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Category: space – Page 969

New Higgs Boson Discovery Could Help Solve Cosmic Puzzle

Scientists can’t take pictures of the Higgs boson. But they can find proof of its existence by watching “E=mc” play out in hundreds of millions of particle collisions per second and detecting how it decays into other particles they do know how to spot. Now, six years after officially discovering the Higgs boson, particle physicists are announcing that they’ve spotted the Higgs in another way.

This announcement isn’t a surprise. It matches the predictions of the Standard Model of particle physics, the rock-solid but probably incomplete blueprint of the Universe on the smallest scales. But the news is certainly important; you might say it closes the first chapter of the Higgs boson’s story, and offers a potential window to explore some of most confounding questions in the Universe.

A trillion-dollar space industry will require new markets

RENTON, Wash. — Forecasts that predict the space industry to grow to a trillion dollars by the 2040s will require the development of new markets, even with the modest annual growth rates needed to achieve that goal.

A panel session June 26 at the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace 2018 conference here noted that several reports in the last year by investment banks predicted that the global space economy, currently valued at about $350 billion, could grow to $1 trillion or more in the 2040s.

One report by Goldman Sachs predicted the industry would reach $1 trillion in the 2040s, noted Jeff Matthews, a consultant with Deloitte who moderated the panel discussion. A separate study by Morgan Stanley projected a “most likely outcome” of a $1.1 trillion space economy in the 2040s. A third study by Bank of America Merrill Lynch was the most optimistic, seeing the market growing to $2.7 trillion by the same timeframe.

Jupiter’s Moons Leave Signature Spots in Its Aurorae

Despite being wildly different from Earth in almost every way, Jupiter does feature some familiar phenomena—including aurorae, what we call the Northern and Southern lights. But Jupiter’s aurorae have something Earth’s don’t: strange features caused by the Jovian moons.

Scientists analyzing data from the Juno spacecraft spotted some of these anomalies in action. They saw swirls and spots caused by Jupiter’s moons Io and Ganymede. And, as is often the case, things weren’t what they seemed from far away.

Milky Way still bears the 10-billion-year-old scars of a galactic collision

Galaxies collide with each other on a pretty regular basis. Our own Milky Way, for instance, has gobbled up dozens of smaller galaxies in the past, and Andromeda is currently hurtling towards us at 109 km (68 mi) per second. An international team of astronomers has now found evidence of a celestial smash-up between the Milky Way and an unknown dwarf galaxy that took place around eight to 10 billion years ago, and forever changed the face of our home galaxy.

According to the researchers, the evidence for this cosmic collision is all around us, from the bulge at the center of the Milky Way to the spread-out halo at the very fringes. The now-defunct dwarf galaxy has been dubbed the “Gaia Sausage,” after the ESA’s Gaia satellite used to plot out the trajectories of its stars, and the apparent shape those measurements revealed.

“We plotted the velocities of the stars, and the sausage shape just jumped out at us,” says Wyn Evans, co-author of the study. “As the smaller galaxy broke up, its stars were thrown out on very radial orbits. These Sausage stars are what’s left of the last major merger of the Milky Way.”

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