dark matter
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Copenhagen
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Like my friend and colleague Peter Coles, I am just returned from the fine wine-soaked dinner for the workshop “Cosmology and Astroparticle physics from the LHC to PLANCK” held at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. It is an honor to visit the place where so many discoveries of 20th Century physics were made, and…
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Flat rotation curves and Facebook
(See below for an update.) In one of the more bizarre meta-experiments that have come out of the latter-day social web, Trieste astrophysicist Paolo Salucci is trying to use Facebook to spread some astrophysics, not to the public, but within the astronomical community. Specifically, he’s trying to “eliminate the deep-routed [sic] wrong misconception [sic] of…
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Doctors, Deep Fields and Dark Matter
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Luckily, not all the astrophysics news this week was so bad. First, and most important, two of our Imperial College Astrophysics postgraduate students, Stuart Sale and Paniez Paykari, passed their PhD viva exams, and so are on their ways to officially being Doctors of Philosophy. Congratulations to both, especially (if I may say so) to…
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Stealing data?
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PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) is a Russian-Italian satellite measuring the composition of cosmic rays. One of the motivations for the measurements is the indirect detection of dark matter — the very-weakly-interacting particles that make up about 25% of the matter in the Universe (with, as I’m sure you all know…
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State of fear
Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to sign up with MI5 to receive an email notice when the “Threat Level” changes. Right now it’s “severe”, but they have the fine-grained menu of “low”, “moderate”, “substantial”, “severe” and “critical” to choose from — we certainly need that much more detail compared to the meagre green/yellow/red of the…
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Matter, Dark and Otherwise
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Anyone reading this blog has doubtless heard about the results announced a few weeks ago, observations of the “bullet cluster” claimed (in the title of the paper) to be “A direct empirical proof of the existence of dark matter.” (The basic idea is recounted better, and with prettier pictures, than I can do here by…
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Spending pounds and bending light (two ways)
I spent the early part of the week in Sheffield at the first meeting of the Institute of Physics Astroparticle Physics Group. There were talks on the search for the Dark Matter, gravitational waves, neutrino astrophysics, gamma-ray astrophsyics, and, of course, cosmology. All of this sometimes goes by the name “non-accelerator particle physics”: trying to…
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Dark Matter: Warm or Cold?
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This morning I woke to find that most of the UK media outlets (like the Guardian and the BBC) were carrying a story that astronomers, in particular a team lead by Gerry Gilmore of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy, had unlocked some of the secrets of Dark Matter, the mysterious stuff that makes up, we think,…
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