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An orbiting star begins to eclipse its partner, a rapidly rotating, superdense stellar remnant called a pulsar. Image courtesy of Aurore Simonnet/Sonoma State University/NASA *************************************************************************** Jan. 26 (UPI) -- NASA made a first-of-its-kind discovery with its Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, spotting the first gamma-ray eclipses from a special type of star system. The agency shared the news with Nature Astronomy on Thursday after scientists researched a decade of observations from the telescope that can detect the most astonishing celestial events from gamma bursts to black holes. Gamma-ray eclipses were observed from a special binary star system that is orbited by...

Seventy years ago, Italian-American nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi asked his colleagues a question during a lunchtime conversation. If life is common in our Universe, why can’t we see any evidence of its activity out there (aka. “where is everybody?”) Seventy years later, this question has launched just as many proposed resolutions as to how extraterrestrial intelligence (ETIs) could be common, yet go unnoticed by our instruments. Some possibilities that have been considered are that humanity might be alone in the Universe, early to the party, or is not in a position to notice any yet. But in a recent study,...

Then there are all the suggestions that the UFOs are optical illusions, meteorological phenomena or electromagnetic events The Silly Season has come early this year. Normally it happens in August, when wicked people all over the northern hemisphere temporarily stop doing evil things to take their children to the beach and enjoy the last of the summer. With no bad news to report, desperate journalists will run any story, however silly. Why is it Silly Season in June this year? Because the US Department of Defence has announced that it will release a report on 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena' (UAPs), which...

The finding that fission releases huge amounts of energy launched a scientific and military race to understand and use this new atomic source of power Over Christmas vacation in 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch received puzzling scientific news in a private letter from nuclear chemist Otto Hahn. When bombarding uranium with neutrons, Hahn had made some surprising observations that went against everything known at the time about the dense cores of atoms—their nuclei. Meitner and Frisch were able to provide an explanation for what he saw that would revolutionize the field of nuclear physics: A uranium nucleus could...

Two big ideas often come up in discussions about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. One is the Drake Equation, which estimates the number of civilizations in our Galaxy whose signals we might be able to detect--potentially thousands, according to plausible estimates. The other is the so-called Fermi paradox, which claims that we should see intelligent aliens here if they exist anywhere, because they would inevitably colonize the Galaxy by star travel--and since we don't see any obvious signs of aliens here, searching for their signals is pointless. The Drake Equation is perfectly genuine: it was created by astronomer...

The Fermi Paradox By Tim Urban Facebook275k Twitter0 Google+0 Pinterest0 Everyone feels something when they’re in a really good starry place on a really good starry night and they look up and see this:Some people stick with the traditional, feeling struck by the epic beauty or blown away by the insane scale of the universe. Personally, I go for the old “existential meltdown followed by acting weird for the next half hour.” But everyone feels something.Physicist Enrico Fermi felt something too—”Where is everybody?”________________A really starry sky seems vast—but all we’re looking at is our very local neighborhood. On the very...

During the walk to the Fuller Lodge, the physicists discussed a recent spate of UFO sightings, and a cartoon in the New Yorker Magazine depicting aliens and a flying saucer. Although the topic of conversation moved on as the group sat down for lunch, Edward Teller recalls “in the middle of the conversation, Fermi came out with the quite unexpected question ‘Where is everybody?’…The result of his question was general laughter because of the strange fact that in spite of Fermi’s question coming out of the clear blue, everybody around the table seemed to understand at once that he was...

(Phys.org) —Scientists as eminent as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan have long believed that humans will one day colonise the universe. But how easy would it be, why would we want to, and why haven't we seen any evidence of other life forms making their own bids for universal domination? A new paper by Dr Stuart Armstrong and Dr Anders Sandberg from Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) attempts to answer these questions. To be published in the August/September edition of the journal Acta Astronautica, the paper takes as its starting point the Fermi paradox – the discrepancy between...

BROOKHAVEN, N.Y., May 9 (UPI) -- U.S. physicists say they're planning a new experiment in particle physics -- but first there's the small matter of moving a 50-foot-diameter magnet 3,200 miles. Along with colleagues from 26 institutions around the world, they are planning an experiment to study the properties of muons, tiny subatomic particles that exist for only 2.2 millionths of a second. But first the core of the experimental equipment, a complex electromagnet 50 feet in diameter, needs to be moved from the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to the department's Fermi National Accelerator...

This week marks the 70th anniversary of a turning point in human history. It was on December 2, 1942, that Enrico Fermi ordered the control rods pulled from the nuclear reactor he had built under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field stadium, thereby initiating the first artificial sustained-fission reaction in human history. A cryptic message flashed the electrifying news back to Washington. “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.” The consequences of Fermi’s success were profound. Within two and a half years, the Manhattan Project advanced to build both uranium-isotope-separation and plutonium-manufacturing facilities on...

Enrico Fermi This week marks the 70th anniversary of a turning point in human history.It was on December 2, 1942, that Enrico Fermi ordered the control rods pulled from the nuclear reactor he had built under the west stands of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field stadium, thereby initiating the first artificial sustained-fission reaction in human history. A cryptic message flashed the electrifying news back to Washington. “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.”The consequences of Fermi’s success were profound. Within two and a half years, the Manhattan Project advanced to build both uranium-isotope-separation and plutonium-manufacturing facilities on...

The story begins with a letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. The celebrated physicist warned the president that Nazi Germany was developing the makings of an atomic bomb. Roosevelt knew what would happen if Hitler got such a weapon. The president ordered a massive secret project to make sure the U.S. beat him to it. Scientists from all over the country were enlisted in the effort. Early in 1942 Enrico Fermi and a team of physicists gathered at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. Their goal was to develop a self-sustaining nuclear pile. This was the...

The Crab Nebula has shocked astronomers by emitting an unprecedented blast of gamma rays, the highest-energy light in the Universe. The cause of the 12 April gamma-ray flare, described at the Third Fermi Symposium in Rome, is a total mystery. It seems to have come from a small area of the famous nebula, which is the wreckage from an exploded star. The object has long been considered a steady source of light, but the Fermi telescope hints at greater activity. The gamma-ray emission lasted for some six days, hitting levels 30 times higher than normal and varying at times from...

Enrico Fermi’s paradox has occupied us more than occasionally in these pages, and for good reason. ‘Where are they,’ asked Fermi, acknowledging an obvious fact: Even if it takes one or two million years for a civilization to develop and use interstellar travel, that is but a blip in terms of the 13.7 billion year age of the universe. Von Neumann probes designed to study other stellar systems and reproduce, moving outward in an ever expanding wave of exploration, could easily have spread across the galaxy long before our ancestors thought of building the pyramids. Where are they indeed. Kelvin...

Rumours are emerging from the rival to the Large Hadron Collider that the Higgs boson, or so-called "God particle", has been found. Tommaso Dorigo, a physicist at the University of Padua, has said in his blog that there has been talk coming out of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, that the Higgs has been discovered. The Tevatron, the huge particle accelerator at Fermi - the most powerful in the world after the LHC - is expected to be retired when the CERN accelerator becomes fully operational, but may have struck a final blow before it becomes obsolete....

"Recent results from the Dzero experiment at the Tevatron particle accelerator suggest that those looking for a single Higgs boson particle should be looking for five particles, and the data gathered may point to new laws beyond the Standard Model. 'The DZero results showed much more significant "asymmetry" of matter and anti-matter — beyond what could be explained by the Standard Model. Bogdan Dobrescu, Adam Martin and Patrick J Fox from Fermilab say this large asymmetry effect can be accounted for by the existence of multiple Higgs bosons. They say the data point to five Higgs bosons with similar masses...

Fermi telescope finds evidence that positrons, not just electrons, are in storms on EarthWashington — Designed to scan the heavens thousands to billions of light-years beyond the solar system for gamma rays, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has also picked up a shocking vibe from Earth. During its first 14 months of operation, the flying observatory has detected 17 gamma-ray flashes associated with terrestrial storms — and some of those flashes have contained a surprising signature of antimatter.

Oak Ridge National Laboratories may not be the first customer that Nvidia will have for its new "Fermi" graphics processor, which was announced yesterday, but it will very likely be one of the largest customers. Oak Ridge, one of the giant supercomputing centers managed and funded by the US Department of Energy to do all kinds of simulations and supercomputing design research, has committed to using the GPU co-processor variants of the Fermi chips, the kickers to the current Tesla GPU co-processors, in a future hybrid system that would have ten times the floating point oomph of the fastest supercomputer...

Gamma-ray spike in Fermi telescope data hikes anticipation.The jury is still out on whether Fermi has spied dark matter.NASA/DOE/International LAT Team The murky hunt for dark matter has just got a little bit brighter. New gamma-ray results from the FERMI telescope fit with previous tantalizing hints of a detection of the mysterious stuff.Last year, a series of independent experiments caused a stir because they seemed to have detected signals of dark matter, which is believed to make up 85% of the universe's matter."There's been tremendous excitement about cosmic ray signals that have dark matter as one possible explanation," says Neal...

New data from two experiments -- one in space, one on a balloon floating above Antarctica -- hint at a tantalizing detection of dark matter, the mysterious stuff comprising 85% of the universe's matter. The evidence is a reported excess of high-energy electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, which could be created as dark matter particles annihilate or decay. The signal from Fermi, the orbiting gamma-ray telescope, is subtle, whereas that claimed by the balloon-borne Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter (ATIC) is much more pronounced. The differences are puzzling, but the findings -- according to some -- could herald the birth...