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2Physics

2Physics Quote:
"Many of the molecules found by ROSINA DFMS in the coma of comet 67P are compatible with the idea that comets delivered key molecules for prebiotic chemistry throughout the solar system and in particular to the early Earth increasing drastically the concentration of life-related chemicals by impact on a closed water body. The fact that glycine was most probably formed on dust grains in the presolar stage also makes these molecules somehow universal, which means that what happened in the solar system could probably happen elsewhere in the Universe."
-- Kathrin Altwegg and the ROSINA Team

(Read Full Article: "Glycine, an Amino Acid and Other Prebiotic Molecules in Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko"
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Thursday, November 20, 2008

Discovery of an Unexpected Surplus of Cosmic Ray Electrons at Very High Energy (300-800 GeV)

John Wefel John Wefel [Photo courtesy: Louisianna State University]

In an article published in today's issue of 'Nature', a team of researchers from the Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter, or ATIC collaboration, have announced the discovery of an unexpected surplus of cosmic ray electrons at very high energy – 300-800 billion electron volts – which must come from a previously unidentified source near the Earth’s solar system.

John P. Wefel, principal investigator for the ATIC project and professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy at Louisianna State University, said,“This electron excess cannot be explained by the standard model of cosmic ray origin, in which electrons are accelerated in sources such as supernova remnants and then propagate through the galaxy to us. Rather, there must be another source relatively near us that is producing these additional particles.”

According to the paper, this source would need to be within about 3,000 light years of the sun and could be an exotic object such as a pulsar, mini-quasar, supernova remnant or even an intermediate mass black hole. “The trouble with this explanation is that there are very few such objects close to the solar system and none have been observed with characteristics that could fit our results,” said Prof. Wefel. “However, we cannot rule out this possibility, and the ATIC results may be the first indication of a very interesting object near our solar system waiting to be studied by other instruments.”

An alternative explanation is that the surplus of high energy electrons might result from the annihilation of very exotic particles put forward to explain dark matter. Over the last several decades, scientists have learned that the kind of material making up the world around us only accounts for about 5% of the mass composition of the universe. Close to 70% of the universe is composed of dark energy – so called because its nature is unknown – which appears to be causing the universe’s expansion to accelerate. The remaining 25% acts gravitationally just like regular matter, but does nothing else so is normally not visible and consequently is referred to as dark matter.

T. Gregory GuzikT. Gregory Guzik [Photo courtesy: Louisianna State University]

The nature of dark matter is not understood, but several theories that attempt to describe how gravity works at very small, quantum distances predict exotic particles that could be good dark matter candidates and which, upon annihilation with each other, produce normal particles that scientists can observe. T. Gregory Guzik, ATIC co-investigator, said,“One such predicted particle has annihilation characteristics that would produce a very good fit for the ATIC results. If true, this would be a major advance in our understanding of dark matter and its role in the universe.”

However, the trouble with this model is that the ATIC result would require the dark matter annihilation rate to be 200 times larger than that calculated by some theoreticians. “This might be possible if dark matter is found in clumps, and one of these clumps is very close to our solar system", said Prof. Guzik.

It may take quite some time before having a full understanding of the nature and origin of these very high energy cosmic rays, but the current result certainly paves the way for a new exciting physics in the 100-500 GeV region of the cosmic-ray spectrum.

About ATIC

ATICATIC in external frame [Photo courtesy: ATIC Collaboration]

The 4,300-pound ATIC experiment was designed to be carried to an altitude of about 124,000 feet above Earth in order to study the cosmic rays that would otherwise be absorbed into the atmosphere. The original purpose of ATIC was to investigate where cosmic rays come from and how they are accelerated to such high speeds.

ATIC is an international collaboration of researchers from LSU, University of Maryland, Marshall Space Flight Center, Pruple Mountain Observatory in China, Moscow State University in Russia and Max-Planck Institute for Solar System Research in German. ATIC is supported in the United States by NASA and flights are conducted under the auspices of the Balloon Program Office at Wallops Flight Facility by the staff of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility.

Reference
"An excess of cosmic ray electrons at energies of 300–800 GeV"
J. Chang, J. H. Adams, H. S. Ahn, G. L. Bashindzhagyan, M. Christl, O. Ganel, T. G. Guzik, J. Isbert, K. C. Kim, E. N. Kuznetsov, M. I. Panasyuk, A. D. Panov, W. K. H. Schmidt, E. S. Seo, N. V. Sokolskaya, J. W. Watts, J. P. Wefel, J. Wu & V. I. Zatsepin,

Nature 456, 362-365 (20 November 2008), Abstract.

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Thursday, November 13, 2008

Upcoming Physics Conferences

[To add an upcoming physics conference to this list, please send an email to 2Physics@gmail.com ]

Dec 01-06: Workshop on Nonequilibrium Nanostructures (Dresden, Germany)
Dec 07-11: TRR 33 Cosmology School (Passo del Tonale, Italy)
Dec 07-14: Texas Symposium (Vancouver, Canada)
Dec 11-16: Physics of Discrete Symmetries (Valencia, Spain)
Dec 16-21: Topical Conference on Elementary Particles, Astrophysics, and Cosmology (Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA)
Jan 05-08: 2nd European Topical Meeting on Nanophotonics and Metamarials (Tirol, Austia)
Jan 05-09: Experimental Gravitation (Cochin, India)
Feb 02-07: 45th Karpacz Winter School in Theoretical Physics (Ladek Zdroj, Poland)
Feb 02-11: Neutrino interactions: from theory to Monte Carlo simulations (Ladek Zdroj, Poland)
Feb 09-11: Dark Matter (Florence, Italy)
Mar 25-27: Intl Symposium on Quantum Interaction (Saarbruecken, Germany)
Mar 25-30: ISF Research Workshop on Random Matrices and Integrability: From Theory to Applications (Yad Hashmona, Judean Hills, Israel)
May 11-13: Workshop on Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication, and Cryptography (Waterloo, Canada)
May 11-13: Phenomenology 2009 Symposium: LHC Turn On (Madison, Wisconsin, USA)
May 25-29: From the Planck Scale to the Electroweak Scale (Padova, Italy)
Jun 29-Jul 01: Unity of the Universe (Portsmouth, UK)
Jun 29-Jul 03: Invisible Universe (Paris, France)
Aug 21-27: Bogolyubov Conference "Problems of Theoretical and Mathematical Physics" (Moscow-Dubna, Russia)
Sep 15-18: Bogolyubov Kyiv Conference "Modern Problems of Theoretical and Mathematical Physics" (Kyiv, Ukraine)

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