Month: October 2023

Space News for October 2023: OSIRIS-Rex, the Parker Solar Probe and Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon all making news.

The big news in space this month is the return of the OSIRIS-Rex probe from its seven-year long mission to the asteroid Bennu, see my posts of 21 October 2020 and 1 May 2021. During the probe’s more than yearlong study of the asteroid in October of 2020 the spacecraft made a pogo stick style bounce off of Bennu that succeeded in collecting an estimated 250 grams of the asteroid’s material. Once the spacecraft had gathered its precious cargo it ignited its rockets once more for the three-year journey back home.

Artist’s impression of the OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft’s touch and go collection of a sample of the asteroid Bennu. (Credit: Smithsonian Magazine)

On September 24th, as the school bus sized main probe passed by the Earth it dropped off a suitcase sized capsule that entered our atmosphere at around 8:40 AM Mountain Daylight Time. The capsule’s descent, including both drogue and main parachute deployment, were flawless and at 8:53 MDT the capsule landed at the US Army’s Proving Ground in Utah and within 30 minutes a NASA recovery team was on the spot and the capsule secured.

The re-entry capsule containing the sample collected by OSIRIS-Rex at Bennu as it was recovered in the Utah desert. (Credit: Flickr)

Taking the utmost care to prevent the capsule’s precious contents from becoming contaminated by anything of this Earth, the NASA personnel took it to a small, especially prepared clean room at the Army base. There the capsule underwent more procedures designed to prevent contamination in order to prepare it for its plane ride to the Johnson Space Center at Houston.

In order to prevent contamination of the material from Bennu the sample collected by OSIRIS-Rex was placed in this chamber which was itself inside a clean room at NASA’s Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston. (Credit: NASA Blogs)

That plane ride took place the very next day and now the samples of asteroid dirt are in Texas undergoing their initial evaluation. A public announcement of the results of those initial tests took place later in the month. In the years to come scientists all over the world will have their chance to study some of the material brought back from Bennu in the hopes of learning clues as to how our Solar system came into being as well as how some of the chemicals of life, basically carbon and water, came to our Earth.

NASA bigwigs discussing the initial results of the sample brought back by OSIRIS-Rex. The big news is that they collected a lot more material than they ever expected. (Credit: Ariziona Daily Star)

O’k so the capsule contained material from Bennu landed safely back here on Earth but what about the main OSIRIS-Rex space probe, what’s going to happen to it? Well, it’s still out there, after dropping off the capsule it fired it engines again and is now on it’s way to another asteroid, one named Apophis which the probe is scheduled to reach in 2029. By the by, that same year Apophis will also pass by our planet at one tenth the distance of the Moon.

The OSIRIS-Rex sample collection maneuver was so successful that some material didn’t get inside the container, see left center of image. NASA scientists are still glad to have it and will catalog everything before actually opening the main container to see what all’s inside. (Credit: Popular Mechanics)

Another NASA interplanetary probe has also been making some dramatic headlines is the Parker Solar Probe which continues to adjust it orbit taking it closer and ever closer to the Sun, see my posts of 7 June 2017 and 18 December 2019. Now just getting to the Sun is dangerous enough, its surface temperature is over 5,000º C after all and last year in September of 2022 the hazards of getting too close to the Sun increased dramatically.

In order to protect itself from the Sun’s heat the Parker Solar Probe has a very sophisticated Heat Shield. (Credit: Phys.org)

You see the Sun can be quite violent at times, remember it is really a million and a half kilometer wide hydrogen bomb that’s been going off for over 4 billion years now. Explosions on the Sun’s surface are common and can result in what are called Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) that can hurl billions of tons of plasma away from the Sun. And the closer you get to the Sun the more likely it is that sooner or later you’ll get hit by a CME.

A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) larger than the Sun itself. Such explosions are really very common and can cause considerable damage to our modern electronics based society. (Credit: EarthSky)

That’s exactly what happened to the Parker Solar probe last September. In fact that CME was one of the most powerful ever observed. Well protected by its massive heat shield Parker not only survived the two day long ordeal but the probe actually succeeded in filming the CME as it went by. You can watch that video by clicking on the link below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF_e5eYgJ3Y

The Sun’s eleven year sunspot cycle is expected to peak in 2025 or 26 and the Parker probe’s trajectory was designed so that it will make its closest approaches at just that time. So Parker will almost certainly encounter even more violent CMEs in the years to come. It’s important to learn all that we can about these powerful events because as our society grows ever more dependent on electrical power and electronics in general the threat of a CME striking our planet and causing massive damage to our infrastructure grows as well.

Just some of the many ways that a CME can cause damage here on Earth. (credit: Hindustan Times)

While the Parker Solar Probe faces extraordinary hazards as it gets ever closer to the Sun space is a dangerous place for any spacecraft. That danger was illustrated by what appears to be the fate of India’s Chandrayaan 3 probe that landed at the Moon’s south polar region just last month.

The Moon isn’t a comfortable place to live either. The Chandrayaan 3 probe and its rover had to endure the long Lunar day where temperatures can reach 200 degrees C but the equally severe Lunar night seems to have been too much for them. (Credit: NDTV)

The success of Chandrayaan 3 made India only the fourth nation to land a probe on the Lunar surface and the first to land near the south pole where it is hoped water ice may be hidden at the bottom of some craters, see my post of 9 September 2023. Chandrayaan landed at the start of the two week long lunar day, sending back priceless data on conditions at the South Pole. Chandrayaan even deployed a small rover vehicle that puttered around the main lander making further measurements.

The Chandrayaan 3 lander as photographed by its rover. (Credit: Space.com)

At the end of the lunar day both the rover and the main lander were ordered to go into a sleep mode for the two week long lunar night during which time the probe’s solar cells would not be able to generate power and the outside temperature could drop to well below -200º C. Even doing so there was no guarantee that either the lander or rover would survive the ordeal.

Hoping to survive the harsh Lunar night the Indian engineers put both Chandrayaan 3 and its rover into a sleep mode. It doesn’t appear to have worked. (Credit: YouTube)

At the moment it appears Chandrayaan 3 has not survived. Engineers at the Indian Space Research Organization (Isro) report that they have not received any signals from the spacecraft and hopes are diminishing that it will revive. Nevertheless Chandrayaan’s mission was a success, a success that told us a great deal about our Moon’s south polar region.

Is there ice at the Moon’s South Pole. If there is then that’s where the first long term human habitation of our satellite will begin. (Credit: SOEST Hawaii)

The knowledge sent back to Earth by missions like OSIRIS-Rex, Parker and Chandrayaan make taking the risks of those missions well worth the effort.

Astronomy News for October 2023: The James Webb Space Telescope begins to show off what it can do.

Lifted into orbit back in (December of 2021) the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spent its first months away from Earth calibrating its instruments while the world’s astronomers waited eagerly. Well JWST has been in operation for a little over a year now and NASA has taken the opportunity to release some of the more spectacular images sent back by the space telescope.

It may not look much like the telescopes we’re used to seeing but the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most powerful instrument ever for observing the Universe. (Credit:General Dynamics Mission Systems)

First a bit of a reminder, JWST operates as most large astronomical telescopes do by taking long exposure digital images of whatever astronomical object it is studying. Most of those ‘deep space’ objects are actually very dim and the only way to get good images is to open up the telescope’s camera and allow the light to gather photon by photon over a long period of time. The images are then computer enhanced to bring out the details the astronomers are interested in. In other words the pictures released by NASA are not what you would see if you actually looked into a telescope at the same object.

To the unaided eye the Milky Way is just a dim wisp of light across the night sky. But by taking a time exposure it becomes much more brilliant and impressive. (Credit: Dave Marrow Photography)

Another big difference between JWST and other telescopes, even the Hubble Space Telescope is that JWST views objects primarily in the infrared portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. This allows JWST to see details that are completely invisible to our eyes. That is the reason that JWST had to be placed more than a million kilometers from the Earth because the infrared light coming from both the Sun and the Earth would blind it if it weren’t protected. Again the digital images taken by the JWST in the infrared are then converted by a computer into visible images for astronomers, and the rest of us to see.

Infrared light, with longer wavelengths than visible light, is actually a much larger portion of the entire Electromagnetic spectrum than visible light is. (Credit: Study.com)

The first set of images released from the JWST team at John Hopkins Physics Lab was of the well known ‘Whirlpool Galaxy’ often referred to as Messier 51 or just M51. At a distance of 27 million light years from Earth this galaxy is a favourite target of amateur astronomers not far from the Big Dipper in the sky. While M51 is a typical spiral galaxy it happens to be facing our galaxy almost full on so that our view of its spiral arms is simply magnificent. A very beautiful image of M51 was taken by Hubble a dozen years ago and astronomers have been itching to get a view with JWST ever since.

A dozen years ago the Hubble space telescope took the image of the Whirlpool galaxy on the right. Now JWST has taken the image on the left. The increase in detail is obvious. (Credit: Business Insider)

Now they’ve done just that and the image is beyond expectations. One of the reasons JWST operates in the infrared is that infrared light can pass through the gas and dust that tends to blur the details in the spiral arms of galaxies like M51 in visible light. That means that JWST sees deeper into the galaxy, imaging structure never seen before. The same is also true of the small dwarf galaxy NGC 5195 located at the end of M51’s ‘tail’ and whose gravitational field is actually responsible for much of the structure of the Whirlpool’s spiral arms. Images such as JWST’s of the Whirlpool not only are beautiful but they give astrophysicists a lot of data to use in their efforts to understand how galaxies are structured and how they change with time.

The detail in this closeup of the JWST Whirlpool image can tell astrophysicists a lot about how galaxies are structured. (Credit: ESA/Webb)

The next astronomical object that the JWST team released images of was a lot closer to home, a mere 2,600 light years away. The Ring Nebula or M57 as it is known is located in the night sky near the bright star Vega and is in many ways a glimpse into the future fate of our own Sun. The star at the center of the ring was once about the same mass as our Sun but about a billion years ago it used up all of its hydrogen fuel and began to burn helium. In order to do that the star’s core had to get smaller and hotter which caused its outer regions to puff up making the star a ‘Red Giant’.

The Ring Nebula as seen by JWST. This is the most likely scenario for the eventual fate of our own Sun so as you might guess astronomers are very interested in all of the details. (Credit: Daily Express US)

Then, less than a million years ago the star started to run out of helium so again its core got smaller and hotter, so much so that its outer regions were pushed out from the star into interstellar space. This material was mostly ejected from the star’s equatorial region so it formed a ring around the original star, the Ring Nebula.

Stars spend about 90% of their life on the main sequence of the HR Diagram burning hydrogen. As they run out of hydrogen they begin to burn helium, becoming a red giant in the process. Eventually a star like our Sun will shed its outer layers, run out of helium and become a white dwarf. (Credit: Britannica)

Since the ring itself is made up of gas and dust JWST’s ability to see in the infrared makes it the perfect instrument with which to study M57. The images taken by JWST show an enormous amount to detail that was never seen before including about 20,000 dense clumps of matter and a halo of 10 concentric arcs with 400 spikes. JWST also discovered that the central star causing the ring is not alone, it has two smaller companion stars, one about 35 astronomical units (AU) from the central star, an astronomical unit is Earth’s distance from our Sun, and the other more distant at 14,400 AU.

Many star systems contain more than one star, our own Sun is actually in a minority. One of the few double stars systems that can be seen with the naked eye is in the Big Dipper, Mizar and Alcor. (Credit: Earthsky)

Like the images of the Whirlpool galaxy astrophysicists will have plenty to keep them busy analyzing what JWST has found at the Ring Nebula. Nebulas like the ring are not only important because they show our Sun’s future but also because the material ejected from such nebula is how heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen and Silicon get spread around the galaxy so that they can form planets like our Earth.

Carl Sagen liked to say that we were all made of star stuff and except for the hydrogen in your body all the other elements were made in stars. Objects like the Ring Nebula and supernova spread those elements throughout the galaxy so that they can form new planets and perhaps new life. (Credit: National Science Foundation)

The final set of images taken by JWST are of Supernova 1987A (SN1987A), the closest supernova to Earth in the last 400 years and the only supernova to date for which we have a picture of the star taken before it blew up. Supernova are rare events that only happen when a huge star, at least 20 times the mass of our Sun has used up all of the nuclear fuel available to it. When that happens the star’s core collapses into a neutron star or even a black hole. The rest of the star explodes in one of the most powerful events in the Universe.

The JWST image of supernova SN1987A. Only a very few stars are massive enough to explode the way this star did so there are only a few examples close enough for astronomers to study adequately. (Credit: Webb Space Telescope)

Obviously studying supernovas is a lot of fun but the problem is that they are so rare that detailed data is hard to get, most of the supernovas observed by astronomers are in galaxies billions of light years away. That’s why astronomers were so anxious for JWST to observe SN1987A. The Hubble space telescope had been observing the supernova for years and had watched as the shock wave from the explosion caught up to and slammed into material ejected from the star before it went nova.

Another comparison of Hubble (r) vs. Webb (l) of SN1987A. (Credit: Business Insider)

The images from JWST show that collision in even greater detail with a cluster of material that looks like a string of pearls. The JWST will continue to observe the dynamic changes around SN1987A while also searching for the neutron star that must have formed in the explosion but which so far has eluded detection.

It is thought that the Neutron Star left over after a supernova event becomes a Pulsar beaming radio waves like a lighthouse. If the beams aren’t pointed at you a Pulsar can be difficult to detect however and that seems to be the case with SN1987A. (Credit: aether.lbl.gov)

The images released by the team (at Johns Hopkins) are just the beginning of the marvels that astronomers hope JWST will reveal in the years to come. Just as Hubble altered and illuminated our view of the Universe JWST is sure to do the same.

Nobel Prizes for 2023 are awarded in Medicine, Physics and Chemistry

Every year during the first week of October the Nobel prizes are awarded for the sciences and this year the order of announcement was Physiology or Medicine on Monday the second with Physics on Tuesday the third and Chemistry on Wednesday the fourth. Not only did the Medicine prize lead off this year but the award was also arguably the most important and controversial of the three prizes. I’ll discuss each award in the order in which it was announced.

If only everybody lived by such a motto! (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

The announcement on Monday that the Physiology prize was awarded to University of Pennsylvania (UofP) researchers Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman was hardly a surprise. You see the pair’s research on messenger RNA (mRNA) as a means to develop vaccines is what allowed the quick fabrication of the Civid-19 vaccines by both Pfizer and Moderna. To date more than 650 million people have received a Covid-19 vaccine and the work of Drs. Karikó and Weissman is credited with saving millions of lives.

Doctors Katalin Kariko (l) and Drew Weissman (r), the 2023 recipients of the Nobel Prize for Medicine. (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

Thirty years ago such a result would have seemed very unlikely. Back then the problems of working with mRNA were so great that the possibility of using it as a vaccine appeared hopeless. RNA is a much more delicate chemical than its cousin DNA, which is why our bodies use DNA for long term storage of genetic information while RNA is used as a short-term messenger. At the same time experiments had shown that when RNA was injected into a lab animal the result was often a severe inflammation at the area of injection.

mRNA is manufactured in the cell nucleus from DNA. It then moves to the ribosomes where it is used to manufacture proteins. Hence ‘Messenger’ RNA. (Credit: Wikipedia)

It was for these reasons that in the mid-1990s Dr. Karikó lost all of the funding for her work and was refused a tenure track position at UofP. In fact she was almost kicked out of the university and forced to return to her home in Hungary. Only a chance meeting with Dr. Weissman, who was working on the human immune system and who had a secure source of funding, enabled Karikó to continue working on mRNA.

‘No bucks, no Buck Rogers’. It’s unfortunate but true. Modern science depends on funding, lot’s of it! (Credit: Imgur)

Even when the two researchers published their key results of how to modify mRNA and deliver it successfully into the body in 2005 few people took notice. It really is something of a miracle that the pharmaceutical community did begin to pay attention in time so that the Covid-19 vaccines could be developed and tested quickly enough to save millions of lives.

It took more than twenty years to develop the vaccine for polio, even longer for measles. But thanks to the work of Kariko and Weissman the Covid vaccine was ready and tested in less than two years! (Credit: Phila.gov)

Now for the controversy. As I mentioned above Dr. Karikó was officially kicked out of the UofP when she lost her funding and only managed to remain in the US thanks to her collaboration with Dr. Weissman. The question is, how much of her problems were also due to her being a woman, and an immigrant! Right now the university is justly praising Dr. Karikó for her work there despite having tried several times to fire her. Hopefully that was because of Dr. Karikó’s lack of funding, not her sex or nationality. Still the UofP and academia in general may want to take a moment to review their criteria for who gets funding and why!

The University of Pennsylvania is now celebrating the work of a scientist they almost got rid of. But at least they are admitting to that fact. Hopefully this incident will cause all universities to reconsider how they deal with their scientists. Ben Franklin, their founder, would certainly approve of that! (Credit: The Daily Pennsylvanian)

The awarding of the Physics Nobel on Tuesday was a lot less divisive. This year’s award went to Pierre Agostini, Anne L’Huillier, both originally from France along with the Hungarian born Ferenc Krausz for their work in generating high-speed laser pulses at the attosecond scale. Like a strobe light that captures movements so fast that they are just a blur to human eyes the team’s attosecond lasers allow scientists to actually see the movements of electrons in chemical reactions and solid state electronics.

Doctors Pierre Agostini (l), Ferenc Krausz (c) and Anne L’Huillier (r) were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for their invention of laser systems that can pulse at one quintillionth of a second. (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

Consider a water molecule for a moment, a single oxygen atom that “shares” the electrons of two hydrogen atoms. Well, back when I was in college we were taught that the electrons in a water molecule behaved something like a cloud, quantum mechanics allowed you to calculate probabilities of where they’d be but trying to actually see them, forget it, they just moved too fast.

Generating attosecond pulses may look complicated, because it is. Still its only with such short flashes of light that we can see what electrons are doing in atoms and molecules. (Credit: Phys.org)

It wasn’t until the early 2000s that Drs. Agostini, L’Huillier and Krausz developed lasers that could flash at the attosecond scale, fast enough to capture a solid image of a electron in motion. An attosecond by the way is one quintillionth of a second, that’s 10-18 or 0.000000000000000001 seconds. As a comparison there are about as many attoseconds in a single second as there are seconds in the current age of the Universe, 13.5 billion years.

There are about as many attoseconds in a single as there have been seconds in the lifetime of the Universe so far! (Credit: Insight IAS)

The development of attosecond light pulses has already enabled chemists to better understand how chemical reactions happen and therefore how to better predict their properties. At the same time a better understanding of how electrons behave in semi-conductor materials should help led to better solid-state electronics.

Just a few of the things that scientists can now clearly observe thanks to attosecond pulses. (Credit: DiMauro The Ohio State University)

Finally on Wednesday the Chemistry prize was announced and as with Physics it was a celebration of the small, only this time small in size rather than duration. The recipients of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry were Moungi Bawendi, Louis Brus and Alexei Ekimov, all Americans. These three scientists were honoured for their pioneering work in the development of nanocrystals, crystals whose size is measured in millionths of a meter and are also known as “quantum dots”.

For their achievements in nanotechnology the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Moungi Bawendi (l), Louis Brus (c) and Alexei Ekimov (r). (Credit: NobelPrize.org)

It was back in the 1980s that Drs. Brus and Ekimov first created quantum dots independently of each other and studied their properties. Then in the 1990s Bawendi discovered techniques to manufacture high quality nanocrystals in large quantity, thereby establishing one of the sectors of the current field of nano-technology. Today quantum dots are used in a wide range of products from QLED TV screens to imaging in biochemistry and even in medicine and increasing the efficiency of solar cells.

Because their are so small the colour of a quantum dots literally changes with its size. That’s what makes them so useful in modern electronics. (Credit: Samsung)

So we celebrate the achievements of the best in the fields of Medicine, Physics and Chemistry. Throughout the year the various sports each get their separate seasons and it seems like politics just goes on year round so I suppose we should be grateful that pure science at least gets some notice one week out of the year.

Physicists at CERN finally succeed in demonstrating that Anti-Matter falls in a gravitational field just as normal Matter does.

It was ninety-five years ago in 1928 that British Physicist Paul Dirac first suggested the possibility of a form of anti-electron, that is an electron with a positive rather than a negative electrical charge. The idea did not attract much attention until four years later in 1932 when Physicist Carl Anderson, who knew nothing about Dirac’s prediction, discovered just such a positively charged electron in the cosmic rays he was studying. In the years that followed many of the particles that physicists studied were found to have an opposite, anti-particle. Soon the whole ensemble was being referred to as Anti-Matter.

Dirac (l), Anderson (r) and the first evidence of the existence of anti-matter (m). (Credit: The Scientific Odessey)

As I said above anti-particles have the opposite electric charge of their ‘normal’ counterparts, so when exposed to an electro-magnetic field they always behave in exactly the opposite way as their matter counterpart does. This led physicist Richard Feynman to suggest in 1949 that anti particles could be described as normal particles going backward in time. If such a thing were real however, then wouldn’t anti-matter behave in the opposite way that matter does in a gravitational field as well? Shouldn’t anti-matter go upward in Earth’s gravitational field?

Luke in his landspeeder in the original ‘Star Wars’. Anti-gravity is as much a part of science fiction as aliens or time travel! But is it real? (Credit: Fandom)

It’s not that easy to determine how anti-matter behaves in a gravitational field. You see anti-particles annihilate instantly as soon as they come into contact with their particle counterpart, so they usually only last a tiny fraction of a second. Plus, since they are generated in high-energy collisions, in particle accelerators or cosmic rays, they are moving at close to the speed of light. Combined that makes it all but impossible to measure the tiny effect of gravity on anti-particles.

A typical high energy event recorded at CERN. All this happened in less than a trillionth of a second and while half of the traces you see are from anti-matter try measuring the tiny effect on them that gravity has! (Credit: Fermilab Today)

If anti-matter did possess anti-gravity however that would be a tremendous discovery, and not only just because anti-gravity is something people have wondered about, written about for hundreds of years. You see all of the models of particle physics we have tell us that the Universe should contain exactly the same amount of anti-matter as it does matter. In fact back in the big bang matter and anti-matter should have been created in exactly equal amounts and then quickly annihilated each other leaving a Universe of only particles of light.

Is there an Anti-Universe going backward in time from the Big Bang just as our Universe went forward. It would solve many problems in our understanding of the cosmos but it would also require anti-particles to exhibit anti-gravity in our Universe. (Credit: American Physical Society)

As far as we can tell however our Universe is almost entirely composed of matter, certainly our galaxy is only matter. If it wasn’t we would detect the telltale signs of matter anti-matter annihilation in the interstellar medium. We feel the same about other galaxies as well. For example if Andromeda were composed of anti-matter then the tiny amount of gas and dust between Andromeda and our Milky Way would again show the signs of annihilation.

The space between galaxies isn’t quite empty, so if Andromeda were composed of anti-matter there would be collisions and annihilation between its anti-particles and the particles of our Milky Way. Nothing like that has been observed by astronomers. (Credit: Science News)

If anti-matter had anti-gravity however then it would be repulsed by matter, eventually matter and anti-matter would segregate into a Universe and an anti-Universe. However, any kind of Anti-gravity would violate Einstein’s principal of equivalence, which is the basis for his General Theory of Relativity. But maybe the equivalence principal just doesn’t hold when you mix matter and anti-matter.

Actually first tested when Galileo dropped his balls from the leaning tower of Pisa, Einstein extended Galileo’s idea so that gravity and acceleration are exactly equal! (Credit: YouTube)

So physicists have long wanted to find out, did anti-matter have anti-gravity? As I said above it’s not an easy experiment to carry out. First you’d need a lot of anti-particles. Then you’d have to slow down your anti-particles, all while keeping them in a vacuum so that they don’t come into contact with, and annihilate normal particles. You also have the problem of the electric charge of the anti-particles because you see the electromagnetic field is so much stronger than gravity that even a refrigerator magnet, or the potential of a 9-volt battery would be enough to completely ruin your measurement. Combining charged anti-particles to form neutral anti-atoms would be the best way to solve that problem, but again, easier said than done.

The effect of a magnetic of Electric field on a charged sub-atomic particle is so much stronger than the effect of gravity that it makes gravity all but invisible. (Credit: YouTube)

The best place to find anti-particles is at a particle accelerator, like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the largest, most powerful atom smasher in the world currently. That makes CERN the best place in the world to try to measure the effect of gravity on anti-matter and Physicist Jeffery Hangst has spent the last thirty years designing and building the experiment to make that measurement.

Thw world’s largest and most power scientific instrument the LHC has already made numerous discoveries and now looks to discover how anti-matter behaves in a gravitational field. (Credit: AlpheaPedia Wiki)

One of the pieces of equipment they’ve built at CERN to accompany the LHC is the Extra-Low-ENergy-Anti-proton (ELENA) ring that is capable of delivering about seven and a half million anti-protons every 120 seconds while the LHC is operating. About half a million of those are successfully captured in a solenoid magnet, I said handling anti-particles wasn’t easy.

Anti-Protons are inserted into the ELENA ring at CERN and slowed down to reduce their energy and velocity making them easier to work with. (Credit: Michael Dudek)

After being captured the anti-protons are cooled and injected into a device named the ALPHA-g where they are combined with anti-electrons, the two combine to form electrically neutral atoms of anti-hydrogen. These atoms are then cooled further to about four degrees above absolute zero. At the end of this operation only about one hundred anti-atoms remain to be tested, like I said anti-matter isn’t easy to handle.

The Alpha-g experiment being installed at CERN. Anti-Hydrogen atoms were trapped in the center of the column and then allowed to either fall, or rise in Earth’s gravity. (Credit: Science)

Once cooling is completed the magnet field confining the anti-hydrogen atoms is turned off allowing them to either fall or rise due to Earth’s gravitational field. Which direction the anti-atoms went was ascertained by detecting the annihilation of the anti-atoms with normal atoms in plugs positioned above and below the containment solenoid.

The anti-Gravity data from CERN. The measured data, crosses, lies near but not exactly on the calculated normal gravity line, top line. It’s definitely not even close to the anti-gravity, bottom calculated line. (Credit: Anderson, Baker, Bertsche et al)

To make certain of the result the experiment was repeated a dozen times but each test showed the same result, anti-hydrogen, and hence anti-protons and anti-electrons fall in Earth’s gravitational field. Anti-matter dos not possess anti-gravity but the measurement did suggest that anti-matter falls more slowly than normal matter, only 75% as fast. The errors in the experiment are so large however that anti-matter falling at exactly the same rate as normal matter cannot be ruled out. The physicists at CERN are planning further experiments, and further refinements of their experiment to measure more accurately just how fast anti-matter does fall.

Leader of the Alpha collaboration at CERN Professor Jeffery Hangst spent 30 years designing and building the experiment that finally showed how gravity behaves in a gravitational field. (Credit: Alpha Experiment CERN)

If anti-matter does fall more slowly than matter that would still violate the Principal of Equivalence and any difference would still be a clue as to why anti-matter is so rare in our Universe. But for now at least we finally know that anti-matter does not possess anti-gravity. A shame really, that would have been so cool!