Symmetry

In science, making data open means making available, free of charge, the observations or other information collected in a scientific study for the purpose of allowing other researchers to examine it for themselves, either to verify it or to conduct new analyses. There are barriers to making scientific data open, but doing so has already contributed to scientific progress.

An Italian experiment has a 20-year signal of what could be dark matter—and scientists are embarking on their most promising efforts yet to confirm or refute its results. For more than two decades, DAMA has observed a regularly changing signal that its operators think comes from our planet’s movements through the “halo” of dark matter suffusing the Milky Way galaxy.

In recent years, scientists have found ways to study black holes, listening to the gravitational waves they unleash when they collide and even creating an image of one by combining information from radio telescopes around the world. But our knowledge of black holes remains limited. So scientists are figuring out how to make do with substitutes — analogs to black holes that may hold answers to mysteries about gravity and quantum mechanics.

Imagine a particle. What comes to mind? If you aren’t a theoretical particle physicist, chances are you picture a tiny ball, bobbing in space. But that’s not quite correct. One way to prove it: Try to imagine that tiny ball as a particle with no mass. If a particle has no mass, how can it exist?

As she grew up in the small town of San Pellegrino in the Italian Alps, three things conspired to make Maria Elena Monzani a physicist: a fascination for outer space, a Nobel Prize and a nuclear disaster. Now she prepares an international team to search for clues to one of the biggest scientific mysteries.

Right now could be considered one of the best — and most uncertain — times in theoretical physics. That’s what Symmetry heard in interviews with 10 junior faculty in the field. They talk about what keeps them up at night, their favorite places to think and how they explain their jobs to nonscientists.

A new study shows that light dark matter is 1000 times less likely to bump into regular matter than previous analyses allowed.

Few numbers have gotten under astronomers’ skin like the Hubble constant. In fact, experts have debated the value of this single parameter for 90 years, and if astronomers can measure its value with great precision, they’ll be one step closer to solving some of the other grand astronomical mysteries of our age. There’s just one problem: The measurements they’ve taken don’t agree. The discrepancy makes scientists question whether something is amiss in our understanding of the universe.

A lot of people say they would like to travel to Mars, but Zoe Townsend doesn’t just talk the talk. As a mechanical engineer at CERN, she knows the importance of putting ideas to the test. To see if she could actually handle the unique challenges posed by living and doing science on another planet, Townsend spent 12 days on a simulated Mars mission in the deserts of Utah.

Scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory are building the world’s largest digital camera for astronomy and astrophysics — a minivan-sized 3200-megapixel “eye” of the future Large Synoptic Survey Telescope that will see light in 2022. In the meantime, the lab has completed its work on a miniature version that will soon be used for testing the telescope and taking LSST’s first images of the night sky. ComCam will help test the observatory once it is installed in Chile later this year.