A very special payload will be aboard the final flight of Space Shuttle Endeavour, one that had a long hard road to launch. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is destined for installation early next month on the S3 Upper Inboard Payload Attach Site on the International Space Station. Once aboard the ISS, the AMS will begin doing real science almost immediately, utilizing a large permanent magnet and no less than five detectors to perform astrophysical experiments.
30.03.10- Fermi: On the Hunt for Dark Matter.
March 30, 2010 By 1 Comment
One of the major astrophysical mysteries of our time may be on the verge of being solved. Namely, where is 85% of our universe? That’s the amount that is predicted to be composed of enigmatic dark matter. Now, scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (formerly known as GLAST) have found tantalizing clues at the core of or galaxy; an electron haze thought to be the signature of dark matter annihilations. Fermi passed a milestone of 100 billion detection events with its Large Area Telescope (LAT) last month; such unprecedented sensitivity is giving scientists a new window on the gamma-ray universe. The key is to isolate dark matter sources from other, more “mundane” cosmic events. The tale started back in 2004, when the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) began detecting a microwave “haze” centered on the center of our galaxy. Then, just over a year ago, Europe’s Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration & Light-nuclei Astrophysics (PAMELA) and NASA’s balloon based Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) both independently detected high energy positrons and electrons that seemed to emanate from the vicinity of our solar system. This could be explained either by dark matter annihilation or a hidden local dark body source, either conclusion equally bizarre. A good candidate for the Fermi emissions are the annihilation of dark matter neutralinos, which serve as their own anti-particle. The predicted number of neutralino events, however, do not match the quantity of gamma-ray emissions that Fermi sees. Other Earth-bound dark matter detectors are entering the fray, such as the XENON100, and Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter experiment. Could the puzzle of dark matter be on the verge of an answer soon? Stay tuned…
25.10.09: In Search of a Mirror Universe.
October 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment
There is one enduring mystery in cosmology that just won’t budge; namely, just what happened to all that pesky anti-matter that was presumably created during the Big Bang? Was it annihilated, only to leave the infinitesimally small faction of pedestrian “normal” baryonic matter that comprises the universe that we know and love, or are there still areas that antimatter predominates? Now, cosmologists are getting their wish in the form of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), due to launch aboard the last shuttle flight and bound for the International Space Station late next year. Once installed, AMS will search the entire sky with an unprecedented accuracy looking for ultra-high energy cosmic rays in the form of anti-helium nuclei. Antimatter looks and behaves just like normal matter…except when it meets up with its mirror cousin. If you meet your anti-matter twin on the road, don’t shake hands with him or her, our you’ll both vanish in a flash of pure energy conversion Ala E=mc^2! The AMS will also look for such exotica as dark matter, micro-quasars, and strangelets, a proposed new form of matter. And that’s just the stuff we know about! I smell a possible Nobel in the works…are you reading this, CERN? The AMS has been an on-again, off-again payload that Congress just green-lighted last year. The AMS promises to reveal a big old, bizarre universe out there. With a sensitivity 200 times anything that’s flown previous, AMS should conclusively prove or disprove the potential existence of any lurking antimatter galaxies out to a radius of 100 mega-parsecs. Like CERN, AMS will also generate terabytes of data to keep astrophysicists awake nights, and will be a fitting end to the shuttle fleets’ career!
August 2009:News & Notes
August 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment
- The LRO Photographs the Apollo landing sites: Fans of this space may have noticed the racy lunar pics we ran a week back as part of our From Earth to the Moon review. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter did indeed snap pics of the famous Apollo landing sites last month. These clearly show the hardware left at multiple sites, as well as the base(s) of the Lunar Lander ascent stages, complete with shadow. You can even see the astronaut’s foot trails in the lunar dust! And the LRO hasn’t even entered its cruising orbit yet… expect more great pics to come! [Read more...]
Review: The Cosmic Cocktail by Katherine Freese
A stellar recipe!
It’s the hottest topic in modern astrophysics. What exactly is dark matter and dark energy? It is kind of amazing to think that astrophysicists do not yet completely understand just what most of the universe is made of. [Read more...]