After the Big Bang: Project Explores Seconds that Shaped the UniverseJuly 13, 2006Kent State faculty and graduate students are among a team of physicists who recreated the material essence of the universe as it would have been mere microseconds after the Big Bang—a quark-gluon plasma. This huge insight allows scientists to study matter in its earliest form and comes from an experiment carried out over the past five years at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the giant crusher of nuclei located at Brookhaven National Lab, where scientists created a toy version of the cosmos amid high-energy collisions. Kent State is playing a vital role in this ongoing research partnership, which includes the University of California-Berkley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Academy of Sciences Nuclear Physics Institute. At the fundamental level, this research advances our understanding of what the universe is really made of and how the early universe evolved into the universe as we now know it. In addition, the development of the equipment and techniques necessary to conduct the research at RHIC will ultimately improve nuclear equipment training for young researchers. Presently, nuclear techniques are used extensively in cancer radiotherapy and non-destructive analysis of steel, oil samples, ceramics and many other materials. As our understanding, equipment and techniques improve, we are able to better treat cancerous tumors and conduct material analysis. The researchers' work has appeared in the journals Nuclear Physics A and Physical Review Letters, as well as the Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, and was presented at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. Links to the most recent articles are available at: http://arxiv.org/find/nucl-ex/1/au:+Collaboration_STAR/0/1/0/all/0/1 For more information about this project, contact Dr. Declan Keane at 330-672-2959, keane@kent.edu, or Dr. Spiros Margetis at 330-672-9739, smargeti@kent.edu. Kent State |
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| Related Big Bang Current Events and Big Bang News Articles Visual assistance for cosmic blind spots A bit of imagination on the part of a measuring instrument wouldn't be a bad thing. It could help to add data from areas where the instrument is unable to measure. Exoplanets clue to sun's curious chemistry "For almost 10 years we have tried to find out what distinguishes stars with planetary systems from their barren cousins," says Garik Israelian, lead author of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature. "We have now found that the amount of lithium in Sun-like stars depends on whether or not they have planets." Rapid star formation spotted in 'stellar nurseries' of infant galaxies The Universe's infant galaxies enjoyed rapid growth spurts forming stars like our sun at a rate of up to 50 stars a year, according to scientists at Durham University. 'Dropouts' pinpoint earliest galaxies Astronomers, conducting the broadest survey to date of galaxies from about 800 million years after the Big Bang, have found 22 early galaxies and confirmed the age of one by its characteristic hydrogen signature at 787 million years post Big Bang. Blast from the past gives clues about early universe Astronomers using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope have gained tantalizing insights into the nature of the most distant object ever observed in the Universe -- a gigantic stellar explosion known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB). Vanderbilt astronomers participate in new search for dark energy The most ambitious attempt yet to trace the history of the universe has seen "first light." The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), took its first astronomical data on the night of Sept. 14-15 at the Sloan Foundation telescope in New Mexico. James Webb Space Telescope Begins to Take Shape at Goddard NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is starting to come together. A major component of the telescope, the Integrated Science Instrument Module structure, recently arrived at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. for testing in the Spacecraft Systems Development and Integration Facility. To understand the universe, science calls on the ultrasmall Will the universe expand outward for all of eternity and end in a vast, dark, cold, sterile, diffuse nothingness? Or will the "Big Bang" - the gargantuan explosion that formed the universe 14 billion years ago - end in the "Big Crunch?" First Black Holes Born Starving The first black holes in the universe had dramatic effects on their surroundings despite the fact that they were small and grew very slowly, according to recent supercomputer simulations carried out by astrophysicists Marcelo Alvarez and Tom Abel of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, jointly located at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, and John Wise, formerly of KIPAC and now of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. First black holes kept to a strict diet, study shows A new supercomputer simulation designed to track the fate of the universe's first black holes finds that, counter to expectations, they couldn't efficiently gorge themselves on nearby gas. More Big Bang Current Events and Big Bang News Articles |
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