The LHC - Dangerous To The World? @sciencemagazine6793

Uploaded March 2010 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

facebook.com/ScienceReason ... Will the Large Hadron Collider create a black hole that will destroy the world? No, but it may solve mysteries about the origin of the universe.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, intended to collide opposing particle beams of either protons at an energy of 7 TeV (1.12 microjoules) per particle, or lead nuclei at an energy of 574 TeV (92.0 microjoules) per nucleus.

The term hadron refers to such particles that are composed of quarks. It is expected that it will address the most fundamental questions of physics, hopefully allowing progress in understanding the deepest laws of nature. The LHC lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference, as much as 175 metres (570 ft) beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) with the intention of testing various predictions of high-energy physics, including the existence of the hypothesized Higgs boson and of the large family of new particles predicted by supersymmetry. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

In September 2008, the operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. Repairing the resulting damage and installing additional safety features took over a year. In November 2009 the proton beams were successfully circulated again and the first proton-proton collisions were recorded, at the injection energy of 450 GeV per particle.

In December 2009, the LHC was shut down after its initial commissioning run, which achieved proton collision energies of 2.36 TeV, with multiple bunches of protons circulating for several hours and data from over one million proton-proton collisions. The LHC resumed operations in February 2010, but it will operate at only half of the design collision energy. In 2012 it will be shut down for the repairs necessary to bring it to its full design energy, and then it will start up again in 2013.

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Hadron_Collider

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Since 1853, the California Academy of Sciences has been dedicated to exploring, explaining, and protecting the natural world. It is the only place in the world to combine an aquarium, natural history museum, and planetarium all under one living roof.

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$The Milky Way Big Picture http://facebook.com/ScienceReason ... The Hidden Universe of the Spitzer Space Telescope (Episode 22): The Milky Way Big Picture (Showcase). Two and a half billion infrared pixels are exposing our own Galaxy in this new image from NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope! This is the Hidden Universe of the Spitzer Space Telescope, exploring the mysteries of infrared astronomy with your host Dr. Robert Hurt. Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason: • http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience • http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV • http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker • http://www.youtube.com/RationalHumanism Its the Milky Way as youve never seen it before! Two and a half billion infrared pixels are exposing our own Galaxy in this new image from NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope! Science is all about getting the big picture, but some pictures are definitely bigger than others. You may have used your computer to make a large panorama yourself by stitching together a few shots from your camera. Depending on the camera the final picture may contain ten or twenty million pixels. Now can you imagine taking over 800,000 images and combining them into a single two-and-a-half billion pixel image? Two teams of astronomers have not only imagined it... theyve used NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope to make one. And its online for everyone to explore. Over 50 astronomers have worked on this massive project since the Spitzer mission began. This image combines data from two different legacy projects known as GLIMPSE, headed up by Dr Ed Churchwell and MIPSGAL, led by Dr. Sean Carey. The picture covers an area of sky as wide as your finger held out at arms length, and as long as your open arms. Thats about 2 by 130 degrees. Though it sounds like a pretty small slice of the sky, it actually captures half of our entire galaxy! Our sun sits a ways out from the Galactic center, so a 130-degree arc takes in most of its area. And our Milky Way is very thin compared to its diameter, a lot like a CD. So even a 2° wide scan includes most of its disk. The rest of the stars that fill the sky are actually very close to us, filling just a tiny fraction of the disk right around our sun. A space image this big takes a lot of space to show off. Spitzer unveiled this giant banner, 4 feet tall and 180 feet long, at the 2008 summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis! Since then its been on display at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. The GLIMPSE part of the survey includes the shorter infrared wavelengths. At 3.6 and 4.5 microns we see blue stars that, in visible light, are completely hidden by dust. Carbon-based dust molecules show up at 8 microns, represented as green. MIPSGAL contributes the 24-micron component, rendered as red. This is the warm thermal glow from dust clouds heated by nearby stars. Together these observations give us a pretty complete view of stellar evolution, beginning to end, across our Galaxy. These ubiquitous dark filaments are dust clouds so dense theyre opaque even in the infrared. Theyre dense enough to trigger gravitational collapse and form new stars. The red dots seen along these filaments are embedded protostars only barely seen at the longest, most transparent infrared wavelengths. Once the stars are fully formed and glowing from the heat of nuclear fusion, they illuminate, warm, and disrupt the surrounding dust, creating these dramatic structures near and far. The stars eventually drift beyond their birthplaces mixing among their older cousins. This diffuse blue glow shows us the overall distribution of stars throughout the galaxy. Eventually the most massive stars die in supernova explosions. We can see their expanding shock waves rich in newly forged heavy elements that will help form the next generation of dust and stars. The GLIMPSE-MIPSGAL image is truly a pictorial guide to the past, present, and future of stars throughout our home galaxy. Astronomers will study the data for many years to come, and the observations will be a roadmap to guide future infrared observatories. If youd like to explore Spitzers Milky Way yourself, all 2.5 gigapixels are available on our website. You can download the whole thing in segments, or use one of several web viewers that let you pan and zoom through the image interactively. Take a look; you might find something that no one else has seen! • http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/$

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$NASA Astronomy Pictures Of The Day [Week 1/2010] Science & Reason on Facebook: http://tinyurl.com/ScienceReason NASA Astronomy Pictures Of The Day [Week 1/2010]. Please subscribe to Science & Reason: • http://www.youtube.com/Best0fScience • http://www.youtube.com/ScienceMagazine • http://www.youtube.com/ScienceTV • http://www.youtube.com/FFreeThinker ► A Roll Cloud Over Uruguay These rare long clouds may form near advancing cold fronts. In particular, a downdraft from an advancing storm front can cause moist warm air to rise, cool below its dew point, and so form a cloud. When this happens uniformly along an extended front, a roll cloud may form. Roll clouds may actually have air circulating along the long horizontal axis of the cloud. A roll cloud is not thought to be able to morph into a tornado. • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100105.html ► The Spotty Surface of Betelgeuse Betelgeuse really is a big star. If placed at the center of our Solar System it would extend to the orbit of Jupiter. But like all stars except the Sun, the red supergiant is so distant it usually appears as a single point of light, even in large telescopes. The intriguing picture shows two, large, bright, star spots. The spots potentially represent enormous convective cells rising from below the supergiants surface. They are bright because theyre hotter than the rest of the surface, but both spots and surface are cooler than the Sun. Betelgeuse is about 600 light-years away. • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100106.html ► The Tail of the Small Magellanic Cloud A satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud is wonder of the southern sky, named for 16th century Portuguese circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan. Some 200,000 light-years distant in the constellation Tucana, the small irregular galaxys stars, gas, and dust that lie along a bar and extended wing, are familiar in images from optical telescopes. • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100107.html ► Andromeda Island Universe The most distant object easily visible to the eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy some two and a half million light-years away. But without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy - spanning over 200,000 light years - appears as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. In contrast, details of a bright yellow nucleus and dark winding dust lanes, are revealed in this digital telescopic image. Were these spiral nebulae simply outlying components of our own Milky Way Galaxy or were they instead island universes distant systems of stars comparable to the Milky Way itself? • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100109.html ► The Mystery of the Fading Star Every 27 years Epsilon Aurigae fades, remaining dim for roughly two years before growing bright again. Since the 19th century, astronomers have studied the mystery star, eventually arguing that Epsilon Aur, centered in this telescopic skyview, was actually undergoing a long eclipse by a dark companion object. But the nature of the companion and even the state of bright star itself could not be pinned down by observations. • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100108.html ► A Spherule from the Earths Moon How did this spherule come to be on the Moon? When a meteorite strikes the Moon, the energy of the impact melts some of the splattering rock, a fraction of which might cool into tiny glass beads. Many of these glass beads were present in lunar soil samples returned to Earth by the Apollo missions. • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100110.html ► Blue Moon Eclipse The International Year of Astronomy 2009 ended with a Blue Moon and a partial lunar eclipse, as the second Full Moon of December grazed the Earths shadow on December 31st. • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100102.html ► The Astronaut Who Captured a Satellite In 1984, high above the Earths surface, an astronaut captured a satellite. It was the second satellite captured that mission. • Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html .$

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