Tag: SMU Department of Physics

White dwarf supernovae are discovered in Virgo Cluster galaxy and in sky area “anonymous”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 26, 2013

Observation of two bright exploding stars improves the astronomical “tape measure” that scientists use to calculate the acceleration of the expansion of the universe

Light from two massive stars that exploded hundreds of millions of years ago recently reached Earth, and each event was identified as a supernova.

A supernova discovered Feb. 6 exploded about 450 million years ago, said Farley Ferrante, a graduate student at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, who made the initial observation.

The exploding star is in a relatively empty portion of the sky labeled “anonymous” in the faint constellation Canes Venatici. Home to a handful of galaxies, Canes Venatici is near the constellation Ursa Major, best known for the Big Dipper.

Reidus hilli, John Graf, SMU, coelacanth, Dipluridae,

A second supernova discovered Nov. 20 exploded about 230 million years ago, said Ferrante, who made the initial observation. That exploding star is in one of the many galaxies of the Virgo constellation.

Both supernovae were spotted with the Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment‘s robotic telescope ROTSE3b, which is now operated by SMU graduate students. ROTSE3b is at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas near Fort Davis.

The supernova that exploded about 450 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2013X. It occurred when life on Earth consisted of creatures in the seas and oceans and along coastlines. Following naming conventions for supernova, Supernova 2013X was nicknamed “Everest” by Govinda Dhungana, an SMU graduate student who participated in the discovery.

The supernova that exploded about 230 million years ago is officially designated Supernova 2012ha. The light from that explosion has been en route to Earth since the Triassic geologic period, when dinosaurs roamed the planet. “That’s fairly recent as these explosions go,” Ferrante said. Dhungana gave the nickname “Sherpa” to Supernova 2012ha.

Type 1a supernovae help measure cosmic distances
Everest and Sherpa are two of about 200 supernovae discovered worldwide in a given year. Before telescopes, supernovae observations were rare — sometimes only several every few centuries, according to the scientists.

“Everest and Sherpa aren’t noteworthy for being the youngest, oldest, closest, furthest or biggest supernovae ever observed,” Ferrante said. “But both, like other supernovae of their kind, are important because they provide us with information for further science.”

Everest and Sherpa are Type 1a supernovae, the result of white dwarf explosions, said Robert Kehoe, physics professor and leader of the SMU astronomy team in the SMU Department of Physics.

The scientists explain that a white dwarf is a dying star that has burned up all its energy. It is about as massive as the Earth’s sun. It’s core is about the size of the Earth. The core is dense, however, and one teaspoon of it weighs as much as Mount Everest, Kehoe said.

A white dwarf explodes if fusion restarts by tugging material from a nearby star, according to the scientists. The white dwarf grows to about one and a half times the size of the sun. Unable to support its weight, Kehoe said, collapse is rapid, fusion reignites and the white dwarf explodes. The result is a Type 1a supernova.

“We call these Type 1a supernovae standard candles,” Ferrante said. “Since Type 1a supernovae begin from this standard process, their intrinsic brightness is very similar. So they become a device by which scientists can measure cosmic distance. From Earth, we measure the light intensity of the exploded star. As star distances from Earth increase, their brilliance diminishes.”

While Sherpa is a standard Type 1a, Everest is peculiar. It exhibits the characteristics of a Type 1a called a 1991T, Ferrante said.

“Everest is the result of two white dwarfs that collide, then merge,” he said.

The brightness of Sherpa’s explosion was a magnitude 16, which is far dimmer than can be seen with the naked eye. Everest’s explosion was even dimmer, a magnitude 18.

For perspective, light travels 5.88 trillion miles in a year. The sun is 93 million miles from Earth, so light from the sun reaches Earth in eight minutes.

Supernovae help in search to understand mysterious dark energy
Like other Type 1a supernovae, Everest and Sherpa provide scientists with a tiny piece to the puzzle of one of the greatest mysteries of the universe: What is dark energy?

Every Type 1a supernova provides astronomers with indirect information about dark energy, which makes up 73 percent of the mass-energy in the universe. It’s theorized that dark energy explains the accelerating expansion of our universe at various epochs after the Big Bang.

“Every exploding star observed allows astronomers to more precisely calibrate the increasing speed at which our universe is expanding,” Ferrante said. “The older the explosion, the farther away, the closer it was to the Big Bang and the better it helps us understand dark energy.”

Hobby-Eberly spectrogram confirms discovery of supernovae
Everest’s discovery was confirmed by a spectrogram obtained Feb. 10 with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, also at McDonald Observatory. Everest is located in a host galaxy identified as 2286144 in the Principal Galaxies Catalog.

A spectrogram obtained Nov. 29 with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope confirmed Sherpa’s discovery in one of the many galaxies of the Virgo Cluster.

The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union officially designated the discoveries as Supernova 2013X and Supernova 2012ha.

Ferrante and Dhungana made both discoveries as part of an international collaboration of physicists from nine universities. Everest and Sherpa were discovered with a fully automated, remotely controlled robotic telescope at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory. The discovery is a first for the SMU collaboration members.

The telescope, ROTSE, constantly scans the skies for any significant changes, such as supernovae, novae and variable stars. Data from the telescope are reviewed daily by Ferrante, Dhungana and other scientists on the team, who search for signs of stellar activity.

Until now, primary responsibility for the management and operation of ROTSE3b was held by the University of Michigan. The SMU team took over that responsibility starting in Fall 2012. The ownership transfer will be completed by summer 2013, said SMU’s Kehoe.

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SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Dedman College, Farley Ferrante, Govinda Dhungana, Robert Kehoe, SMU Department of Physics

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Dallas Observer: How Texas Came Within an Atom’s Breadth of Discovering the God Particle

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 17, 2012

The Dallas Observer interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about Texas’ historic role in particle physics before the landmark discovery announced in July of the new fundamental “God particle” necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

The Dallas Observer article, “How Texas Came Within an Atom’s Breadth of Discovering the God Particle,” published Aug. 15.

SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

The experimental physics group at SMU has been involved since 1994 and is a major contributor to the research, the heart of which is the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator on the border with Switzerland and France.

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Ryszard Stroynowski in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

More SMU Research news

Observed! SMU’s LHC physicists confirm new particle; Higgs ‘God particle’ opens new frontier of exploration

SMU physicists at CERN find hints of long sought after Higgs boson — dubbed the fundamental “God” particle

Dallas Observer: As Physicists Near Discovery of God Particle, A Word With SMU Prof Involved In the Search

WFAA: Super Collider’s legacy lives on in Switzerland

The discovery results, which are preliminary, were announced July 4 at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Conference of High Energy Physics in Melbourne, Australia. CERN is the headquarters for the LHC lab, which is a collaborative experiment involving thousands of scientists worldwide.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Brantley Hargrove
Dallas Observer
Ryszard Stroynowski sat bathed in the pale glow of his laptop screen. At 2 in the morning of Independence Day, as the final, fugitive firecracker reports of the night crackled across a sleeping Dallas, the 65-year-old physicist was wide awake. As he watched the live broadcast in his pajamas, his colleagues at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva, the locus of the physics universe, tolled the end of the search for an elusive force that had confounded them for half a century. It was the final puzzle piece in a theory that describes with unfathomable precision the fundamental particles of the universe and the laws they obey.

This piece, known as the Higgs boson and often referred to in the popular press as “the God particle,” was detected in the largest scientific experiment ever devised. Inside a racetrack-shaped particle accelerator five miles across and spanning the borders of France and Switzerland, researchers had reproduced the first, violent moments of creation. By crossing opposing beams of protons powered by enough electrical current to flash-melt a ton of steel instantaneously, and guided by megalithic magnets ringing the accelerator’s course, researchers induced collisions powerful enough to overcome the elemental forces that bind the proton’s constituents. Out of the flashes of the collisions, they glimpsed the wraith-like field that allowed atoms and molecules, stars and planets, to coalesce out of chaos. What they found helped the shapeless take form.

“As a layman, I would now say I think we have it,” said a beaming Rolf Heuer, director-general of CERN, to the experimenters, the press and to anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Stroynowski, an avuncular man with a smooth pate, a white corona of hair and pale gray eyes, already knew, had known for months. After all, he had crunched the numbers. He led the design and construction of the major component of a detector heavier than an aircraft carrier and as big as the science building at Southern Methodist University, where he teaches. It was called ATLAS, and it found the Higgs.

Stroynowski knew something else, too, a truth that had irrevocably altered his life, the lives of thousands of physicists and the future of North Texas, if not the state. Once upon a time, a tiny town known for its blackland prairie and cotton fields, just a straight shot south down Interstate 35 from Dallas, was physics’ next frontier. In 1988, Ellis County was selected the winner in a heated nationwide competition to be the site for a particle accelerator that would dwarf the one in Geneva. In size, the leviathan’s circumference would approach D.C.’s Beltway, some 54 miles around; big enough to envelop Waxahachie, and require the extinction of a nearby farming hamlet. The world’s existing accelerators had taken physics as far as they could. The accelerator in Texas, called the Superconducting Super Collider, had the potential to take it further than any theorist could possibly dream, opening doors they could not predict.

Thousands of physicists from all over the world, including Stroynowski, pulled up stakes and migrated to the North Texas site as though it were Mecca, a holy place where the future of the field lay. They established physics departments at nearby universities and began construction of the Super Collider and the components they had to literally invent as they went along. But in 1993, after more than a decade of work and $2 billion spent, Congress canceled it. Its death rendered stillborn American hegemony in the physics world and drove a host of promising young minds from the field. [ … ]

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SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the SMU Broadcast Studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Dedman College, Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU Department of Physics

Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

The Telegraph: Cern announcement: after 50 years, the Higgs hunt could be over

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 7, 2012

SMU postdoctoral researcher Aidan Randle-Conde, SMU Department of Physics, was quoted by the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Randle-Conde was quoted for his commentary on the search for the fundamental particle the Higgs boson and the media frenzy sparked in the days leading up to CERN’s much-anticipated July 4 announcement of a new particle discovery.

Telegraph science reporter Anjana Ahuja quoted in the July 3 article “Cern announcement: after 50 years, the Higgs hunt could be over.”

Ahuja quoted a blog post by Randle-Conde published on the popular Quantum Diaries web site, which follows physicists from around the world.

Randle-Conde is part of the team of SMU researchers at Switzerland-based CERN, the largest high-energy physics experiment in the world. Physicists have been seeking the elusive fundamental particle the Higgs boson since it was theorized in the 1960s. The so-called “God” particle is believed to play a fundamental role in solving the important mystery of how matter acquires mass.

Thousands of scientists from around the world seek evidence of the Higgs particle through experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The researchers analyze a flood of electronic data streaming from the breakup of speeding protons colliding in the massive particle accelerator.

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By Anjana Ahuja
The Telegraph
Tomorrow could see one of the most anticipated moments in the history of modern science. In a packed auditorium, scientists at Cern, the European nuclear research institute which operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will reveal the latest findings in their hunt for the Higgs boson.

If they really have found the Higgs, as rumours suggest, this would be a triumph for physics – not merely by providing a finishing touch to the Standard Model, which is the dominant theory of how the universe works at the subatomic level, but by solving the long-standing mystery of why objects have mass, and why some have more than others.

During the decades of Higgs hunting, there have been many false dawns. What makes tomorrow’s announcement different is primarily its timing. The seminar coincides with the opening of the 36th International Conference on High Energy Physics in Melbourne. This features updated results from two separate experiments at the LHC, which, in December, were showing tantalising glimpses of a Higgs-like particle. The Daily Telegraph has learnt that four out of the five surviving theorists involved in predicting the Higgs boson have chosen to attend the announcement, three in Geneva and one at an event in Westminster. […]

[…] However, Dr Aidan Randle-Conde, a British physicist working on Atlas, argues that rushing things, while good for PR, makes for bad science: “This is the worst thing we could do… The Higgs field was postulated nearly 50 years ago, the LHC was proposed 30 years ago … and we’ve been taking data for about 18 months. We should resist the temptation to get an answer now.”

Another Cern scientist told me that he had seen “plenty of smiles on the faces of people who really need to sleep. People are very excited about what will happen in the Cern auditorium”. Some scientists have started saying, half-seriously, that they’ll need to camp outside the night before, to guarantee a seat. Significantly, Peter Higgs, the octogenarian University of Edinburgh physicist after whom the boson is named, is flying into Geneva. He had stated a wish to avoid publicity until the Higgs was found. The two theorists with whom Kibble worked, Gerald Guralnik and Carl Hagen, will also be present, the first time either has gone to the Swiss city for an update on LHC.

Read the full article.

Tags Aidan Randle-Conde, Dedman College, SMU Department of Physics

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NatGeo: “God Particle” Found? “Historic Milestone” From Higgs Boson Hunters

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 6, 2012

National Geographic News science reporter Ker Than interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

The National Geographic article, ““God Particle” Found? “Historic Milestone” From Higgs Boson Hunters,” published July 4.

SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Ker Than
National Geographic
“I think we have it. You agree?”

Speaking to a packed audience Wednesday morning in Geneva, CERN director general Rolf Heuer confirmed that two separate teams working at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are more than 99 percent certain they’ve discovered the Higgs boson, aka the God particle—or at the least a brand-new particle exactly where they expected the Higgs to be.

The long-sought particle may complete the standard model of physics by explaining why objects in our universe have mass—and in so doing, why galaxies, planets, and even humans have any right to exist.

“We have a discovery,” Heuer said at the seminar. “We have observed a new particle consistent with a Higgs boson.”

At the meeting were four theorists who helped develop the Higgs theory in the 1960s, including Peter Higgs himself, who could be seen wiping away tears as the announcement was made.

Although preliminary, the results show a so-called five-sigma of significance, which means that there is only a one in a million chance that the Higgs-like signal the teams observed is a statistical fluke.

“It’s a tremendous and exciting time,” said physicist Michael Tuts, who works with the ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) Experiment, one of the two Higgs-seeking LHC projects.

The Columbia University physicist had organized a wee-hours gathering of physicists and students in the U.S. to watch the announcement, which took place at 9 a.m., Geneva time.

“This is the payoff. This is what you do it for.”

The two LHC teams searching for the Higgs—the other being the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) project—did so independently. Neither one knew what the other would present this morning.

“It was interesting that the competing experiment essentially had the same result,” said physicist Ryszard Stroynowski, an ATLAS team member based at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “It provides additional confirmation.”

CERN head Heuer called today’s announcement a “historic milestone” but cautioned that much work lies ahead as physicists attempt to confirm the newfound particle’s identity and further probe its properties.

Read the full article.

Tags Dedman College, Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU Department of Physics

Energy & Matter Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

DMN: Dallas-area physicists had a hand in discovery of “God particle”

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 5, 2012

The Dallas Morning News interviewed SMU physicist Ryszard Stroynowski about the historic discovery of the new fundamental particle necessary for scientists to explain how matter acquires mass.

The Morning News article, “Dallas-area physicists had a hand in discovery of “God particle,” published July 4.

SMU physicist Stroynowski is a principal investigator in the search for the Higgs boson, and the leader of SMU’s team in the Department of Physics that is working on the experiment.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Joe Simnacher
Staff Writer
Three teams of physicists from North Texas were at the heart of the research that discovered the new subatomic particle announced Wednesday.

Professors and graduate students from Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of Texas at Arlington were all working in Geneva on Wednesday when the identification of the basic building block of the universe was announced.

“It’s really exciting,” said Dr. Joe Izen, the physics professor leading the UTD team. “I get paid to do this.”

The North Texas teams were part of ATLAS, one of seven larger experiments designed to detect the subatomic particle.

The UTD team created and operated the ATLAS pixel detector, “kind of like an 80 million pixel camera, if you will,” Izen said. It detects the paths of charge tracks so they can be traced to their point of origin.

The SMU team works on the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeter, which measures the energy of photons and electrons.

Dr. Ryszard Stroynowski, physics professor and leader of the SMU team, said he and his colleagues have spent years in Geneva working with equipment they built in Dallas. Stroynowski recently devoted a one-year sabbatical from SMU to the experiment.

“The experiment operates 24 hours a day,” Stroynowski said. “It has to be manned in shifts.”

Read the full article.

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Tags Dedman College, Ryszard Stroynowski, SMU Department of Physics

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