 that have teased physicists ever since.

    At a virtual seminar and news conference Wednesday, Polly pointed to a graph displaying white space where the Fermilab findings deviated from the theoretical prediction. “We can say with fairly high confidence, there must be something contributing to this white space,” he said. “What monsters might be lurking there?”

    “Today is an extraordinary day, long awaited not only by us but by the whole international physics community,” Graziano Venanzoni, a spokesperson for the collaboration and a physicist at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, said in a statement issued by Fermilab. The results are also being published in a set of papers submitted to several peer-reviewed journals.

    The measurements have about one chance in 40,000 of being a fluke, the scientists reported, well short of the gold standard needed to claim an official discovery by physics standards. Promising signals disappear all the time in science, but more data are on the way. Wednesday’s results represent only 6% of the total data the muon experiment is expected to garner in the coming years.