UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Artist's impression of the New Horizons spacecraft encountering a Kuiper Belt Object. Credit: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

Images taken by NASA’s New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto, and now the Kuiper Belt, have given scientists an unexpected tool for measuring the brightness of all the galaxies in the universe, said a Rochester Institute of Technology researcher in a paper published this week in Nature Communications.

In the study, “Measurement of the Cosmic Optical Background using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager on New Horizons,” lead author Michael Zemcov used archival data from the instrument onboard New Horizons—the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI—to measure visible light from other galaxies. The light shining beyond the Milky Way is known as the cosmic optical background. Zemcov’s findings give an upper limit to the amount of light in the cosmic optical background.

“Determining how much light comes from all the galaxies beyond our own Milky Way galaxy has been a stubborn challenge in observational astrophysics,” said Zemcov, assistant professor in RIT’s School of Physics and Astronomy and member of RIT’s Center for Detectors and Future Photon Initiative.

Light from the cosmic optical background can reveal the number and location of stars, how galaxies work and give insights into the peculiar nature of exotic physical processes, such as light that may be produced when dark matter decays. Dark matter is the invisible substance thought to comprise 85 percent of matter in the universe.

“This result shows some of the promise of doing astronomy from the outer solar system,” Zemcov said. “What we’re seeing is that the optical background is completely consistent with the light from galaxies and we don’t see a need for a lot of extra brightness; whereas previous measurements from near the Earth need a lot of extra brightness. The study is proof that this kind of measurement is possible from the outer solar system, and that LORRI is capable of doing it.”

Spacecraft in the outer solar system give scientists virtual front-row seats for observing the cosmic optical background. The faint light from distant galaxies is hard to see from the inner solar system because it is polluted by the brightness of sunlight reflected off interplanetary dust in the inner solar system.

Cosmic dust is sooty bits of rock and small debris that moved, over time, from the outer solar system toward the sun. Scientists launching experiments on sounding rockets and satellites must account for the dust that makes the Earth’s atmosphere many times brighter than the cosmic optical background.

NASA’s New Horizons mission has been funded through 2021, and Zemcov is hopeful for the chance to use Long Range Reconnaissance Imager to re-measure the brightness of the cosmic optical background.

“NASA sends missions to the outer solar system once a decade or so,” Zemcov said. “What they send is typically going to planets and the instruments onboard are designed to look at them, not to do astrophysics. Measurements could be designed to optimize this technique while LORRI is still functioning.”

Zemcov’s method harkens back to NASA’s first long distance missions Pioneer 10 and 11 in 1972 and 1974. Light detectors on the instruments measured the brightness of objects outside the Milky Way and made the first direct benchmark of the cosmic optical background.

“With a carefully designed survey, we should be able to produce a definitive measurement of the diffuse light in the local universe and a tight constraint on the light from galaxies in the optical wavebands,” Zemcov said.

Archived data from New Horizon’s Long Range Reconnaissance Imager show “the power of LORRI for precise low-foreground measurements of the cosmic optical background,” Zemcov wrote in the paper.

Chi Nguyen, a Ph.D. student in RIT’s astrophysical sciences and technology program, mined data sets from New Horizons’ 2006 launch, Jupiter fly-by and cruise phase. She isolated four different spots on the sky between Jupiter and Uranus, captured in 20

07, 2008 and 2010, that met their criteria: looking away from the solar system and looking out the galaxy.

Poppy Immel, an undergraduate majoring in math and computer science, generated the data cuts and determined the photometric calibration of the instrument. Other co-authors include Asantha Cooray from University of California Irvine; Carey Lisee from Johns Hopkins University; and Andrew Poppe from UC Berkeley. Zemcov is affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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Hunt for Why We Exist Turns to Weird Atomic Decay — **The germanium detector array is being lowered into the liquid argon. The physicists wanted to see if this germanium-76 ever decays without releasing the neutrinos — neutrinoless double-beta decay.**
**Credit: M. Heisel/GERDA collaboration**

A never-before-seen type of radioactivity could explain why matter, including humans, exists today. And now a team of physicists has launched an experiment to find the oddball phenomenon.

When the universe first formed some 13.7 billion years ago, current theories say that equal amounts of matter and its bizarre cousin, antimatter, should have been produced during the Big Bang. Physicists know that when the two come into contact, they annihilate each other — poof. If that were the case, though, nothing should exist except photons and neutrinos. And yet, here we are. Calculations show there was a tiny bit more matter than antimatter — enough so that things exist — but why?

One way to explain this matter-antimatter asymmetry is to look for some difference between the two, besides charge, that could explain matter's advantage. It's a big question in contemporary physics, because otherwise matter and antimatter should, per contemporary theories, behave the same way. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

Weird neutrinos

In this new study, physicists are seeking so-called neutrinoless double-beta decay. Normally, some radioactive atoms' unstable nuclei will lose a neutron via beta decay — the neutron transforms into a proton by releasing an electron and a tiny particle called an electron antineutrino. A mirror image can also occur, in which a proton turns into a neutron, releasing a positron and an electron neutrino — the normal-matter counterpart to the antineutrino. Double-beta decay happens when two electrons and two antineutrinos (the antimatter counterparts of neutrinos) are released: basically, the beta decay happens twice. Scientists have long theorized a neutrinoless version of this process — something that would suggest that the two neutrinos annihilated each other before being released from the atom. Essentially, the neutrino behaves as its own antimatter sibling.

(Particles of matter that are their own antiparticles are called Majorana fermions, after the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, who hypothesized their existence in 1937.)

If neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently from each other, that could help to explain why all matter wasn't annihilated at the instant the universe formed. [5 Elusive Particles That May Lurk in the Universe]

Detecting decay

Finding this odd event though, is hard to do, because there's so much background "noise," said Bernhard Schwingenheuer, the spokesman for the GERmanium Detector Array (GERDA) collaboration. The background "noise" comes largely from cosmic rays.

In the experiment, physicists had to account for background noise, mostly from cosmic rays. So they covered the inner walls of the water tank surrounding the liquid argon with a reflecting foil to improve light detection and allow for the identification of cosmic muons (formed when cosmic rays interact with Earth's atmosphere).
**Credit: K. Freund/GERDA collaboration**

So the physicists turned to GERDA. Nestled in an underground lab in Italy, the GERDA experiment consists of detectors in a bath of liquid argon that is enriched with the isotope germanium-76, which is mildly radioactive. It has a half-life of 1.78 x 10²¹ years (or 1.78 billion trillion years) — meaning that it takes that amount of time for half of its atoms to turn into selenium, which is many orders of magnitude longer than the universe's 14-billion-year age.

Usually, germanium will emit two electrons and two electron antineutrinos — the ordinary double-beta process — when it transforms via its slow decay. The physicists wanted to see if this ever happens without releasing the neutrinos: the long-sought neutrinoless double-beta decay.

With such a long half-life, one might think it would take too long to see this happen, but a half-life is a probabilistic phenomenon. This is why the experimenters used some 84 lbs. of germanium mixed with the liquid argon: that yields about 4.5 x 10²⁵ (or 45 trillion trillion) atoms, which means at least a few of them should undergo the decay while scientists are watching.

The GERDA team gathered data for about seven months, from December 2015 until June 2016. They didn't find the decay, but they could put a lower limit on how often the decay happens: It has a half-life of 5.3 x 10²⁵years, which means you'd have a 50-50 chance of seeing a single atom do it in that amount of time.

Extending the Standard Model

If they find it, that would mean that neutrinos are their own antiparticle, like photons — the neutrinoless decay couldn't happen unless that were the case. It also means that this kind of radioactive decay is not symmetrical. Recall that beta decay has a mirror image — either electrons and antineutrinos or positrons and neutrinos are emitted. If the double-beta decay isn't symmetrical, that means that neutrinos and antineutrinos behave differently. This isn't true of other kinds of particle-antiparticle pairs, as far as anyone knows.

This phenomenon would affect the Standard Model, which has been a wildly successful way to describe particle physics, but it's clearly incomplete. The model predicted the existence of the Higgs boson particle. However, Schwingenheuer noted that there is evidence that neutrinos have a tiny mass (only discovered in 1998, which won the Nobel in 2015) and that dark matter exists — indicating that the Standard Model isn't the last word.

"If neutrinoless double-beta decay is observed, it helps solve a couple of problems," said Philip Barbeau, an assistant professor of physics at Duke University in an email to Live Science. "For one, it helps to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. It also helps explain why neutrino masses are so surprisingly small. We would also get an idea of the neutrino masses as well, as the decay rate is related to the mass scale of the neutrinos."

The question then becomes what kind of physics lies beyond it. The GERDA experiment has yet to reveal the decay that the researchers seek, but that doesn't mean it won't in the future, Schwingenheuer said. And it would be difficult to rule it out entirely, because it's possible that the timescale is just longer than they think. Right now, they've set a lower limit on the half-life for this decay, but further experimental runs could push that number up.

As for what happens if they don't see the odd decay after many runs, Barbeau said it might not be a deal breaker for new models. "We don't go back to the drawing board from the point of view of the underlying theories. We just won't know whether neutrinos are Majorana or not."

The research is detailed in the April 6 issue of the journal Nature.

Original article on Live Science.