CMS discovers new particle – Meet the Ξb*0 beauty baryon

CERN - European Organization for Nuclear Research logo.

April 27, 2012

Image above: The Ξ_b^*0 particle shows a clear signal (blue) above the background level (red) (Image: CMS) The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at CERN has submitted a paper for publication describing the first observation of a new particle, an excited beauty baryon called the Ξ_b^*0 (Ξ_b is pronounced "Csai - bee").

Baryons are subatomic particles whose mass is equal to or greater than that of a proton. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts the existence of Ξ_b baryons in charged, neutral or excited states. Though charged and neutral Ξ_b baryons have been seen in detectors before, this is the first time the an excited Ξ_b beauty baryon has been observed. CMS measured the mass of the new particle to be 5945.0 ± 2.8 MeV.

 LHC - CERN

CMS physicists found the Ξ_b^*0 signal in a sample of about 530 trillion proton—proton collisions (an integrated luminosity of 5.3 inverse femtobarns) which were delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) operating at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV in 2011.

The Ξ_b^*0 adds to a growing list of discoveries at CERN in recent months. In December the ATLAS experiment announced the observation of a new "quarkonium state" containing a beauty quark bound with its antiquark, and in November the LHCb experiment reported a new effect in the decays of particles containing a charm quark (or antiquark).
With the LHC now running at 4TeV per beam, the collision number is set to increase, which enhances the machine's discovery potential considerably, and opens up new possibilities for searches for new and heavier particles.

Note:

1. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's leading laboratory for particle physics. It has its headquarters in Geneva. At present, its Member States are Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Romania is a candidate for accession. Israel is an Associate Member in the pre-stage to Membership. India, Japan, the Russian Federation, the United States of America, Turkey, the European Commission and UNESCO have Observer status.

Find out more:
    CMS news: http://cms.web.cern.ch/news/observation-new-xib-beauty-particle
    The CMS experiment: http://cms.web.cern.ch/
    Quantum diaries: CMS observes a new beauty particle: http://www.quantumdiaries.org/2012/04/27/cms-observes-a-new-beauty-particle/
    ATLAS: http://atlas.ch/
    LHCb: http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/

Image, Graphic, Text, Credit: CERN.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

100 Days and Counting to NASA's Curiosity Mars Rover Landing

NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Mission patch.

 04.27.12

Mars Science Laboratory Spacecraft During Cruise, Artist's Concept

At 10:31 p.m. PDT today, April 27, (1:31 p.m. EDT), NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, carrying the one-ton Curiosity rover, will be within 100 days from its appointment with the Martian surface. At that moment, the mission has about 119 million miles (191 million kilometers) to go and is closing at a speed of 13,000 mph (21,000 kilometers per hour).

"Every day is one day closer to the most challenging part of this mission," said Pete Theisinger, Mars Science Laboratory project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Landing an SUV-sized vehicle next to the side of a mountain 85 million miles from home is always stimulating. Our engineering and science teams continue their preparations for that big day and the surface operations to follow."

On Sunday, April 22, a week-long operational readiness test concluded at JPL. The test simulated aspects of the mission's early surface operations. Mission planners and engineers sent some of the same commands they will send to the real Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars to a test rover used at JPL.

Image above: Curiosity, the big rover of This artist's concept depicts the moment that NASA's Curiosity rover touches down onto the Martian surface. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

"Our test rover has a central computer identical to Curiosity's currently on its way to Mars," said Eric Aguilar, the mission's engineering test lead at JPL. "We ran all our commands through it and watched to make sure it drove, took pictures and collected samples as expected by the mission planners. It was a great test and gave us a lot of confidence moving forward."

The Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft, launched Nov. 26, 2011, will deliver Curiosity to the surface of Mars on the evening of Aug. 5, 2012, PDT (early on Aug. 6, Universal Time and EDT) to begin a two-year prime mission. Curiosity's landing site is near the base of a mountain inside Gale Crater, near the Martian equator. Researchers plan to use Curiosity to study layers in the mountain that hold evidence about wet environments of early Mars.

The Cruise to Mars

JPL, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for the NASA Science Mission Directorate, Washington. More information about Curiosity is online at http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/ .

You can follow the mission on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity and on Twitter at: http://www.twitter.com/marscuriosity .

Images, Text, Video, Credit: NASA / JPL / JPL-Caltech  / DC Agle / Guy Webster.

 Best regards, Orbiter.ch

Within the Realm of a Dying Star

NASA - Hubble Space Telescope patch.

April 27, 2012

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has been on the forefront of research into the lives of stars like our sun. At the ends of their lives, these stars run out of nuclear fuel in a phase that is called the preplanetary or protoplanetary nebula stage. This Hubble image of the Egg Nebula shows one of the best views to date of this brief, but dramatic, phase in a star’s life.

During the preplanetary nebula phase, the hot remains of an aging star in the center of the nebula heat it up, excite the gas and make it glow over several thousand years. The short lifespan of preplanetary nebulae means there are relatively few of them in existence at any one time. Moreover, they are very dim, requiring powerful telescopes to be seen. This combination of rarity and faintness means they were only discovered comparatively recently. The Egg Nebula, the first to be discovered, was first spotted less than 40 years ago, and many aspects of this class of object remain shrouded in mystery.

At the center of this image, and hidden in a thick cloud of dust, is the nebula’s central star. While scientists can’t see the star directly, four searchlight beams of light coming from it shine out through the nebula. Researchers hypothesize that ring-shaped holes in the thick cocoon of dust, carved by jets coming from the star, let the beams of light emerge through the otherwise opaque cloud. The precise mechanism by which stellar jets produce these holes is not known, but one explanation is that a binary star system, rather than a single star, exists at the center of the nebula.

The onion-like layered structure of the more diffuse cloud surrounding the central cocoon is caused by periodic bursts of material being ejected from the dying star. The bursts typically occur every few hundred years.

This image is produced from exposures in visible and infrared light from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3.

 Hubble Space Telescope

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., in Washington, D.C.

For more information about Hubble visit: http://www.nasa.gov/hubble and http://hubblesite.org/

ESA Hubble site: http://www.spacetelescope.org/

Images, Text, Credit: ESA / Hubble, NASA.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

Expedition 30 Lands in Kazakhstan

ISS - Expedition 30 Mission patch / ROSCOSMOS - Soyuz TMA-22 Mission patch.

April 27, 2012

The Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft carrying Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank and Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin landed in Kazakhstan at 7:45 a.m. EDT. They undocked from the International Space Station at 4:18 a.m. officially ending their stay.

The Soyuz performed a deorbit burn at 6:49 a.m. before the descent module separated from the rest of the Russian spacecraft and entered the Earth’s atmosphere. Afterward, the Soyuz deployed several parachutes, slowing its descent, and then fired three small engines to soften its landing.

Image above: Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank is carried to a medical tent after being extracted from the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft he and Flight Engineers Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin landed in. Credit: NASA TV.

Soyuz TMA-22 landing full

Read more about Soyuz landings: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/structure/elements/soyuz/landing.html

The Soyuz TMA-22 descent

Support personnel have extracted the Expedition 30 crew members from the Soyuz and they are now being monitored by flight surgeons.

Expedition 31 began when Burbank, Shkaplerov and Ivanishin undocked from the station. Commander Oleg Kononenko and Flight Engineers Don Pettit and Andre Kuipers will continue their stay aboard the orbital laboratory until July 1. Scheduled to join them in mid-May are Flight Engineers Gennady Padalka, Joe Acaba and Sergei Revin, who will launch and arrive in the Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft.

Read more about Expedition 31: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition31/index.html

The new crewmates are completing their mission training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. They will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 15, and plan to stay in space until Sept. 17.

Images, Video, Text, Credits: ROSCOSMOS / Roscosmos TV / NASA TV / NASA.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

Soyuz TMA-22 in the free flight

ROSCOSMOS - Soyuz TMA-22 Mission patch.

27/04/2012

In accordance with the schedule of the flight the International Space Station today at 12:18 GMT performed undocking of manned spacecraft Soyuz TMA-22 with the International Space Station (on the modulus of the "Search").

The Soyuz will perform a deorbit burn before the descent module separates from the rest of the Russian spacecraft and enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Afterwards, the Soyuz will deploy several parachutes slowing its descent and then fire three small engines to soften its landing in the steppe of Kazakhstan.

Image above: Expedition 31 Commander Oleg Kononenko (left) and Expedition 30 Commander Dan Burbank prepare to close the hatches between the International Space Station and the Soyuz TMA-22 spacecraft. Credit: NASA.

A landing capsule with a crew consisting of commander Anton Shkaplerova (Roscosmos), Anatoly Ivanishin flight engineers (Roscosmos) and Daniel Burbank (NASA) is expected in 15 hours 45 minutes Moscow time 88 kilometers north-east of the town of Arkalyk in Kazakhstan.

Soyuz TMA-22 Undocking

After undock Soyuz TMA-22 from the Russian segment of ISS and prior to the arrival on board the next Expedition will continue to work on the orbiting crew consisting of Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, astronauts André Cowper (ESA) and Donald Pettit (NASA).

The new crewmates are completing their mission training at the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia. They will launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on May 15, and plan to stay in space until Sept. 17.

Original text in Russian: http://www.federalspace.ru/main.php?id=2&nid=19019

For more information about International Space Station (ISS), visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html

Press-service of Federal Space Agency and the PCO (Roscosmos PAO) / NASA / NASA TV / Roscosmos TV / Translation: Orbiter.ch.

Greetings, Orbiter.ch

NASA's Cassini Finds Saturn's Moon Phoebe Has Planet-Like Qualities

NASA / ESA - Cassini - Huygens Mission to Saturn & Titan patch.

April 26, 2012

 The Face of Phoebe

Image above: Phoebe's true nature is revealed in startling clarity in this mosaic of two images taken during Cassini's flyby on June 11, 2004. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Scientists had their first close-up look at Phoebe when Cassini began exploring the Saturn system in 2004. Using data from multiple spacecraft instruments and a computer model of the moon's chemistry, geophysics and geology, scientists found Phoebe was a so-called planetesimal, or remnant planetary building block. The findings appear in the April issue of the Journal Icarus.

"Unlike primitive bodies such as comets, Phoebe appears to have actively evolved for a time before it stalled out," said Julie Castillo-Rogez, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Objects like Phoebe are thought to have condensed very quickly. Hence, they represent building blocks of planets. They give scientists clues about what conditions were like around the time of the birth of planets and their moons."

Cassini images suggest Phoebe originated in the far-off Kuiper Belt, the region of ancient, icy, rocky bodies beyond Neptune's orbit. Data show Phoebe was spherical and hot early in its history, and has denser rock-rich material concentrated near its center. Its average density is about the same as Pluto, another object in the Kuiper Belt. Phoebe likely was captured by Saturn's gravity when it somehow got close to the giant planet.

Image above: This panel of images shows the nearly spherical shape of Saturn's moon Phoebe, as derived from imaging obtained from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Each image represents a 90-degree turn. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Cornell.

Saturn is surrounded by a cloud of irregular moons that circle the planet in orbits tilted from Saturn's orbit around the sun, the so-called equatorial plane. Phoebe is the largest of these irregular moons and also has the distinction of orbiting backward in relation to the other moons. Saturn's large moons appear to have formed from gas and dust orbiting in the planet's equatorial plane. These moons currently orbit Saturn in that same plane.

"By combining Cassini data with modeling techniques previously applied to other solar system bodies, we've been able to go back in time and clarify why it is so different from the rest of the Saturn system," said Jonathan Lunine, a co-author on the study and a Cassini team member at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

Analyses suggest that Phoebe was born within the first 3 million years of the birth of the solar system, which occurred 4.5 billion years ago. The moon may originally have been porous but appears to have collapsed in on itself as it warmed up. Phoebe developed a density 40 percent higher than the average inner Saturnian moon.

A Skyline View. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Objects of Phoebe's size have long been thought to form as "potato-shaped" bodies and remained that way over their lifetimes. If such an object formed early enough in the solar system's history, it could have harbored the kinds of radioactive material that would produce substantial heat over a short timescale. This would warm the interior and reshape the moon.

"From the shape seen in Cassini images and modeling the likely cratering history, we were able to see that Phoebe started with a nearly spherical shape, rather than being an irregular shape later smoothed into a sphere by impacts," said co-author Peter Thomas, a Cassini team member at Cornell.

Phoebe likely stayed warm for tens of millions of years before freezing up. The study suggests the heat also would have enabled the moon to host liquid water at one time. This could explain the signature of water-rich material on Phoebe's surface previously detected by Cassini.

The new study also is consistent with the idea that several hundred million years after Phoebe cooled, the moon drifted toward the inner solar system in a solar-system-wide rearrangement. Phoebe was large enough to survive this turbulence.

Artist's concept of Cassini's Saturn Orbit Insertion

More than 60 moons are known to orbit Saturn, varying drastically in shape, size, surface age and origin. Scientists using both ground-based observatories and Cassini's cameras continue to search for others.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. JPL manages the mission for the agency's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena manages JPL for NASA.

For more information on the Cassini mission, visit: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov and http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Cassini-Huygens/

Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA / Dwayne Brown / JPL / Jia-Rui C. Cook.

Cheers, Orbiter.ch

NASA's WISE Catches Aging Star Erupting With Dust

NASA - WISE Mission patch.

04.26.12

It's a dust bunny of cosmic proportions. Astronomers used images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, to locate an aging star shedding loads of dust (orange dot at upper left). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Images from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) reveal an old star in the throes of a fiery outburst, spraying the cosmos with dust. The findings offer a rare, real-time look at the process by which stars like our sun seed the universe with building blocks for other stars, planets and even life.

The star, catalogued as WISE J180956.27-330500.2, was discovered in images taken during the WISE survey in 2010, the most detailed infrared survey to date of the entire celestial sky. It stood out from other objects because it glowed brightly with infrared light. When compared to images taken more than 20 years ago, astronomers found the star was 100 times brighter.

"We were not searching specifically for this phenomenon, but because WISE scanned the whole sky, we can find such unique objects," said Poshak Gandhi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), lead author of a new paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Results indicate the star recently exploded with copious amounts of fresh dust, equivalent in mass to our planet Earth. The star is heating the dust and causing it to glow with infrared light.

"Observing this period of explosive change while it is actually ongoing is very rare," said co-author Issei Yamamura of JAXA. "These dust eruptions probably occur only once every 10,000 years in the lives of old stars, and they are thought to last less than a few hundred years each time. It's the blink of an eye in cosmological terms."

The aging star is in the "red giant" phase of its life. Our own sun will expand into a red giant in about 5 billion years. When a star begins to run out of fuel, it cools and expands. As the star puffs up, it sheds layers of gas that cool and congeal into tiny dust particles. This is one of the main ways dust is recycled in our universe, making its way from older stars to newborn solar systems. The other way, in which the heaviest of elements are made, is through the deathly explosions, or supernovae, of the most massive stars.

"It's an intriguing glimpse into the cosmic recycling program," said Bill Danchi, WISE program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "Evolved stars, which this one appears to be, contribute about 50 percent of the particles that make up humans."

Astronomers know of one other star currently pumping out massive amounts of dust. Called Sakurai's Object, this star is farther along in the aging process than the one discovered recently by WISE.

After Poshak and his team discovered the unusual, dusty star with WISE, they went back to look for it in previous infrared all-sky surveys. The object was not seen at all by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), which flew in 1983, but shows up brightly in images taken as part of the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS) in 1998.

Artist view of Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or WISE

Poshak and his colleagues calculated the star appears to have brightened dramatically since 1983. The WISE data show the dust has continued to evolve over time, with the star now hidden behind a very thick veil. The team plans to follow up with space- and ground-based telescopes to confirm its nature and to better understand how older stars recycle dust back into the cosmos.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages and operates WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode after it scanned the entire sky twice, completing its main objectives. The principal investigator for WISE, Edward Wright, is at the University of California, Los Angeles. The mission was selected competitively under NASA's Explorers Program managed by the agency's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The science instrument was built by the Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah. The spacecraft was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Science operations and data processing take place at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

The IRAS mission was a collaborative effort between NASA (JPL), the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The 2MASS mission was a joint effort between Caltech, the University of Massachusetts and NASA (JPL). Data are archived at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech.

More information about WISE is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise , http://wise.astro.ucla.edu and http://jpl.nasa.gov/wise

Images, Text, Credits: NASA / J.D. Harrington / JPL / Whitney Clavin.

Best regards, Orbiter.ch