Scientists talk about the origin of the Universe, the nature of the mysterious dark matter, 21st century medicine and the existence of a particle that the world did not know about until now.
On Saturday, the international conference Large Hadron Collider Phisics (LHCP) 2015, dedicated to the work of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and other divisions of the international high energy laboratory CERN, ended in our city.
On the threshold of discovery
Physicists speak cautiously about the main scientific result of the conference.
“There is a pattern: any new quality appeared with an increase in energy. And in 1976, when we realized that elementary particles are not protons, but quarks. And in 2012, when the Higgs boson was discovered. Now we have doubled the energy - maybe we will discover something. Something has already been said at the meeting, but we can’t say for sure without preliminary results,”
- explains Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Head of the Department of High Energy Physics of the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics, National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute" Alexei Vorobyov.
Most likely, the academician is talking about the discovery of new particles, similar to a photon, but with a very large mass.
Professor of St Petersburg University Alexander Andrianov tells more about them:
“They are hardly elementary. There is a techno theory (as a branch of techno music) that suggests that vector bosons are made up of techno quarks, which themselves do not interact with us.
There are such particles 10 to the minus 24th power of seconds, but their influence on modern physics is enormous.
Intensification-2015
Speaking about the upcoming discoveries, the professor warns that increasing the power of the accelerator is not the only way to get meaningful results:
“Striving for high energies is not always useful. Because the temperature rises from them, and the nuclear density becomes very small. Sometimes you need an intermediate state - more current and a little less energy.
Therefore, physicists from St. Petersburg have developed a system that increases the intensity of the particle flow by 10 times.
"Like all Russian inventors - with the help of a simple device and ingenuity",
- laughs Georgy Feofilov, head of the laboratory at St Petersburg University, head of the St Petersburg University team in the ALICE collaboration.
Made in Russia
Holding the event in St. Petersburg reflects the contribution of our countrymen to the international project.
"The ideas that Russian scientists have brought have no analogues",
- states CERN Deputy Director General for Science Sergio Bertolucci.
Professor of the University of Freiburg, member of the Committee for the European Strategy for High Energy Physics, founder and former head of the ATLAS collaboration Peter Jenny tells more about the work of his colleagues:
“The participation of Russian institutes in the project began about 20 years ago, already at that time your physicists had an understanding of how to set up experiments at the LHC. Some of these ideas have been implemented. What our Russian colleagues have done works great.”
So the ideas that arose in St. Petersburg became the basis for the creation of the ALICE collaboration, a division of CERN, which studies the pra-matter that was formed immediately after the Big Bang.
“The engineering and scientific potential of our city made it possible to develop proposals that were submitted to CERN in 1992 and are still working. Now St Petersburg University is upgrading the detectors of the ALICE facility, university students have joined the process,” says Grigory Feofilov.
Almost like football
In total, more than eight hundred physicists, engineers and programmers from Russia work at CERN. Only three countries - Italy, Germany and France, as well as the United States, which are not part of the association - boast a large presence.
But holding a conference in St. Petersburg has another aspect, a political one. He is voiced by Vladimir Shevchenko, Deputy Director of the Center for Fundamental Research at the National Research Center "Kurchatov Institute":
“Why do we like to hold football championships in Russia? Because the organizers always have some advantages. In addition, holding such a large forum in our country is a reminder of us as a major player. A country that has its own interests."
Before us is a portal to a new world
“Those who say that the collider is the hottest place in the universe are not mistaken. When nuclei collide, accelerated almost to the speed of light, matter becomes something very interesting to study, Grigory Feofilov admits. "Gives clues to discoveries in the field of astrophysics, influences fundamental science - understanding the standard model and deviations from it."
The temperature during the experiments is measured in trillions of degrees, that is, hundreds of times higher than the temperature of the Sun.
As for the Standard Model, the Higgs boson discovered at the LHC in 2012, or “Higgs”, as scientists briefly call it, remains a constant subject of discussion. This elementary particle confirmed the consistency of the basic theoretical construction of modern physics and at the same time brought humanity beyond the limits of the standard model, into unknown dimensions.
“It is important to understand that the Higgs is not “another particle”, but a representative of a new type of matter with spin zero. A portal to a new world is opening before us, to find out what awaits behind the gates is a task for many years for the entire scientific community, -
predicts Vladimir Shevchenko.
dark beginnings
There are other predictions as well.
“The most impressive discovery that lies ahead of us should be the solution to the mystery of dark matter. We can get the result either by increasing the energy in the accelerator or by making more accurate measurements of the particles.”
hopes Peter Yenny.
Dark matter really remains the main mystery of our age - the Universe is 96% of this substance, but we can neither see it nor register it, only determine its existence by its effect on the visible 4%. Understanding what dark matter is is likely to overturn all our ideas about reality. But even these amazing discoveries do not exhaust the possibilities of CERN.
"I don't know what nature will reveal to us next moment"
- Sergio Bertolucci, CERN Deputy Director General for Science, honestly admits.
Only for the sick
There are also more understandable results of the accelerator. It was at CERN that hadron therapy originated - the use of charged particle beams for point irradiation of tumors. The impact occurs so locally that it does not affect healthy tissues.
"This is a fusion of high energy physics and the latest medical technology, which gives very high performance,"
- says Grigory Feofilov.
It is planned to build two private proton centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The imperfection of legislation hinders the greater spread of hadron medicine in Russia, explains Vladimir Shevchenko: a physicist does not have the right to provide medical services, and a doctor does not know high-energy physics.
Waiting for the end of the world
In the eyes of the layman, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider are most often associated not with great discoveries, but with a global catastrophe.
Seven years ago, scientists from CERN were even tried to be judged for trying to organize the end of the world.
Society's ideas are well expressed by a picture in which a bandaged scientist tells a journalist: "With the help of the LHC, we learned that the Universe appeared as a result of an explosion." Or a four-sleeved T-shirt with the words "I survived the launch of the hadron collider."
Physicists know about such jokes and are ironic in response.
“If a black hole is discovered at CERN, it will be a big scientific discovery. True, its price will also be high - all of humanity will disappear, ”says Alexei Vorobyov.
However, it is too early to despair. Physics teaches that a small black hole should evaporate, and not swallow the universe at all.
Everything has already happened
Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR, Dubna) Viktor Matveev advises to keep calm:
“It is difficult for a person who does not deal with physics to imagine the scale of the processes. Experiments in the laboratory only repeat what was in the universe. Everything that could happen has already happened. If it had catastrophic consequences, you and I would no longer exist.”
From the fact that we exist, the conclusion follows: The Large Hadron Collider does not pose a danger to humanity. And this proof should be clear even to people who are infinitely far from high energy physics.
Did you know that the most massive star weighs 265 times more than the sun? Read the post and learn a lot of interesting things.
No. 10. The Boomerang Nebula is the coldest place in the universe
The Boomerang Nebula is located in the constellation Centaurus at a distance of 5000 light years from Earth. The temperature of the nebula is −272°C, making it the coldest known place in the universe.
The flow of gas coming from the central star of the Boomerang Nebula is moving at a speed of 164 km/s and is constantly expanding. Because of this rapid expansion, the temperature in the nebula is so low. The Boomerang Nebula is colder than even the CMB from the Big Bang.
Keith Taylor and Mike Scarrot named the object the Boomerang Nebula in 1980 after observing it from the Anglo-Australian Telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory. The sensitivity of the device made it possible to fix only a slight asymmetry in the lobes of the nebula, which gave rise to the assumption of a curved, like a boomerang, shape.
The Boomerang Nebula was photographed in detail by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1998, after which it became clear that the nebula has the shape of a bow tie, but this name was already taken.
R136a1 lies 165,000 light-years from Earth in the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This blue hypergiant is the most massive star known to science. The star is also one of the brightest, emitting light up to 10 million times more than the Sun.
The mass of the star is 265 solar masses, and the mass at formation is more than 320.
R136a1 was discovered by a team of astronomers from the University of Sheffield led by Paul Crowther on June 21, 2010.
The question of the origin of such supermassive stars is still unclear: did they form with such a mass initially, or did they form from several smaller stars.
In the image from left to right: a red dwarf, the Sun, a blue giant, and R136a1.
No. 8. SDSS J0100+2802 is the brightest quasar with the oldest black hole
SDSS J0100+2802 is a quasar located 12.8 billion light-years from the Sun. It is notable for the fact that the black hole that feeds it has a mass of 12 billion solar masses, which is 3000 times larger than the black hole at the center of our galaxy.
The luminosity of the quasar SDSS J0100 + 2802 exceeds the solar one by 42 trillion times. And the Black Hole is the oldest known. The object formed 900 million years after the supposed Big Bang.
Quasar SDSS J0100+2802 was discovered by astronomers from the Chinese province of Yunnan using the 2.4 m Lijiang Telescope on December 29, 2013.
No. 7. WASP-33 b (HD 15082 b) is the hottest planet
Planet WASP-33 b is an exoplanet around the white main sequence star HD 15082 in the constellation Andromeda. Slightly larger than Jupiter in diameter. In 2011, the temperature of the planet was measured with extreme accuracy - about 3200 ° C, which makes it the hottest known exoplanet.
No. 6. The Orion Nebula is the brightest nebula
The Orion Nebula (also known as Messier 42, M 42 or NGC 1976) is the brightest diffuse nebula. It is clearly visible in the night sky with the naked eye, and it can be seen almost anywhere on Earth. The Orion Nebula is about 1344 light-years from Earth and is 33 light-years across.
Philippe Delorme discovered this lonely planet using ESO's powerful telescope. The main feature of the planet is that it is all alone in space. We are more accustomed to the fact that the planets revolve around the star. But CFBDSIR2149 is not such a planet. She is alone, and the star closest to her is too far away to have a gravitational effect on the planet.
Similar lonely planets have been found by scientists before, but the large distance prevented their study. The study of a lonely planet will allow "to learn more about how planets can be ejected from planetary systems."
No. 4. Cruitney - an asteroid with an orbit identical to Earth
Cruitney is a near-Earth asteroid moving in orbital resonance with the Earth 1:1, while crossing the orbits of three planets at once: Venus, Earth and Mars. It is also called a quasi-satellite of the Earth.
Cruitney was discovered on October 10, 1986 by British amateur astronomer Duncan Waldron using the Schmidt telescope. Cruitney's first provisional designation was 1986 TO. The asteroid's orbit was calculated in 1997.
Due to orbital resonance with the Earth, the asteroid flies through its orbit for almost one Earth year (364 days), that is, at any given time, the Earth and Cruitney are at the same distance from each other as a year ago.
The danger of a collision of this asteroid with the Earth does not exist, at least for the next few million years.
No. 3. Gliese 436 b - hot ice planet
Gliese 436 b was discovered by American astronomers in 2004. The planet is comparable in size to the size of Neptune, the mass of Gliese 436 b is equal to 22 Earth masses.
In May 2007, Belgian scientists led by Mikael Zhillon from the University of Liege found that the planet consists mainly of water. Water is in a solid state of ice under high pressure and at a temperature of about 300 degrees Celsius, which leads to the effect of "hot ice". Gravity creates a huge pressure on the water, the molecules of which turn into ice. And even despite the ultra-high temperature, water is not able to evaporate from the surface. Therefore, Gliese 436 b is a very unique planet.
No. 2. El Gordo is the largest space structure in the early universe
A galaxy cluster is a complex superstructure made up of several galaxies. The ACT-CL J0102-4915 cluster, unofficially named El Gordo, was discovered in 2011 and is believed to be the largest cosmic structure in the early universe. According to scientists' latest calculations, this system is 3 quadrillion times more massive than the Sun. The El Gordo cluster is located 7 billion light-years from Earth.
El Gordo is the result of the merger of two clusters that collide at speeds of several million kilometers per hour, according to a new study.
No. 1. 55 Cancer E - diamond planet
Planet 55 Cancer e was discovered in 2004 in the planetary system of the sun-like star 55 Cancer A. The mass of the planet is almost 9 times that of the Earth.
The temperature on the side facing the mother star is +2400°C, and is a giant ocean of lava, on the shadow side the temperature is +1100°C.
According to new research, 55 Cancer e contains a large proportion of carbon in its composition. It is believed that a third of the mass of the planet is made up of thick layers of diamond. At the same time, there is almost no water in the composition of the planet. The planet is located 40 light years from Earth.
P.S.
The mass of the Earth is 5.97×10 to the 24th power kg
The giant planets of the solar system:
Jupiter - 318 times the mass of Earth
Saturn - 95 times the mass of Earth
Uranus - 14 times the mass of Earth
Neptune - 17 times the mass of Earth
Summary of previous episodes:
Scientists from Russia have found an amazing object in the vastness of the Universe - a quasar, which received the index 3C 273. This object is interesting because it has such a high temperature that it cannot be described by existing physical theories.
Quasars, like black holes, are little-studied objects in space that are of great interest to astronomers. Scientists have found a new quasar in the constellation Virgo. After careful study, it turned out that 3C 273 has a colossal temperature that ranges from 10 to 40 trillion degrees Celsius! There were scientists, because such a temperature limit is beyond the scope of our physical knowledge.
Previously, scientists believed that the cores of quasars did not exceed a temperature of 500 billion degrees, but 3C 273 "broke" all scientific calculations and introduced the academic world into a stupor. “This does not agree with our calculations at all, we have not yet found a normal answer why this object . Most likely, we are on the verge of a new era of exploration of the Universe,” said Russian researcher N. Kardashev.
Quasars are amazing because they emit a huge amount of light. Some of these objects can create radiation that is greater than all the stars in our galaxy! There is a theory that says that quasars are an early "stage" of new galaxies, which grows due to the absorption of matter by a black hole.
The hottest object in the Universe is located at a very distant one, at the speed of light it can only be reached after 2.44 billion years.
Some cosmologists argue that the relic "cold spot" is the imprint of a parallel universe that is intertwined with ours.
The Eridani Super Void, or “cold spot,” is a unique region in the constellation Eridanus that has an incredibly low CMB that is 70 µK cooler than the average temperature of the CMB in the entire universe, which is produced by CMB photons. A temperature deviation of 0.00015 degrees Celsius could mean that the "cold spot" is a supervoid - the empty space between galactic filaments. In the region of the Eridanus Supervoid, there are practically no radio sources that could create radiation. This means that there are no galaxies or galaxy clusters in this region of space.
The size of this spatial "hole" in diameter is about a billion light years. More than 10,000 different galaxies would easily fit in it. Presumably, not only ordinary matter is missing here, but also hypothetical dark matter. Based on this assumption, the Eridani Supervoid could contain dark energy or the vacuum of space.
According to the latest data obtained by scientists, ordinary matter, of which all known elementary particles are composed, create 5% of the total energy in the Universe. Dark and ordinary matter make up only 1/3 of the total energy of the Universe. Based on the theory that the Universe is constantly expanding, cosmologists have decided that in addition to gravitational attraction in nature, there is also gravitational repulsion - antigravity.
Astronomers have recognized dark energy as the main "engine" of the expansion of the Universe. Accordingly, the remaining 2/3 of the total energy of the Universe presumably falls on this substance. Theoretically, the carrier of dark energy in the Universe is the universal physical medium. Maybe it is contained precisely inside such “holes” as the Eridani Super Void?
It should be noted that there are quite a few such voids in the Universe, similar to the zone in the constellation Eridanus. Modern science knows a couple of dozens of supervoids, where the density of cosmic matter is lower than the average in the Universe. Eridani's super-void could lay claim to being the largest void of all, containing 20% less matter than the rest of the universe. What can be inside this "hole"?
Some cosmologists argue that the relic "cold spot" is the imprint of a parallel universe that is intertwined with ours. Others believe that the real picture looks different. The Eridani supervoid may be a cluster of much smaller voids, each surrounded by galaxies. This assumption is consistent with the theory of the Multiverse, which says that our Universe exists in a hypothetical "soap bubble", while parallel worlds develop inside their own "bubbles". If analysis of the background radiation proves the validity of this theory, then the Eridanus Supervoid may become evidence of its veracity.
It is unlikely that this temperature record will be beaten; at the moment of birth, our Universe had a temperature of about 10 32 K, and by the word "moment" we mean here not a second, but the Planck unit of time, equal to 5 10 -44 seconds. In this literally immeasurably short time, the universe was so hot that we have no idea by what laws it existed; even fundamental particles do not exist at such energies.
2. TANK
The second place in the list of the hottest places (or points in time, in this case there is no difference) after the Big Bang is our blue planet. In 2012, at the Large Hadron Collider, physicists collided heavy ions accelerated to 99% of the speed of light and for a brief moment got a temperature of 5.5 trillion Kelvin (5 * 10 12) (or degrees Celsius - on such scales, this is the same thing).
3. Neutron stars
10 11 K - this is the temperature inside the newborn neutron star. The substance at this temperature is not at all like the forms we are used to. The interiors of neutron stars are made up of a seething "soup" of electrons, neutrons, and other elements. In just a few minutes, the star cools down to 10 9 K, and in the first hundred years of its existence, by another order of magnitude.
4. Nuclear explosion
The temperature inside the fireball of a nuclear explosion is about 20,000 K. This is more than the surface temperature of most main sequence stars.
5. The hottest stars (except neutron)
The surface temperature of the Sun is about six thousand degrees, but this is not the limit for stars; The hottest star known today, WR 102 in the constellation Sagittarius, is heated to 210,000 K, ten times hotter than an atomic explosion. There are relatively few such hot stars (about a hundred of them were found in the Milky Way, and the same number in other galaxies), they are 10-15 times more massive than the Sun and much brighter than it.
