Mystery of Milky Way’s particle accelerators solved

October 6th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In a new research, a scientist is working towards controlling huge electromagnetic forces that have the potential to destroy the next generation of particle accelerators. Professor Roger Jones, a University of Manchester physicist, is carrying out the research.

September 23rd, 2009 WASHINGTON - A dramatic new view of the center of the Milky Way galaxy from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has exposed new levels of the complexity and intrigue in the Galactic center. The 88 Chandra pointings represents a freeze-frame of the spectacle of stellar evolution, from bright young stars to black holes, in a crowded, hostile environment dominated by a central, supermassive black hole.

September 18th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of scientists has solved a longstanding mystery about a pair of stars called DI Herculis whose peculiar rotation had remained a mystery for three decades. The shift in the orbit of DI Herculis was a mystery till now.

September 7th, 2009 LONDON - A team of archaeologists has solved the ancient mystery of why the odd-looking statues on the Easter Island statues wear red hats. Up to one thousand years ago, the islanders started putting giant red hats on the statues.

September 2nd, 2009 LONDON - The Large Hadron Collider's (LHC) delay in starting up has benefited the Tevatron collider near Chicago, with officials at the facility saying that they now have a brighter chance of discovering the elusive Higgs boson, or 'God particle', by the year 2011. "The Tevatron definitely has a chance," Greg Landsberg of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who works on one of the LHC's detectors, told New Scientist.

August 12th, 2009 STOCKHOLM - A team of scientists has established that a mysterious flux of particles in the Universe originates from exploding stars, rather than being proof of dark matter. Several independent studies recently discovered a mysterious flux of electrons and positrons in the universe.

August 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Reports indicate that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle smasher, should yield its first data by Christmas, smashing protons at energies high enough to begin pushing back the boundaries of particle physics. The LHC is a particle accelerator at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, designed to answer fundamental questions, such as what gives elementary particles their mass, by colliding particles at higher energies than ever achieved in a laboratory before.

July 30th, 2009 WASHINGTON - In an interesting new research, astronomers have determined that dwarf spheroidal galaxies, which contain few stars relative to their total mass, are formed by indulging in a cosmic dance. Dwarf spheroidal galaxies appear to be made mostly of dark matter - a mysterious substance detectable only by its gravitational influence, which outweighs normal matter by a factor of five to one in the universe as a whole.

July 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A team of astrophysicists has solved a mystery that led some scientists to speculate that the distribution of certain gamma rays in our Milky Way galaxy was evidence of a form of undetectable "dark matter" believed to make up much of the mass of the universe. In two separate scientific papers, the astrophysicists show that this distribution of gamma rays can be explained by the way "antimatter positrons" from the radioactive decay of elements, created by massive star explosions in the galaxy, propagate through the galaxy.

July 1st, 2009 WASHINGTON - A new theory by scientists says that our Milky Way galaxy survived intense heat generated by the "ignition" of the Universe about half-a-billion years after the Big Bang, because it was already immersed in a large clump of dark matter that trapped gases inside it. Tiny galaxies, inside small clumps of dark matter, were blasted away by the heat that reached approximate temperatures of between 20,000 and 100,000 degrees centigrade, according to the scientists, including experts at Japan's University of Tsukuba.

June 10th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Astronomers have found that stars of a recently discovered type, dubbed 'ultracool subdwarfs', take some pretty wild rides as they orbit around the Milky Way, following paths that are very different from those of typical stars. The finding, by Adam Burgasser and John Bochanski of MIT, clarifies the origins of these peculiar, faint stars, and may provide new details on the types of stars the Milky Way has acquired from other galaxies.

June 9th, 2009 WASHINGTON - Physicists at the University of Texas at Austin, US, have created a superconducting sheet of lead only two atoms thick, the thinnest superconducting metal layer ever created. Superconductors are unique because they can maintain an electrical current indefinitely with no power source.

June 8th, 2009 WASHINGTON - A superconducting metal sheet with just two atoms thick has been developed by physicists at the University of Texas in Austin. The university said in a statement Monday that it was the thinnest superconducting metal layer ever created.

June 5th, 2009 LONDON - In the race for finding the elusive Higgs boson, or 'God particle', as it is popularly called, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will run through the year, as it is in direct competition with the Tevatron, a less powerful accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois, US. According to a report in the Times, the LHC will start smashing its first protons in October and run through the winter to keep it ahead in the international race to find the elusive "God particle".

May 30th, 2009 LONDON - Cosmologists have come up with a model postulating the existence of a 'chameleon' particle, which would change its mass depending on its environment, and might be used to explain the accelerating expansion of the Universe. According to a report in Nature News, a new research has claimed to have spotted signs of this elusive particle, whose existence was first postulated in 2003 to explain the accelerating expansion of the Universe, which has been attributed to some unknown 'dark energy'.