The Herschel Space Observatory has discovered a giant, galaxy-packed filament ablaze with billions of new stars.
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El Centro Nacional de Aceleradores (CNA), centro de investigación formado por la Universidad de Sevilla, la Junta de Andalucía y el Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), oferta por primera vez a la comunidad médica investigadora nacional e internacional su equipo PET/CT para la realización de investigación y ensayos clínicos con pacientes.
El equipamiento que el Centro de Diagnóstico por Imagen del CNA, CDI-CNA, pone a disposición de la comunidad investigadora para este tipo de estudios es un equipo híbrido PET/CT de última generación que permite obtener información tanto funcional como anatómica del paciente. Se trata de un escáner PET/CT fabricado por Siemens, modelo Molecular CT (mCT-64).
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Observations from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to the best assessment yet of our solar system's population of potentially hazardous asteroids.
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NASA is lending the Galaxy Evolution Explorer to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where the spacecraft will continue its exploration of the cosmos.
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In beautiful agreement with the Standard Model, two new excited states (see below) of the Λb beauty particle have just been observed by the LHCb Collaboration. Similarly to protons and neutrons, Λb is composed of three quarks. In the Λb’s case, these are up, down and… beauty.
Although discovering new particles is increasingly looking like a routine exercise for the LHC experiments (see previous features), it is far from being an obvious performance, particularly when the mass of the particles is high. Created in the high-energy proton-proton collisions produced by the LHC, these new excited states of the Λb particle have been found to have a mass of, respectively, 5912 MeV/c2 and 5920 MeV/c2. In other words, they are over five times heavier than the proton or the neutron.
Physicists only declare a discovery when data significantly show the relevant signal. In order to do that, they often have to analyse large samples of data. To obtain its beautiful result, the LHCb Collaboration has analysed the information coming from about 60 million million (6x1013) proton-proton collisions collected during the 2011 data-taking period. In particular, since the excited states only survive for a very short time before decaying, physicists carefully studied the decay products and tracked the whole process back to the decay vertex. The analysis took scientists several months to complete but today they are able to present the discovery with very high statistical significance, namely 4.9 σ for the first excited state and 10.1 for the second one.
Although never observed before, the excited states of the Λb particle were expected to exist according to the Standard Model, the theory that tells us how quarks combine to build particles and matter. The LHCb result is therefore a new confirmation of the success of the theory itself.
EXCITED STATES OF MATTER
Matter can be formed in different energy states. The most stable one – that is, the one that survives the longest before decaying – is the so-called “ground state”, in which particles have the lowest possible energy. States with higher energy are called “excited states”. They are still allowed by Nature but they are unstable. The higher the formation energy (i.e. the mass) the more unstable they are.
Read more about this result on the LHCb Public Webpage.
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NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., invites the public to its annual Open House on Saturday, June 9, and Sunday, June 10, from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
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