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The Pioneer Anomaly & Other Breaking Physics News

Posted by kdawson on from the explaining-the-unseen dept.

David Harris, editor-in-chief at Symmetrymagazine.org (a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC), sends us to his blog covering the American Physical Society meeting now going on in St. Louis. Among the breaking physics news relating to topics we have discussed in the past: results that explain about 1/3 of the Pioneer anomaly by differential heat flow in the spacecraft; an analysis of the Fermilab Tevatron's chances of spotting the Higgs "God particle"; and a hint that an Italian team has replicated their results from the year 2000 pointing to a detection of dark matter.

5 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Before LHC though? by yomegaman · · Score: 5, Informative

    The LHC will probably switch on this year, but it won't generate very much luminosity at first. Perhaps by the end of 2009 it will have made a couple of inverse femtobarns which would be enough, but it will be another year or so after that before the data are processed and analyzed. It takes quite a bit of time to understand and interpret the detector readout. The Tevatron does have a chance if the Higgs is around 160 GeV, but only with about one-in-a-thousand level statistical significance, and so far we are not seeing any excess of events there, but in fact somewhat fewer events than expected.

    --
    ...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
  2. On the Pioneer anomaly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I read a discussion somewhere that many spacecraft pick up a sizable electric charge and keep it (they are after all in a vacuum), and that electrostatic forces from the Sun and the solar wind are enough to account for course deviations. It's certainly true that gravity is not the only force operating out there.

    1. Re:On the Pioneer anomaly by barath_s · · Score: 5, Informative

      Right, radiation pressure, gas leaks, drag, electric charge are all suspects, as are changes in the way data was collected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly The issue is that the current best guesses for these effects do not yet account for the anomaly.

  3. Re:Enough of the "God Particle" please by yomegaman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think it was Leon Lederman who coined it in his book. He is definitely a high-energy physicist, he was director of Fermilab for years and won a Nobel Prize for discovering the bottom quark. I agree with the sentiment, though, if I never heard it again it would be fine with me. I read the book some years ago but can't remember why he called it that.

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    ...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
  4. Re:Rumor/conjector by HiggsBison · · Score: 5, Funny

    I read the article on Higgs, and it is entirely conjecture based on specified rumor after rumor. Is this TMZ.com?

    Rumors? About me? *sigh* I'm always the last to hear of them.

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