‘Tis the season for friends, family and funny physics fill-ins. Here at Symmetry, we’ve taken a page from Mad Libs, those short stories designed to trick you into learning parts of speech, and created some science-themed Lab Libs (to trick you into learning science). Simply fill in the blanks to create original science stories.
The Perks of Being an Astrophysicist
The Perks of Being an Astrophysicist
One of the perks of being an astrophysicist is getting to a telescope. For the Dark Energy Survey, we use a telescope at the Observatory high in the mountains of . The elevation means there are far fewer than usual, so it’s a(n) place to observe the night sky. We take pictures of millions of and floating out in space, which give us an idea of how the universe . To capture these images, we use a 570-megapixel camera, which is about the size of a . Compare that to the roughly 20-megapixel camera on the you probably have in your pocket right now! We’ll use all of these images to better understand dark energy, a mysterious that is the universe apart faster and faster. Whoever figures that puzzle out will probably win a(n) .
How to Build a Physics Experiment
How to Build a Physics Experiment
Building your own neutrino experiment is easy. First assemble a team of . Then design a particle detector full of , the latest technology in neutrinos, also known as particles. Fun fact: if a explodes somewhere in the Milky Way, your experiment should be able to see it! You’ll want to build your detector underground, to block out all the coming from the atmosphere. Consider building it inside of a . Hire some to carefully the detector in its new home. Connect all the coming out of the detector to the data acquisition system, chill everything to precisely negative degrees Fahrenheit, and wait for the to roll in! Make sure to give your project a name, like the “Grand Experiment.”
Discovering the Final Quark
Discovering the Final Quark
Dr. was a very physicist. Her team of graduate student(s) and Nobel Prize winner(s) had been searching for the quark, the final piece of the Standard Model puzzle, for what seemed like forever: . Dr. rubbed her together in anticipation. Other scientists had already five kinds, aka flavors, of quarks: the quark, the quark, the quark, the quark, and the quark. The results today would reveal whether they had succeeded at finding the most of the quarks. Hundreds of people had built a/n particle accelerator at the National Accelerator Laboratory in , and it had millions of particle collisions. Dr. and the team looked at the data and saw what they had hoped for: a ! The final quark had been found! The team celebrated by a bottle of and having a toast: “Hip, hip, !”
Gifts from the Sun
Gifts from the Sun
Did you know that billions of tiny are created in the core of the sun as a product of nuclear fusion every ? They in all directions, including towards Earth, but are so that they pass right through matter—even entire —without ever being noticed. need to use extra- detectors to catch even a few. These detectors are often filled with liquid . We want to learn as much as we can about their properties, such as how they are and how often they . This will help us understand how they with other in the Standard Model of and could even explain the role they played in the of the entire .
Upgrading a Collider
Upgrading a Collider
Early today, a group of at CERN’s Control Center turned off the Collider. The collider was used to discover the elusive boson. Over the past three years, collisions produced more than of to be studied in the quest to understand the and that make up everything around us. CERN’s accelerators will be stopped for about for major renovations and upgrades. For example, technicians will replace of the collider’s , crucial components that accelerate and subatomic particles. They’ll also install new , which will enable the collider to at higher energies than ever before!
