All go at the Large Hadron Collider!

There has been two important bits of news about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the worlds largest experiment which is devoted to the study of particle physics.

First up, the Experimental Particle Physics team here at the University of Sussex have now officially become part of the LHC team! The full story can be seen on the University News pages.

And secondly, scientists have successfully inserted protons into the collider (although no collisions have taken place as yet). The full story of that can be seen on the BBC News.

Activity on the Sun

The Sun has an 11 year cycle of activity, and for the last two years the Sun has been very quiet indeed. Last year had the second fewest number of sun spots - in only 1913 was the Sun less active (see this plot of inactivity).

So it has been nice to see a few sunspots on the Sun over the last few days, as shown in the SOHO observatory image below.

A nice image for sure... But I'm still looking forward a few years, when the Sun will (hopefully!) look more like the following image taken in November 2003!

Clocks go back at the weekend

Don't forget to change your clocks back on Sunday morning, the 25^th of October!

On Sunday morning at 2am, the clocks have to be changed back by one hour, as we change from British Summer time and back to the more traditional Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time as it is also known.

We change the clocks so that have more daylight in the summer evenings, and change them back so that we have some daylight to go to work (and, more importantly, school) in a winters morning.

Do you think we should continue to change the time on our clocks?

Cassini Scientist for a Day Competition 2009

Would you like to be a scientist for a day, and use the Cassini spacecraft which is orbiting Saturn?

The are a huge number of areas around Saturn that Cassini can be used to study in detail - the storms in Saturn's atmosphere, the rings that are divided into 33 different sections, and any one of the 61 moons that orbit the planet!

Scientists working on the Cassini Mission have chosen three key targets. These are:

• Saturn and its rings
• Tethys and its effect on the outer-most E-ring of Saturn
• Titan

Your challenge is to decide which of these is the most scientifically valuable, and make your case in 500 words. The competition is open to all students at school or college in the UK and Ireland, between the ages of 11 to 18.

Deadline for competition entries is the 30th October!

Full details, including links to the YouTube videos that will help you decide on your preferred target, are available at the Queen Mary University of London website.

X-treme Astronomy Seeing the Universe through X-ray Eyes

by Dr Darren Baskill of the University of Sussex

...is the next Institute of Physics South Central Branch (Brighton Area) lecture, and is to be held at the University of Sussex.

A beautiful clear night full of stars may look poetically peaceful, but it's the biggest illusion known to man. The Universe is violent almost beyond comprehension. Some stars you can see in the night sky are being consumed by their partners; others are violently collapsing in the biggest explosions known to man; and black holes are surrounded by disks of hot gas, the distorted remains of countless stars.
X-rays originate from wherever gas is heated up to millions of degrees in the most energetic phenomena we know of. During this talk you will see the universe as witnessed through the eyes of the latest generation of X-ray telescopes.

X-treme Astronomy - Seeing the Universe through X-ray Eyes
by Dr Darren Baskill of the University of Sussex
7pm, on Tuesday 13th October
Lecture Theatre 1A7
Pevensey 1 Building
University of Sussex


Admission is free and everyone is welcome. Details of how to get to the venue can be found here.

Image: XMM-Newton, Europe's X-ray Space Telescope

Chance to observe with Gemini!

Would your school students like to use one of the biggest telescopes in the world?!

The Gemini Observatory consists of a pair of identical telescopes, one in Chile and one in Hawai'i, and each one has a massive 8 meter diameter mirror! They are positioned on the planet so that the two telescopes can between them observe almost any part of the night sky. A quarter of the funding for Gemini is from the UK.

If your school would like to win the chance to remotely observe with Gemini, all you need to do is send an outline of what you would like to observe and why it is interesting (maximum 500 words) to ukgemini@astro.ox.ac.uk by the 16th of October, 2009! The competition is open to all students from UK schools and science clubs in years 11, 12 and 13.

For more details, please see the competition website.

October's Night Sky

October is traditionally the month when you notice that the Earth is moving through space, as this is the time of year when the nights are rapidly drawing in. As the month begins, the Sun is rising at 7am and setting at 18:30. By the end of the month, the Sun is rising an hour later and setting an hour earlier. Plus, we change the clocks back to normal on the 25th to give us some daylight in the morning, and so the sunset occurs another hour earlier. By the month's end, the Sun will be setting over Sussex at 16:30!

This is all because the Earth is tilted as it orbits the Sun. In summer, our side of the Earth is tilted towards the Sun; in winter, it is tilted away – and there is a difference of 47° between the two.

All this tilting also means that the summer triangle of stars is still visible at this time of year. Look directly upwards as soon as it goes dark and the brightest three stars you can see, covering quite a large patch of sky, are the summer triangle stars.

There are some amazing sights that can be seen in the summer triangle when using even a small telescope, such as the ring and dumbbell nebulae – the glowing remains of exploded stars. The star close to the centre of the triangle is a beautiful double star called Albireo – but you will need a telescope to be able to see this star as a pair, since they are so close together in the night sky.

At this time of the year the Milky-way, the city of stars within which we live, can be clearly seen for the first-half of the night from anywhere away from light pollution. The photograph to the left was taken from the outskirts of Brighton. The lower you look at the milky-way, the closer you are looking at the bright centre of our galaxy.

During October, Jupiter (as also seen in the photograph to the left) is rising in the south-east at sunset, and setting in the west at 2am when Mars is rising. Jupiter is the brightest object in the night sky at the moment (after the Sun and Moon, of course!), and if you go somewhere that is beautifully dark, away from any light pollution, you will be able to see your own shadow cast by the light reflected from Jupiter. As a guide, the Moon will be to the top right of Jupiter on the 26th of October, and to the top left on the 27th.

Take a look through a small telescope or binoculars, and you will be able to see up to four dots in a line around Jupiter. Those four dots are the four biggest and so brightest Moons of Jupiter, so bright that there were easily seen by Galileo 400 years ago with one of the first (and so very primitive) telescopes. Sometimes, one of those moons are hidden behind or in front of Jupiter – so just take a look an hour or two later to see if another moon has reappeared into view.

The darkest nights of the month will be from the 15th to the 25th of the month, when the Moon is close to new (the new Moon, when the Moon is in line with the Sun, occurs on the 18th of October). Full moon occurs on the 4th of October, and the 2nd of November, and so the sky is awash with moon light at the start and end of the month.

We hope you enjoy October’s beautiful night-skies! And if you want to see the night sky as it will be at any time on your own computer, I recommend that you download the excellent and free Stellarium software.