Latest news with #LargeHadronCollider
Hans India
6 days ago
- Science
- Hans India
Mysterious particle pierces earth, hinting at possible first direct dark matter detection
In February 2023, an underwater telescope anchored deep in the Mediterranean Sea—known as KM3NeT—recorded the brightest particle event ever seen. A stunning flash of light pierced through the detector's sensor network, revealing an object carrying a staggering 220 peta-electronvolts (PeV) of energy—nearly 100 times more powerful than anything produced by the Large Hadron Collider. Initially believed to be an ultra-energetic neutrino, this high-energy particle earned the nickname 'impossible muon' because of how unusually bright it was—35 times brighter than any prior detection. But soon, scientists hit a snag: its cousin observatory, IceCube in Antarctica—larger and operational for over a decade—had no record of a similar event, even though it had clear access to the same region of the sky. This anomaly led researchers to entertain a revolutionary idea: the flash could be humanity's first direct evidence of dark matter—the mysterious, invisible material believed to make up five times more mass than ordinary matter in the universe. Their theory suggests that the particle may have originated from a blazar—a galaxy with a supermassive black hole ejecting high-speed jets of particles. If those jets contain dark matter particles, they could survive billion-year journeys through space. The particle that struck KM3NeT came from a direction populated by known blazars, lending weight to the hypothesis. As the beam traveled sideways through Earth, it pierced 93 miles (150 km) of rock before reaching KM3NeT. Scientists theorize that during this underground trek, a dark matter particle might have collided with a nucleus, briefly becoming an 'excited' state that quickly decayed into two tightly aligned muons. KM3NeT's detectors, unable to distinguish the twin paths, saw a single blazing track. In contrast, IceCube—due to its South Pole location—would have seen the particle pass through only 9 miles (15 km) of crust. With less matter in its path, a collision (and thus detection) was far less likely. Not all physicists are convinced. Some argue the simplest explanation is still a record-breaking neutrino. Others, like Shirley Li of UC Irvine, note that while the dark matter model predicts a pair of overlapping muons, current instruments can't resolve such fine detail at these extreme energies—yet. Regardless of the outcome, the discovery has reignited the global pursuit to uncover what dark matter is made of. As KM3NeT expands and IceCube undergoes planned upgrades, scientists will continue watching the skies—and seas—for answers. Whether this was a neutrino anomaly or the long-sought dark matter breakthrough, one underwater flash may have just opened a new chapter in modern physics.
Daily Mirror
13-06-2025
- Business
- Daily Mirror
'Rachel Reeves needs to go back to school - her spending review doesn't add up'
There are two things I learned in maths at school: the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square on the other two sides, and how to write my name in numerals on a calculator. You may think that's not much to show for 11 years of effort in trying to put numbers into a brain that only ate words. But knowing how triangles work is a damned useful thing when looking at the world and working out where it's gone wrong. And the more I see of her, the more it looks like Rachel Reeves' triangle expertise starts and ends with knowing it'll go 'ting' if you hit it with a teaspoon. For those who read only headlines, the first Chancellor to not have the same colour hair from one day to the next has announced £113bn of investment, building back what's been destroyed, restoring people's faith in Labour, and blah de blah blah. Few headlines have reported the Tory view, but that's understandable: it's hard to hear what they say when people have their head that far up their own rancid fundament. At this point a columnist might attempt to pick apart a Chancellor's sums, perhaps quote a great economist. But to me Keynes is what you call interns from Buckinghamshire, and my calculator always seems to spell 315005. The brutal truth is she hasn't bothered with any sums. She's just drawn a lovely picture of an inexplicable future, and she might as well have told us there'd be marmalade custard and sausage ice cream too. A chancellor's spending review doesn't have the same restraints as a Budget, so she's managed to get away with the fiscal equivalent of an architect's drawing of how the town centre will look after it's pedestrianised, all springtime pavement cafes and leafy trees and children playing. But in reality, it's still West Bromwich, the business died for lack of traffic, and everyone grew up living too close to the paint factory. So when Rachel's sunny little plan says HM Revenue and Customs will save 13.1% of its budget through "AI and automation", what will happen is that even less effort will be made to go after tax dodgers, and the process of small business owners and the self-employed getting shafted annually will be commentated by a chatbot. The sort of blithely dysfunctional customer service that will leave you actually pining for a keypad options menu, and a recipe for cock-ups. Rachel said departmental budgets will grow by an average of 2.3%, aside from all those which will be cut. The NHS will get an extra £29billion, and she'll promptly take a chunk back in employer National Insurance contributions for 1.3m staff, which she'll then say she's 'reinvesting' in the NHS. Even spotting some of that cash as it whizzes around in theoretical space and time will be like trying to catch a quark in your hands in the Large Hadron Collider. Then she had the brass neck to call it "a record cash investment in our NHS, increasing real-terms, day-to-day spending by 3%". Except under Tony Blair it increased by £60bn, over the entire lifetime of the NHS it's been 4% a year, and in those days we could actually see it. No mention of dentists, not a sniff of social care. Defence spending has squeaked up merely by changing what you count as 'defence', and is already too low for what the rest of NATO wants. Disabled people rendered more disabled, and less able to work, by a programme of punishing them into work rather than giving bosses an incentive to hire them. A huge £39bn for 'affordable' housing that probably won't be, with a construction industry 250,000 people short of actually being able to build them. A u-turn on winter fuel payments because of a changed economic outlook when the economic outlook has actually got worse. And hooray, a triumph for the Mirror's campaign to extend free school meals to every family on Universal Credit. Except - have you seen a school meal recently? We're talking damp pizza, cold gravy, the cheapest of miserable chickens that even Donald Trump would feel guilty about selling to us. All this hoo-hah about how a hot meal improves learning and life chances, and nary a thought about how reheated, reformed offcuts from the cheapest bidder for the off-site catering contract can possibly qualify as food. You'd get more nutrition from licking the playground. If it weren't so far beneath her, school catering could be Michelle Mone's next big wheeze. And the asylum seekers. The ones who can't work, because that right was taken away last time Labour were in power and saw votes in naked racism. The homeless who can't have social housing, because the Tories sold it all and Angela Rayner bought as much as she could. The people who get £49 a week to feed, heat, and clothe themselves, while living in 'hotels' six to a room or detention centres crawling with cockroaches, while the owners bill the taxpayer five star rates. Well, no more hotels for them! Can it be coincidence, I wonder, that on the same day it was announced rough sleeping would be decriminalised? No need to house them, and no need to sweep them up and put them in the jails we don't have. Heaven forfend anyone'd have a good idea, like allowing them to work and pay taxes, so they could house themselves, integrate, and everyone benefits. In Rachelworld, all the asylum seekers are going to just disappear - pouf - as the world plummets headfirst into climate crisis and authoritarianism. I can't even bear to discuss the environmental unfriendliness of nuclear waste, or the carbon footprint of a modular reactor and everything that goes into it. Suffice it to say, even Swampy might be converted to burn coal instead, and by the time that idea's toxic half-life has decayed to a bearable level we won't have those pavement cafes. The one good bit of news in the spending review is that we can all rejoice, for the only way Rachel could square all this is by locating and stripping the fabled magic money tree. But all she has to show for it is promises that don't add up, and won't be enough to save her from being a convenient firee for a Prime Minister who, not long from now, will want to blame someone else for the economy that tanked for two reasons he wouldn't admit. Now class, what do you get if you triangulate all the above, and add up the squares of Brexit and employers National Insurance contributions? 707. Put that upside down in your calculator and smoke it.
Epoch Times
11-06-2025
- Science
- Epoch Times
Physics Meets Finance: Theoretical Consequences of Man-Made Gold
Commentary In a remarkable feat of modern physics, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have managed to recreate one of humanity's oldest fantasies:
Yahoo
08-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Protect LIGO's science and local impact from Trump's budget cuts
The Trump administration wants to slash funding for America's two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatories (LIGOs) as part of broader cuts to the National Science Foundation. That would be a devastating blow to the nation's global leadership in scientific research. When Congress writes its fiscal 2026 budget, it should ignore the president's anti-science request. One of the LIGO sites is on the Hanford nuclear site. The other is in Louisiana. The White House proposes cutting 40% of their funding – $48 million to $29 million. And it also dictates how that cut should be made. It wants one of the two sites shut down. Given that Washington is a blue state that is participating in multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration and Louisiana is a red state that voted for the president, the odds of LIGO Hanford surviving seem low. Either way, scientists' ability to explore the universe by detecting gravitational waves would suffer significantly. Shutting one site down would compromise scientists' ability to verify detections of cosmic events and weed out false readings originating from local disturbances. It also would prevent the two sites from triangulating where an event occurred in the sky, allowing telescopes that rely on light for observations to also find and research them. The two LIGOs work in tandem. In 2015, the Hanford observatory and its sibling in Louisiana detected gravitational waves for the first time when they measured the ripple in space-time caused by two black holes merging 1.4 billion light-years away. The findings provided fresh confirmation of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity and earned researchers a Nobel Prize in physics. Since then, LIGO has detected hundreds of events, including black holes merging and neutron stars colliding. The Hanford site continues to refine its tools and push science forward. An upgrade a couple of years ago installed quantum squeezing technology that allows scientists to detect 60% more events and probe a larger volume of space. If funded, the observatories will continue to help humanity answer profound questions about the universe. Projects like LIGO are expensive. The National Science Foundation has spent more than $1 billion on detecting gravitational waves over four decades. At the start, skeptics deemed it risky, but it has provided tremendous return on investment. It epitomizes the sort of Big Science research that few institutions other than governments can afford. Think Europe's Large Hadron Collider, the Manhattan Project and the international Human Genome Project. Undercutting LIGO as it reaches its full potential and produces its most impressive results just to save a few million dollars would be a colossal mistake. As one commenter on the Tri-City Herald's website put it, 'It would be like inventing the microscope, seeing a cell for the first time, and then discarding it.' The best is yet to come. Even if a future administration were to restore funding, rehiring skilled researchers would be a monumental hurdle. A temporary shutdown will delay scientific progress and result in America losing ground to international researchers. LIGO has a local impact, too, and not just that it is visible from outer space. Its presence helps the Tri-Cities and the Hanford nuclear site evolve their scientific narrative from Cold War-era nuclear development to 21st-century astrophysics. It is a symbol of progress, diversification and positive global contribution that is invaluable for regional identity and attracting future talent and investment. LIGO staff go the extra mile by working with local STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students. They speak in classrooms about science careers and explain the complex workings of the observatory in a way that young people can understand. An $8 million LIGO Exploration Center, which opened in 2022 and was funded by Washington state, further enhances that public-facing mission. Such direct engagement cultivates future STEM talent and inspires the next generation of scientists and engineers. The proposed cuts to LIGO would lead to an irreversible loss of U.S. leadership in gravitational wave astronomy and an immense loss to the Tri-Cities. The Trump administration must reconsider. If it does not, Washington's congressional delegation must convince their colleagues to preserve this cornerstone of American scientific preeminence.
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Black holes could work as natural particle colliders to hunt for dark matter, scientists say
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. To unlock the secrets of dark matter, scientists could turn to supermassive black holes and their ability to act as natural superpowered particle colliders. That's according to new research that found conditions around black holes are more violent than previously believed. Currently, the most powerful particle accelerator on Earth is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), but since it was used to discover the Higgs Boson in 2012, it has failed to deliver evidence of physics beyond the so-called "standard model of particle physics," including the particles that comprise dark matter. That has led scientists to propose and plan even larger and more powerful particle colliders to explore this as-yet undiscovered country of physics. However, these particle accelerators are prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build. Fortunately, the cosmos offers natural particle accelerators in the form of the extreme environments around supermassive black holes. We just need a little ingenuity to exploit them. "One of the great hopes for particle colliders like the LHC is that it will generate dark matter particles, but we haven't seen any evidence yet," Joseph Silk, study team member and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said in a statement. "That's why there are discussions underway to build a much more powerful version, a next-generation supercollider. But as we invest $30 billion and wait 40 years to build this supercollider, nature may provide a glimpse of the future in supermassive black holes." Dark matter is the mysterious stuff that seems to account for around 85% of all matter in the cosmos. That means the matter we understand — everything we see around us that's composed of atoms made of electrons, protons and neutrons — accounts for just 15% of stuff in the matter remains frustratingly elusive because it doesn't interact with light, making it effectively invisible. This is why we know it can't be made of standard atoms because these particles do interact with light. That has spurred the search for new particles that could comprise dark matter, with a great deal of this effort conducted using particle accelerators like the LHC. Human-made particle accelerators like the LHC allow scientists to probe the fundamental aspects of nature by slamming together particles like protons at near-light speeds. This creates flashes of energy and showers of short-lived particles. Within these showers, scientists hunt for hitherto undiscovered particles. Test particles like protons are accelerated and guided toward each other within the LHC and other "atom smashers" using incredibly strong magnets, but supermassive black holes could mimic this process using gravity and their own spins. Supermassive black holes with masses millions, or billions, of times that of the sun sitting at the hearts of galaxies are often surrounded by material in flattened clouds called "accretion disks." As these black holes spin at high speeds, some of this material is channeled to their poles, from where it is blasted out as near-light-speed jets of plasma. This phenomenon could generate effects similar to those seen in particle accelerators here on Earth. "If supermassive black holes can generate these particles by high-energy proton collisions, then we might get a signal on Earth, some really high-energy particle passing rapidly through our detectors," Silk said. "That would be the evidence for a novel particle collider within the most mysterious objects in the universe, attaining energies that would be unattainable in any terrestrial accelerator. "We'd see something with a strange signature that conceivably provides evidence for dark matter, which is a bit more of a leap, but it's possible.'The key to Silk and colleagues' recipe of supermassive black holes as supercolliders hinges on their discovery that gas flows near black holes can sap energy from the spin of that black hole. This results in the conditions in the gas becoming far more violent than expected. Thus, around spinning supermassive black holes, there should be a wealth of high-speed collisions between particles similar to those created in the LHC here on Earth."Some particles from these collisions go down the throat of the black hole and disappear forever," Silk said. "But because of their energy and momentum, some also come out, and it's those that come out which are accelerated to unprecedentedly high energies."It's very hard to say what the limit is, but they certainly are up to the energy of the newest supercollider that we plan to build, so they could definitely give us complementary results," Silk said. Related Stories: — Black hole announces itself to astronomers by violently ripping apart a star — Massive star's gory 'death by black hole' is the biggest and brightest event of its kind — Star escapes ravenous supermassive black hole, leaving behind its stellar partner Of course, catching these high-energy particles from supermassive supercolliders many light-years away will be tricky even if the team's theory is correct. Key to this detection could be observatories already tracking supernovas, black hole eruptions and other high-energy cosmic events."The difference between a supercollider and a black hole is that black holes are far away," Silk concluded. "But nevertheless, these particles will get to us." The team's research was published on Tuesday (June 3) in the journal Physical Review Letters.
