Latest Astroparticle physics Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Science teachers in grade school sometimes hand out "mystery boxes," which contain ramps, barriers and a loose marble. Rotating the marble and feeling it hang up or drop, the students begin to deduce the contents of the box. Scientists who are trying to understand why tiny particles rain down from space face a similar dilemma, but on a much grander scale. Their mystery box is a hundred thousand light years across, and the only clues...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Nearly a mile underground beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota, scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are using a tank to make key contributions to a physics experiment that will look for one of nature's most elusive particles, "dark matter." The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment located at the Sanford Underground Research Facility in Lead, SD is the most sensitive detector of its kind to look for...

The search for dark matter runs deep with physicists Blas Cabrera and Bernard Sadoulet, who have chased this mystery far underground and will be recognized for their work as joint recipients of the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics. The search for dark matter runs deep with physicists Blas Cabrera and Bernard Sadoulet, who have chased this mystery far underground and will be recognized for their work as joint recipients of the 2013 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online The University of Utah has plans to build a new observatory facility to study high energy cosmic rays, thanks to a $1 million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation. These cosmic rays, which are 10 trillion times more energetic than particles emitted during a nuclear explosion, originate from violent cosmic events deep within the universe and hurtle their way towards Earth. The grant will allow a team of researchers to develop a new...

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A debate that has been raging over the distribution of matter in the universe can finally be put to bed thanks to the WiggleZ Dark Matter survey that was conducted over 276 nights from August 2006 to January 2011. The majority of physicists believe that the matter in the universe is distributed evenly on the largest scales and this outlook has fueled everything from Einstein’s equations to calculations that are the foundation for the...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Predicting solar flares still remains a hit-or-miss task for scientists, but new research may shed more light on helping to predict just when the events could occur. Researchers discovered a new method to predict solar flares more than a day before they occur, which could help provide advanced warnings to protect satellites, power grids and astronauts. As the sun transitions into "solar maximum" next year, more solar activity is...

Gamma-ray photons seen emanating from the center of the Milky Way galaxy are consistent with the intriguing possibility that dark-matter particles are annihilating each other in space, according to research submitted by UC Irvine astrophysicists to the American Physical Society journal Physical Review D. Kevork Abazajian, assistant professor, and Manoj Kaplinghat, associate professor, of the Department of Physics & Astronomy analyzed data collected between August 2008 and June 2012...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers at the University of Zurich, ETH Zurich, the University of Leicester and NOAC Beijing have found large amounts of invisible "dark matter" near the Sun. They also found tantalizing hints of a new dark matter component within our own galaxy. The study results, which will be published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, are consistent with the theory that the Milky Way is surrounded by a massive...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In August, physicists will gather to celebrate a century of research since the discovery of cosmic rays. It is widely accepted that cosmic rays are the nuclei of atoms, from the full array of naturally occurring elements that travel at near-light-speeds for millions of years before reaching Earth. What isn't known yet is where these cosmic rays originate. Alan Watson, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Leeds, provides...

Scientists from the XENON collaboration announced a new result from their search for dark matter. The analysis of data taken with the XENON100 detector during 13 months of operation at the Gran Sasso Laboratory (Italy) provided no evidence for the existence of Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), the leading dark matter candidates. Two events being observed are statistically consistent with one expected event from background radiation. Compared to their previous 2011 result the...