Month: April 2014
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One blog fewer
I started the blog on Bowler Hat Science to cover the writing I do at other sites, but to simplify matters, I’m going to move all that content over to my primary blog Galileo’s Pendulum. (This post has more on my reasoning for doing so, as well as a great song.) So, this is the […]
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Using Black Holes to Measure Dark Energy, Like a BOSS
Far from being invisible, black holes are among some of the brightest objects in the Universe. The black holes themselves aren’t emitting light, but the matter they draw in heats up and much of it shoots back out in powerful jets. When that happens, the black hole is known as a quasar, and it can […]
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Four quarks for Muster Mark!
Today, researchers with the LHCb experiment at CERN announced the confirmation of a weird object that first appeared in detectors in 2008. This object is made up of four quarks, where other particles are made of two or three quarks (or zero, in the case of electrons, neutrinos, and the like). But what sort of […]
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All the single centaurs
Saturn’s magnificent rings have been known since Galileo observed the planet’s “ears” in his telescope. In the last few decades, researchers found rings (albeit less shiny ones) around the other giant planets — Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune. And now the small asteroid Chariklo has joined the ring cycle: observations revealed it has two narrow rings, […]
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Supersymmetry in…superconductors?
Symmetry and elegance have proven to be a very successful way to think about the physical Universe. Arguably the greatest successes in 20th century particle physics came from translating mathematical symmetries into predictions about the results of particle collisions. However, not every symmetry thus far has led to a successful theory, and one of the […]
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