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The instrument that spots killer asteroids and star-eating black holes

    From CNN, Feb. 16, 2019: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln discusses the Zwicky Transient Facility, a massive sky-survey instrument designed to scan the heavens and look for “transients” or things that brighten unexpectedly. When the instrument sees a change, alerts go out to other astronomers subscribed to the service, who can then use even more powerful telescopes to study the transient event in detail. Even the public can get a daily summary of the previous night’s happenings.

    Particle physics keeps producing beyond the Higgs boson

      From AAAS, Feb. 16, 2019: The Higgs boson, the once-elusive particle that provides mass to the building blocks of the universe, is the most famous product of the CERN international laboratory, but the lab’s bragging rights extend to a host of innovations, said the lab’s director-general Fabiola Gianotti.

      An astronomical data challenge

        The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will manage unprecedented volumes of data produced each night. Scheduled to come online in the early 2020s, the LSST will use a 3.2-gigapixel camera to photograph a giant swath of the heavens. It’ll keep it up for 10 years, every night with a clear sky, creating the world’s largest astronomical stop-motion movie.

        At AAAS: Near-massless, neutrinos might open up some mighty weighty mysteries

          From William & Mary, Feb. 15, 2019: Scientist Patricia Vahle, a William & Mary professor and NOvA co-spokesperson, Patricia Vahle, Mansfield Professor of Physics at William & Mary, gives a talk on “The Quest to Understand Neutrino Masses” at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe. And because of their interesting properties, physicists look to a fuller understanding of neutrinos to help unravel the universe’s mysteries.

          Taking a collider to the dark energy problem

            With the warmth of holiday cheer in the air, some physicists decided to hit the pub after a conference in December 2014 and do what many physicists tend to do after work: keep talking about physics. That evening’s topic of conversation: dark energy particles. The chat would lead to a new line of investigation at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. Every second, the universe grows a little bigger. Scientists are using the LHC to try to find out why.

            Dispositivo criado no Brasil para experimento internacional com neutrinos é aprimorado

              From Saense, Feb. 14, 2019: Uma parte vital de um dos maiores experimentos da física de partículas atual foi desenvolvida no Brasil. O Arapuca é um detector de luz a ser instalado no Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment — projeto que busca descobrir novas propriedades dos neutrinos, partícula elementar com muito pouca massa e que viaja a uma velocidade muito próxima à da luz.