Dark Matter
Tag archives for Dark Matter
So much more than an Atom Smasher
Posted by Ethan on December 6, 2012 
“Forget it. I didn’t have that thing inside me where I wanted to smash against somebody and watch them break. I was too sensitive for that and disliked being that sensitive.” -Josh Brolin How do you figure out what something is made of? You take it apart — cracking it open if necessary — and…
So just what is out there beyond the Standard Model?
Posted by Ethan on November 16, 2012 
“Other than the laws of physics, rules have never really worked out for me.” -Craig Ferguson Earlier this week, evidence was presented measuring a very rare decay rate — albeit not incredibly precisely — which point towards the Standard Model being it as far as new particles accessible to colliders (such as the LHC) go.…
The Halloween Horror of the Dark Universe!
Posted by Ethan on October 31, 2012 
“A cosmic mystery of immense proportions, once seemingly on the verge of solution, has deepened and left astronomers and astrophysicists more baffled than ever. The crux … is that the vast majority of the mass of the universe seems to be missing.” -William J. Broad Despite the wondrous, luminous sights of the night sky, we’ve…
What does the Universe look like beyond our Galaxy?
Posted by Ethan on August 9, 2012 
“Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.” -Carl Sagan Our night sky, quite literally, is our window to the Universe. Well, it’s kind of a…
The Story of Neptune
Posted by Ethan on May 6, 2008 (This is adapted from my public lecture, Afraid of the Dark: How We Know What We Can’t See.) Let’s go back over 200 years ago, to 1781. William Herschel (left) discovered the planet Uranus, noticing that an object, as bright as a star, was actually moving relative to the other stars. The other five inner…
Will the LHC Create Dark Matter?
Posted by Ethan on May 5, 2008 Hector writes in and asks about someone from Sheffield in the UK who says that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will create Dark Matter: The massive ATLAS detector will measure the debris from collisions occurring in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which recreates the conditions found in the early universe during the Big Bang when…
Ethan takes on Johannes Kepler
Posted by Ethan on May 2, 2008 Can you believe that I had a fight today with someone who’s been dead for over 350 years, and I’m losing? — Ethan, yesterday Of course you can believe it, when the man I’m fighting with is Johannes Kepler. I don’t get a chance to tell you about my research very often, mostly because it’s…
DAMA is at it Again!
Posted by Ethan on April 18, 2008 Remember how I told you earlier this week that DAMA was going to announce that they found dark matter, even though the signal that they found is not consistent with other experiments? Looks like my powers of predicting the future are pretty damned good. They have a new plot with more data showing the continued…
Dark Matter: Anything Practical About It?
Posted by Ethan on April 15, 2008 Yesterday, my good friend (and SWAB reader) Brian wrote a great comment about the practical reasons to explore space, where he talked about the overall economic impact that Space Exploration has had on the economy, as well as the impact it has had on our knowledge and understanding of the Earth, its environment, and how…
Future News: DAMA discovers Dark Matter?!
Posted by Ethan on April 14, 2008 The DAMA collaboration, an experimental team searching for dark matter via direct detection, is poised to report this week that they have discovered Dark Matter. And I’m here to pre-empt that by bringing you the truth: no, they haven’t. They take some very cold (cryogenic) atoms, look for nuclear recoils resulting from dark matter collisions,…
