Browsing Archive: July, 2018

The Opposition of Mars

Posted by on Friday, July 27, 2018, In : Astronomy 
For those who are interested in astronomy, tonight Mars will make its closest approach to Earth in fifteen years. That means that it will be both large - though still only viewable in detail through binoculars or a telescope - and very bright. 

As most people already know, both the Earth and Mars orbit the sun, in neighbouring orbits. Usually they are at different points in their respective orbits, and so Mars appears small and distant. Roughly every two years, the two planets pass close toget...
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Neutrinos By The Sea

Posted by on Thursday, July 19, 2018, In : Astronomy 
Neutrinos are popular right now. 

Last week the IceCube neutrino observatory announced the discovery of the origin of many high energy cosmic rays as being a massive black hole and active galaxy, using the flux of neutrinos that it produced as a pointer to their source. The observations were then confirmed by a variety of observatories working in radio waves, visible light, and gamma-rays, but the original signal was through neutrinos.

Today we have the announcement that the University of Victo...
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The Origin of Cosmic Rays

Posted by on Friday, July 13, 2018, In : Astronomy 
After weeks of speculation, today the IceCube neutrino observatory has revealed their big news. After more than a century of debate about the origin of high energy cosmic rays, the IceCube team together with astronomers around the world have managed to pinpoint the source of at least some high energy cosmic rays as being a very active and violent distant galaxy known as a blazar. (For those interested in the technical details, the two research papers can be found here and here)

Cosmic rays wer...
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Sterile Neutrinos

Posted by on Tuesday, July 10, 2018, In : Particle Physics 
There has been a lot of discussion lately of the possible existence of sterile neutrinos in the Universe, due in large part to a few papers in the recent weeks making claims of possible signs of detection in one of the bigger neutrino observatories. And although these results are preliminary, with the formal announcements coming later this week, and may show no clear sign of anything other than a statistical fluctuation, the theory of sterile neutrinos is still quite interesting to the theore...
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About Me


Dr. Chris Bird I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.

   


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