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Could the elusive Higgs boson finally be in sight? Earlier this summer, physicist Tommaso Dorigo of the University of Padua wrote about talk of a tentative hint of the Higgs at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result," wrote Dorigo. The blog post was low on detail but...

Initial results from high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider offer first glimpse of physics at new energy frontier.In December, the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, shattered the world record for highest energy particle collisions. This week, team led by researchers from MIT, CERN and the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest, Hungary, completed work on the first scientific paper analyzing the results of those collisions. Its findings show that the collisions produced an unexpectedly high number of particles called mesons — a factor that will have to be taken into account...

The CMS experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has completed a search for microscopic black holes produced in high-energy proton-proton collisions. No evidence for their production was found and their production has been excluded up to a black hole mass of 3.5-4.5 TeV (1012 electron volts) in a variety of theoretical models. Microscopic black holes are predicted to exist in some theoretical models that attempt to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by postulating the existence of extra “curled-up” dimensions, in addition to the three familiar spatial dimensions. At the high energies of the Large Hadron Collider, such theories...

The science blog Cosmic Variance has a great rundown of what the LHC could find. At the top of this list is the Higgs boson, which is the only particle in the Standard Model (the theory that describes the fundamental interactions between the particles that make up all matter), that hasn't yet been detected. The site thinks there is a 95 percent chance the LHC finds this particle, and that could lead to a much better understanding of how our universe works. Other notable possibilities on Cosmic Variance's list include finding extra dimensions (these could be so-called "warped" hidden dimensions...

Enormous black holes, some of the most powerful sources of radiation in the universe, apparently switch on after galaxies collide, researchers have found. The centers of as many as a tenth of all galaxies generate more energy than can be explained by stars, with some of these "active galactic nuclei" releasing more radiation than the entire Milky Way galaxy combined, but from a space no larger than our solar system. Astronomers suspect this energy is released when matter falls into giant, supermassive black holes that are up to billions of times the mass of our sun at these galaxies'...

Astronomers have detected the deepest note ever generated in the cosmos, a B-flat flying through space like a ripple on an invisible pond. No human will actually hear the note, because it is 57 octaves below the keys in the middle of a piano. The detection was made with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and announced at a press conference today. The note strikes an important chord with astronomers, who say it may help them understand how the universe's largest structures, called galaxy clusters, evolve. The sound waves appear to be heating gas in the Perseus galaxy cluster, some 250 million...

After 20 years in the making, the first physics results have come out of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Physicists from the University of Birmingham played a key role in analyzing these collisions and producing the first results from the 27 km circular atom smasher near Geneva.

Enlarge ImageBoom! After being hit with laser beams, a small plastic pellet (sunlike object) emits x-rays, some of which bombard a pellet of silicon (blue and purple). Credit: Adapted from S. Fujioka et al., Nature Physics, Advance Online Publication A team of researchers has created conditions analogous to those found outside of a black hole by blasting a plastic pellet with high-energy laser beams. The advance should sharpen insights into the behavior of matter and energy in extreme conditions. Astronomers can't observe black holes directly because their immense gravity won't let light escape. Instead, they have focused on what...

IT IS the ultimate cosmic villain: space and time come to an abrupt end in its presence and the laws of physics break down. Now it seems a "naked" black hole may yet emerge in our universe, after spinning away its event horizon.

Enlarge ImageOutlier. Astronomers think they have found an intermediate-mass black hole (bright blue object) just outside a distant galaxy. Credit: Heidi Sagerud Heavyweight and lightweight black holes abound in the universe, but nobody has detected a middleweight--and some scientists argue they don't exist. Now, astronomers say they have found the first conclusive evidence for one of these elusive objects at the fringe of a distant galaxy. Estimated to be at least 500 times more massive than the sun, the discovery could plug a large gap in the cosmic menagerie, though it leaves unanswered questions about this type of black...

(PhysOrg.com) -- A pair of astronomers from Texas and Germany have used a telescope at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory together with Hubble Space Telescope and many other telescopes around the world to uncover new evidence that the largest, most massive galaxies in the universe and the supermassive black holes at their hearts grew together over time."They evolved in lockstep," said The University of Texas at Austin's John Kormendy, who co-authored the research with Ralf Bender of Germany's Max-Planck-Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and Ludwig Maximilians University Observatory. The results are puiblished in this week's issue of Astrophysical...

Still worried that the Large Hadron Collider will create a black hole that will destroy the Earth when it's finally switched on this summer? Um, well, you may have a point. Three physicists have reexamined the math surrounding the creation of microscopic black holes in the Switzerland-based LHC, the world's largest particle collider, and determined that they won't simply evaporate in a millisecond as had previously been predicted. Rather, Roberto Casadio of the University of Bologna in Italy and Sergio Fabi and Benjamin Harms of the University of Alabama say mini black holes could exist for much longer — perhaps...

A simulated Black Hole with the Milky Way in the backgroundThere is a giant black hole at the centre of our galaxy, a study has confirmed. German astronomers tracked the movement of 28 stars circling the centre of the Milky Way, using the European Southern Observatory in Chile. The black hole is four million times heavier than our Sun, according to the paper in The Astrophysical Journal. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so great that nothing - including light - can escape them. According to Dr Robert Massy, of the Royal Astronomical Society, the results suggest that galaxies...

ST. LOUIS — As if in a cosmic hug, the spiral arms of some galaxies wrap around themselves more tightly than others. The key to the bear hug: Galaxies holding heftier black holes at their centers also have more tightly wound spiral arms, an astronomer announced today. The finding gives astronomers a way to weigh so-called supermassive black holes, which can have masses of millions to billions that of the sun, and are thought to reside at the centers of galaxies. "This is a really easy way to determine the masses of these super-massive black holes at the centers of...

CHICAGO (AFP) - Hundreds of rogue black holes may be roaming around the Milky Way waiting to engulf stars and planets that cross their path, US astronomers said Wednesday. The astronomers believe these "intermediate mass" black holes are invisible except in rare circumstances and have been spawned by mergers of black holes within globular clusters -- swarms of stars held together by their mutual gravity. These black holes are unlikely to pose a threat to Earth, but may engulf nebulae, stars and planets that stray into their paths, the researchers said. "These rogue black holes are extremely unlikely to do...

Black holes are weird. Well, duh, right? But they do something that surprises most people: besides hoovering down almost everything nearby, they can also eject material as well. And by eject, I mean send it out screaming at nearly the speed of light and heated to a bazillion degrees. Picture from Chandra of the active galaxy pair 3C321 The image above is from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and it’s all about this scary scenario. Let’s take a walk down the gravity well, shall we? Basically, as matter swirls down into the maw of the hole, it forms a flattened disk...

Black holes often are thought of as just endless pits in space and time that destroy everything they pull toward them. But new findings confirm the reverse is true, too: Black holes can drive extraordinarily powerful winds that push out and force star formation and shape the fate of a galaxy. Supermassive black holes are suspected to lurk in the hearts of many—if not all—large galaxies. These holes drag gas inward, which accrues in rapidly spinning, glowing disks. Astronomers have long thought that such "accretion disks" give off mighty winds that shape the host galaxies, profoundly influencing how they grow....

Fears over factoids Recent TV programmes have claimed that the Earth could be destroyed by black holes created in particle accelerators and that helium-3 from the Moon could be used for fusion energy. Frank Close warns that these "factoids" must be stamped out before they become accepted as facts. Did you know that when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online at CERN next spring, it could end up creating mini black holes that destroy the Earth? This is not something from a Dan Brown novel, but from a TV documentary broadcast as part of the BBC's Horizon series in...

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM - The International Space Nomenclature Council today adopted the term 'emplacements de hauts gravité super' - or 'super high gravity locations' - as the official replacement name for black holes. Originally named in reference to the fact that light cannot escape their intense gravity, the term 'black hole' was increasingly criticized as being insensitive to African-Americans and African-Europeans...

Like gluttonous piranhas, supermassive black holes in young galaxy clusters gorge on bountiful gas until little fuel is left, and then they fade away, a new study suggests.Using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers tallied the number of rapidly growing supermassive black holes, called active galactic nuclei, or AGN, in two populations of galaxy clusters. One group consisted of young-looking clusters located very far from Earth, and the other consisted of an older group located closer to us. The results of the survey, detailed in the July 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, showed that the more distant, younger clusters...