Radio burst from space mystifies astronomers

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Astronomers who stumbled upon a powerful burst of radio waves said on Thursday they had never seen anything like it before, and it could offer a new way to search for colliding stars or dying black holes.

They were searching for pulsars -- a type of rotating compacted neutron star that sends out rhythmic pulses of radiation -- when they spotted the giant radio signal.

It was extremely brief but very strong, and appears to have come from about 3 billion light-years away -- a light-year being the distance light travels in a year, or about 6 trillion miles.

"This burst appears to have originated from the distant universe and may have been produced by an exotic event such as the collision of two neutron stars or the death throes of an evaporating black hole," said Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Writing in the journal Science, Lorimer and colleagues said they were looking at old scans done by the Parkes radio telescope in Australia when they spotted the burst.

The burst appears to have lasted 5 milliseconds and may be the radio fingerprint of a single event such as a supernova or the collision of black holes, the astronomers said.

"This burst represents an entirely new astronomical phenomenon," Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University in Australia said in a statement.

Maura McLaughlin of West Virginia University said the event is probably not rare.

"We think there are probably many of these bursts every day that we are just not detecting because we don't have the right kind of surveys of the sky looking for them," McLaughlin said in a telephone interview.

While satellites are detecting x-ray and gamma-ray bursts with regular surveys of large portions of the sky, radiotelescopes generally focus on a very narrow field, she said.

"We are really not sure (what it is)," McLaughlin said.

"We think it has got to be some sort of catastrophic event happening in another galaxy -- like two stars colliding and merging or maybe a black hole. Something kind of exotic," she said.

It is, however, unlikely to be the extraterrestrial equivalent of "I Love Lucy" or other radio or television broadcast.

"It's much too bright. There is no way any civilization that we could possibly think of could create a thing so incredibly powerful," she said.

Quoted from Radio burst from space mystifies astronomers | Tech & Sci | Science | Reuters.com

 

Technorati Tags: Cool, Science, Space, Universe

Germs taken to space come back deadlier

WASHINGTON - It sounds like the plot for a scary B-movie: Germs go into space on a rocket and come back stronger and deadlier than ever. Except, it really happened.

The germ: Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning. The trip: Space Shuttle STS-115, September 2006. The reason: Scientists wanted to see how space travel affects germs, so they took some along — carefully wrapped — for the ride. The result: Mice fed the space germs were three times more likely to get sick and died quicker than others fed identical germs that had remained behind on Earth.

"Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can't sterilize humans. Wherever we go, under the oceans or orbiting the earth, the microbes go with us, and it's important that we understand ... how they're going to change," explained Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University.

Nickerson added, in a telephone interview, that learning more about changes in germs has the potential to lead to novel new countermeasures for infectious disease.

She reports the results of the salmonella study in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers placed identical strains of salmonella in containers and sent one into space aboard the shuttle, while the second was kept on Earth, under similar temperature conditions to the one in space.

After the shuttle returned, mice were given varying oral doses of the salmonella and then were watched.

After 25 days, 40 percent of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10 percent of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth.

The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.

Why?

"That's the 64 million dollar question," Nickerson said. "We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes."

However, they think it's a force called fluid shear.

"Being cultured in microgravity means the force of the liquid passing over the cells is low." The cells "are responding not to microgravity, but indirectly to microgravity in the low fluid shear effects."

"There are areas in the body which are low shear, such as the gastrointestinal tract, where, obviously, salmonella finds itself," she went on. "So, it's clear this is an environment not just relevant to space flight, but to conditions here on Earth, including in the infected host."

She said it is an example of a response to a changed environment.

"These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive," she said.

The research was supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Louisiana Board of Regents, Arizona Proteomics Consortium, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Southwest Environmental Health Sciences Center, National Institutes of Health and the University of Arizona.

 

Quoted from http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070924/ap_on_sc/germs_in_space:

Germs taken to space come back deadlier - Yahoo! News

Technorati Tags:Health,Scary,Space,Weird

Mystery Illness Linked to Meteor Crash Site

Officials are investigating unconfirmed reports that a meteorite crashed in southern Peru over the weekend and caused dozens of people to become sick.

 

Technorati Tags: Health, Scary, Space, Video, Weird

Peru 'meteor' causes illness

 

Hundreds of people in Peru are reported to be feeling sick after an object from space crashed to Earth.

Technorati Tags: Health, Scary, Space, Video, Weird

Earth Might Survive Sun’s Explosion

By DENNIS OVERBYE

What happens to planets when their stars age and die?

That’s not an academic question. About five billion years from now, astronomers say, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and swell temporarily more than 100 times in diameter into a so-called red giant, swallowing Mercury and Venus and dooming life on Earth, but perhaps not Earth itself.

Astronomers are announcing that they have discovered a planet that seems to have survived the puffing up of its home star, suggesting there is some hope that Earth could survive the aging and swelling of the Sun.

The newly discovered planet is a gas giant at least three times as massive as Jupiter. It orbits about 150 million miles from a faint star in the constellation Pegasus known as V 391 Pegasi. But before that star blew up as a red giant sometime in the past and lost half its mass, the planet must have been about as far from its star as the Earth is to the Sun — about 90 million miles — the astronomers led by Roberto Silvotti of the Observatorio Astronomico di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, calculated.

Dr. Silvotti said that the results showed that a planet at the Earth’s distance “can survive” the red giant and he hoped the discovery would spur searches for more like it. “With some statistics and new detailed models we will be able to say something more even to the destiny of our Earth (which, as we all know, has much more urgent problems by the way),” he said in an e-mail message.

He and his colleagues report their results in Nature on Thursday.

In an accompanying commentary in Nature, Jonathan Fortney of NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Sunnyvale, Calif., wrote, “This system allows us to start examining what will happen to planets around stars such as our own Sun as they too evolve and grow old.”

The star V 391Pegasi is about 4,500 light years away and is now about half as massive as the Sun, burning helium into carbon. It will eventually sigh off another shell of gas and settle into eternal senescence as a “white dwarf.” Meanwhile, the star’s pulsations cause it to brighten and dim every 6 minutes.

After studying the star for seven years, Dr. Silvotti and his colleagues were able to discern subtle modulations in the 6-minute cycle, suggesting that it was being tugged to and fro over a three-year period by a massive planet. “Essentially the observers are using the star as a clock, as if it were a G.P.S. satellite moving around the planet,” explained Fred Rasio, of Northwestern University, who was not involved in the research.

This is not the first time that a pulsing star has been used as such a clock. In 1992, astronomers using the same technique detected a pair of planets (or their corpses) circling the pulsar PSR1257+12.

And , today, X-ray astronomers from the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced they had detected the remains of a star that had been whittled by radiation down to planetary mass circling a pulsar in the constellation Sagittarius. Those systems have likely endured supernova explosions.

The Pegasus planet has had to survive relatively less lethal conditions, although it must have had a bumpy ride over its estimated 10 billion years of existence. Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, said “stellar evolution can be a wild ride for a planet that is trying to survive, especially inner planets like Earth.”

When our own Sun begins to graduate from a hydrogen-burning “main sequence” star to a red giant, two effects will compete to determine the Earth’s fate, the astronomers explain. On one hand, as the Sun blows off mass in order to conserve angular momentum, the Earth will retreat to a more distant, safer orbit. But at the same time tidal forces between the Earth and the expanding star will try to drag the planet inward where it could be engulfed. The latter effect, in particular, is difficult to compute.

As a result, said Mario Livio of the Space Telescope Science Institute, of the inner planets, “the Earth’s fate is actually the most uncertain because it is at the border line between being engulfed and surviving.”

A particularly dangerous time for Earth, Dr. Silvotti said, would be at the end of the red giant phase when the Sun’s helium ignites in an explosive flash. In the case of V 391 Pegasi, that explosion sent a large fraction of the star’s mass flying outward.

“This is another reason why the survival of a planet in a relatively close orbit is not trivial,” he said.

 

Quoted from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/12/science/space/12cnd-planet.html?ei=5090&en=2e3c30bc2beed102&ex=1347249600&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1189688477-s+T6k7PXPQeI1iKDt2Y1rg:

Earth Might Survive Sun’s Explosion - New York Times

Technorati Tags:Cool,Scoence,Space,Universe

Saturn's sixtieth moon discovered

A new moon has been discovered orbiting Saturn - bringing the planet's latest moon tally up to 60.

The body was spotted in a series of images taken by cameras onboard the Cassini spacecraft.

Initial calculations suggest the moon is about 2km-wide (1.2 miles) and its orbit sits between those of two other Saturnian moons, Methone and Pallene.

The Cassini Imaging Team, who found the object, said Saturn's moon count could rise further still.

New family

The moon appears as a dim speck in images taken by the Cassini probe's wide-angle camera on 30 May 2007.

Professor Carl Murray, a Cassini Imaging Team scientist from Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL), said: "After initially detecting this extremely faint object, we carried out an exhaustive search of all Cassini images to date and were able to find further detections."

It is thought, like many of Saturn's other moons, to be mostly made up of ice and rock.

The body's proximity to Methone and Pallene suggests the three satellites may constitute a family of moons.

"Naturally we are going to use Cassini's cameras to search for additional family members," added Professor Murray.

The moon, currently dubbed Frank by the scientists who discovered it, has yet to be officially named. This decision will be taken by the International Astronomical Union.

Professor Murray said: "The Saturnian system continues to amaze and intrigue us with many hidden treasures being discovered the more closely we look."

'Epic journey'

The Cassini-Huygens mission, a collaboration between the US space agency (Nasa), the European Space Agency (Esa) and the Italian Space Agency (ASI), set off on its mission to explore Saturnian system in 1997.

The Cassini space probe arrived at its destination in 2004, while the Huygens probe, initially carried onboard Cassini, landed on Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 2005.

Professor Keith Mason, chief executive of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), said: "It is amazing to think that when Cassini embarked upon its epic journey to Saturn in 1997, we only knew about 18 of its moons.

"Since then, through observations from ground based telescopes and the Cassini spacecraft, a further 42 have been identified."

 

This was found at BBC News.

Technorati Tags: Cool, Science, Space, Universe

Pluto Smaller Than Nearby Dwarf Planet Eris, Study Finds

Technorati Tags: Science, Space

Anne Minard
for National Geographic News

June 14, 2007

Poor Pluto just keeps getting downgraded.

The beleaguered former planet has been dwarfed again by a new study that finds its neighbor Eris is significantly bigger.

That makes Eris—formerly known as 2003 UB313 and then Xena—the largest so-called dwarf planet in the solar system.

Eris was the catalyst for Pluto's demotion last summer, when the International Astronomical Union redefined the term "planet" and created the category of dwarf planet for objects such as Eris and Pluto.

Using the Keck Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope, Michael E. Brown and Emily Schaller at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have now put the mass of Eris at a third more than Pluto's.

The paper appears in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Modest Moon
The key to finding Eris' mass was its tiny moon, Dysnomia. Brown and Schaller used Keck and Hubble to capture images of the moon's position over time.

The data suggest that Dysnomia is Eris' only moon and orbits every 15 days.

The researchers also calculated the total mass of the pair—about 1.27 times that of Pluto—and revealed that the objects are made of around 70 percent rock, making them as dense as Pluto and Triton, a moon of Neptune.

Pluto itself has been described as a ball of rock and ice just bigger than Texas.

Alan Stern is principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. When he first read the paper, he said the researchers compared "apples to oranges" by putting Pluto in the ring with two objects—Eris and its moon.

But Brown said that Dysnomia is so small that its mass doesn't throw things off.

"Really, the interesting comparison is Eris to Pluto, rather than the system to the system," he said.

"And since the mass of Dysnomia is insignificant compared to Eris ... we really are just calculating the mass of Eris."

Nail in Pluto's Coffin?
Along with Eris, Brown is also the discoverer of 2003EL61, Sedna, Orcus and Quaoar, and 2005 FY9, which is only a little smaller than Pluto.

All of these objects reside in the far-flung area beyond Neptune's orbit known as the Kuiper Belt, named after 20th-century astronomer Gerard Kuiper.

Brown's work on the region helped spur the International Astronomical Union to make the decision to distinguish between planets and dwarf planets.

With that, Pluto became the ambassador for all of its neighbors in the Kuiper Belt: planetary science's next frontier. But ambassador is a step down from Pluto's planet status and even its more recent conciliatory title, "King of the Kuiper Belt."

Objects in the Kuiper Belt orbit 30 to 50 times farther from the sun than Earth—Pluto is about 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from the sun, while Earth orbits 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away.

Astronomers are intrigued by the region, because it's the source of many comets and it contains frozen evidence from the birth of the solar system. (Related: "Far-Flung Space Crash May Help Solve Mystery of Moon's Formation" [March 15, 2007].)

Meanwhile, Wikipedia has dubbed Brown "Pluto's worst nightmare," and he doesn't seem to mind.

"Pluto sort of had one last chance," he said of his new paper. "Maybe, just maybe, it would be more massive after all. And now we've done it in for good."

Not So Fast
Michael A. Burstein is president of the Society for the Preservation of Pluto as a Planet, which goes by the acronym SP3. The group of astronomy buffs formed in the spring of 2006, when rumors first started circulating that Pluto was in trouble.

Burstein preferred the IAU's initial idea for a planet definition, which was never voted upon at their solar-system-shattering meeting last August. (Related: "Pluto to Get Partners? New Definition of 'Planet' Proposed" [August 16, 2006].)

By that definition—that a planet should directly orbit a star and be massive enough to be round—Pluto would still be a planet, as would dwarf planets Eris and Ceres, a large, round asteroid orbiting near Jupiter.

It's fine if we end up with 50 or even 100 planets as new objects are discovered, Burstein said. We could keep the math easy by calling the old guard, including Pluto, "classical planets," he added.

For now, Burstein's group is laying low to see what the pros do—under the guidance of New Horizons' Alan Stern. Stern is leading the charge of professional astronomers to dismiss the IAU's ruling.

"People just aren't using the IAU definition because it's so substantially flawed," he said. "Even their own members, and I'm one, aren't using the IAU definition."

 The debate over a better definition was a hot topic at the April meeting of the European Geophysical Union. And it's already part of the agenda for the February 2008 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

 

This was found at National Geographic News.

Methane Rocket Engine Successfully Tested

Engineers have successfully tested a rocket powered by methane--the first of its kind for spaceflight. Future generations of the new engine could use Mars, Jupiter, Saturn's moon Titan and other planets and moons as celestial refueling stations, allowing for lighter spacecraft and easier lift-offs from Earth.

A dramatic video shows the rocket's blue flames streaking into the desert, blowing up clouds of dust and sand.

Built by XCOR Aerospace, the test rocket packs 7,500 pounds of thrust--just a fraction of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters at 3,300,000 pounds of thrust each--but its designers are just getting started. The Mojave Desert test will provide testing grounds for the design of a much-larger, space-faring rocket.

Today's space rockets use liquid oxygen and hydrogen or solid fuels, which are hard to collect, tricky to store and very expensive. Methane, however, need not be stored at -253 degree Celsius temperatures as hydrogen must be. It's also denser than hydrogen, making more out of limited space in fuel containers.

Methane has another bonus: "You don't have to put on a HAZMAT suit to handle it like fuels used on many space vehicles, said Terri Tramel, NASA's project manager for the rocket.

Collecting methane on other planets and moons would be tricky, but not impossible. Robotic probes could gather the stuff from Saturn's moon Titan, which harbors lakes and rivers of liquid methane. Although Mars has much less methane, it could be produced by heating carbon dioxide and hydrogen together.

One caveat to methane is that it's difficult to ignite, unlike highly reactive oxygen and hydrogen. But rocket engineers are hopeful. "Methane has so many advantages," Tramel said. "The question is, why haven't we done this before?"

This was found at Space.com

Astronomers Find Planet Outside Solar System

The most enticing property yet found outside our solar system is about 20 light years away in the constellation Libra, a team of European astronomers said today.

The astronomers have discovered a planet five times as massive as the Earth orbiting a dim red star known as Gliese 581.

It is the smallest of the 200 or so planets that are now known to exist outside of our solar system, called extrasolar or exoplanets. Moreover, it orbits its home star within the so-called habitable zone where surface water, the staff of life, could exist if other conditions are right, said Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory.

“We are at the right place for that,” said Dr. Udry, the lead author of a paper describing the discovery that has been submitted to the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

But he and other astronomers cautioned that it was far too soon to conclude that liquid water was there without more observations. Sara Seager, a planet expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said, “For example, if the planet had an atmosphere more massive than Venus’s, then the surface would likely be too hot for liquid water.”

Nevertheless, the discovery in the Gliese 581 system, where a Neptune-size planet was discovered two years ago and another planet of eight Earth masses is now suspected, catapults that system to the top of the list for future generations of space missions.

“On the treasure map of the Universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X,” said Xavier Delfosse, a team member from Grenoble University in France, according to a news release from the European Southern Observatory, a multinational collaboration based in Garching, Germany.

“It’s 20 light years. We can go there,” said Dimitar Sasselov, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who studies the structure and formation of planets.

The new planet was discovered by the wobble it causes in its home star’s motion as it orbits, the method by which most of the known exo-planets have been discovered. Dr. Udry’s team used an advanced spectrograph on a 141-inch diameter telescope at the European observatory in La Silla, Chile.

The smallest previous exo-planet was roughly six Earth masses, discovered by a team led by the American planet hunters Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, and Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The two astronomers are longtime rivals of the Swiss group founded by Michel Mayor, of the Geneva Observatory. Of the new result, Dr. Marcy said, “The Swiss do excellent work, so I’m sure that they have a strong case for it.”

The planet, officially known as Gliese 581c, circles the star every 13 days at a distance of about 7 million miles. According to models of planet formation developed by Dr. Sasselov and his colleagues, such a planet should be about half again as large as the Earth and be composed of rock and water, what the astronomers now call a “super Earth.”

The most exciting part of the new find, Dr. Sasselov said, is that it “basically tells you these kinds of planets are very common.” Because they could stay geologically active for billions and billion of years, Dr. Sasselov said he suspects that such planets could be even more congenial for life than the Earth. NASA’s coming Kepler mission, he added, would probably find hundreds of these super Earths.

Although the new planet is much closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, its star, a so-called red dwarf, is only about a hundredth as luminous as the Sun. So 7 million miles is a comfortable cuddling distance.

How hot the planet would get, Dr. Udry said, would depend on how much light the planet reflects, or its albedo. Using the Earth and Venus as two extreme examples, he estimated that temperatures on the surface of the planet should range from 0 to 40 degrees centigrade. “It’s just right in the good range,” he said. “Of course, we don’t know anything about its albedo.”

One problem is that the wobble technique only gives masses of planets. To measure their actual size and thus their densities, astronomers have to catch them in the act of passing in front of or behind their stars. Such transits can also reveal if the planets have atmospheres and what they are made of. Earlier this month, such observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope returned the first tentative indications of water in the atmosphere of another exoplanet in the constellation Pegasus.

Dr. Udry said he and Dr. Sasselov would be observing the Gliese system with a Canadian space telescope named Most, to see if there are any dips in starlight caused by the new planet. Failing that, they said, the best chance for more information about the Gliese system lies with NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder and the European Space Agency’s Darwin missions, which are designed to study Earth-like planets, but have been delayed by political, technical and financial difficulties.

“We are starting to count the first targets,” Dr. Udry said.

This was found at New York Times

Light can bend liquid

Agençe France-Presse

The gentle radiation pressure of light was able to deform and direct a stream of a special soapy liquid.

Just the gentle pressure of a beam of light is enough to bend and direct streams of a special liquid, according to a study to be published this week.

The discovery could lead to new advances in biomedicine and biotechnology by offering a way to control the flow of fluids through extremely narrow channels.

Physicists from France and the U.S. have used a laser beam to produce a surprisingly long and steady jet of soapy liquid that is narrower than a human hair. The researchers were then able to push the liquid into a "hump-like shape", by directing the laser at a different angle.

The discovery was made by accident while University of Chicago fluid scientist, Wendy Zhang, was visiting colleagues at the University of Bordeaux in France.

Here, physicist Jean-Pierre Delville had observed a strange and unexpected result after completing a previous experiment studying the behaviour of fluid under a low intensity laser beam.

Delville then turned up the laser power just to see what it could do, much the same way a motorist might test the performance of a powerful car on a deserted road, said Zhang. "He turned up the power and then saw this amazing thing," she said. "Because he has a lot of experience with optics, he realized that what he saw was strange."

What they found was that the laser beam was able to direct and bend the fine jet of liquid.

The find, Which was further probed by lead author and Chicago graduate student Robert Schroll, is detailed in the 30 March edition of the journal Physical Review Letters.

While heat can set liquid in motion, the researchers discovered that in this case it was the gentle radiation pressure generated by photons - discrete packets of light energy - that moved the fluid.

This radiation pressure is so slight it ordinarily goes unnoticed, but the liquid used in the Bordeaux experiment has such an "incredibly weak surface" that even light can deform it. "It's basically soap," Zhang said of the experimental liquid, which was a mixture of water and oil that had been precisely blended to display varying characteristics under certain conditions.

Further research is now needed to determine whether this light-driven flow could advance 'microfluidics' – that is the science of controlling fluid flow through channels thinner than a human hair. Conventional microfluidics techniques use channels etched into computer chips to control fluid flow. While this is a relatively easy process, Zhang said, a laser-driven microfluidics system might allow researchers to make more rapid adjustments.

"Here I've created a channel, but I didn't have to make anything. I just shined a light," Zhang said.

Big magnet ready to face the big questions of the universe

World's largest superconducting magnet switches on

The largest superconducting magnet ever built has successfully been powered up to its operating conditions at the first attempt. Called the Barrel Toroid because of its shape, this magnet is a vital part of ATLAS, one of the major particle detectors being prepared to take data at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator scheduled to turn on in November 2007. ATLAS will help scientists probe the big questions of the Universe – what happened in the moments after the Big Bang? Why does the material in the Universe behave the way it does? Why is the Universe we can see made of matter rather than anti-matter?
UK scientists are a key part of the ATLAS collaboration and Dr Richard Nickerson, UK ATLAS project leader, who is from the University of Oxford welcomed this important milestone "The toroidal magnets are critical to enabling us to measure the muons (a type of particle) produced in interactions. These are vital to a lot of the physics we want to study, so the successful test of the magnets is a great step forward."

The ATLAS Barrel Toroid consists of eight superconducting coils, each in the shape of a round-cornered rectangle, 5m wide, 25m long and weighing 100 tonnes, all aligned to millimetre precision. It will work together with other magnets in ATLAS to bend the paths of charged particles produced in collisions at the LHC, enabling important properties to be measured. Unlike most particle detectors, the ATLAS detector does not need large quantities of metal to contain the field because the field is contained within a doughnut shape defined by the coils. This allows the ATLAS detector to be very large, which in turn increases the precision of the measurements it can make.

At 46m long, 25m wide and 25m high, ATLAS is the largest volume detector ever constructed for particle physics. Among the questions ATLAS will focus on are why particles have mass, what the unknown 96% of the Universe is made of, and why Nature prefers matter to antimatter. Some 1800 scientists from 165 universities and laboratories (including 12 from the UK) representing 35 countries are building the ATLAS detector and preparing to take data next year.

The ATLAS Barrel Toroid was first cooled down over a six-week period in July-August to reach –269oC. It was then powered up step-by-step to higher and higher currents, reaching 21 thousand amps for the first time during the night of 9 November. This is 500 amps above the current needed to produce the nominal magnetic field. Afterwards, the current was switched off and the stored magnetic energy of 1.1 GJ, the equivalent of about 10 000 cars travelling at 70km/h, has now been safely dissipated, raising the cold mass of the magnet to –218oC.

"We can now say that the ATLAS Barrel Toroid is ready for physics," said Herman ten Kate, ATLAS magnet system project leader.

The ATLAS Barrel Toroid is financed by the ATLAS Collaboration and has been built through close collaboration between the French CEA-DAPNIA laboratory (originator of the magnet's design), Italy's INFN-LASA laboratory and CERN. Components have been contributed in-kind by national funding agencies from industries in France (CEA), Italy, Germany (BMBF), Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), an international organization based near Moscow. The final integration and test of the coils at CERN, as well as assembly of the toroid in the ATLAS underground cavern, was done with JINR providing most of the manpower and heavy tooling.

###

Notes for Editors

Images

Pictures of the Barrel Toroid Magnet can be downloaded from http://atlasexperiment.org/atlas_photos/toroid/toroid_barrel.html

The 8 elements of the magnet are clearly visible in the picture of the ATLAS detector.

Contacts

Dr Richard Nickerson

University of Oxford

Tel +44 1865 273318

r.nickerson1@physics.ox.ac.uk

James Gillies

CERN press office

Tel. +41 22 767 41 01

James.Gillies@cern.ch

InterAction Collaboration media contacts:

• Fermilab, USA: Kurt Riesselmann, 630-840-3351, kurtr@fnal.gov
  
• INFN, Italy: Barbara Gallavotti, + 39 06 6868162 (office), + 39 335 6606075 (cell phone), + 39 06 6868162 (fax), Barbara.Gallavotti@presid.infn.it
  
• KEK, High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan: Youhei Morita, + 81 029 8796047, + 81 029 8796049 (fax), youhei.morita@kek.jp
  
• IN2P3-CNRS, France: Alain de Bellefon, + 33 01 44 96 47 51, bellefon@in2p3.fr
  
• Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia: Boris Starchenko, + 7 096 221 6 38 24, irinak@jinr.ru
  
• Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC), United Kingdom: Peter Barratt, + 44 (0) 1793 442025, + 44 (0) 787 602 899 (mobile), peter.barratt@pparc.ac.uk
  
  
  
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California, USA: Ron Kolb, + 1 510 486 7586, rrkolb@lbl.gov
  
  

The Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) is the UK's strategic science investment agency. It funds research, education and public understanding in four areas of science - particle physics, astronomy, cosmology and space science.

PPARC is government funded and provides research grants and studentships to scientists in British universities, gives researchers access to world-class facilities and funds the UK membership of international bodies such as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the European Space Agency. It also contributes money for the UK telescopes overseas on La Palma, Hawaii, Australia and in Chile, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh and the MERLIN/VLBI National Facility, which includes the Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank observatory.