Bird’s Eye: We bring you the latest science news from the very big (we may have a ninth planet again!) to the very small. There are a lot of potential life-bearing planets out there (not that we have any way of reaching them, nor them us) and in Europe the hunt for the “God particle (aka the Higgs’ boson) narrows down, while in the US new (and bigger!) forms of anti-matter are created. And then we give you a useful (and incredibly fun!) interactive sliding scale to keep it all in perspective.
* Evidence Points To Brown Dwarf Orbiting Sun
An old theory has re-appeared due to new evidence…. Some scientists have stated that regular mass extinctions are due to a far sun orbiting brown dwarf that regularly sends fast moving objects such as comets at Earth every 26 million years or so…. We have been told that NASA’s infrared space telescope WISE will confirm Tyche’s existence and location within two years.
A just published article on CNN is stating that mounting evidence is pointing to a brown dwarf roughly 4 times the size of Jupiter is in fact orbiting our sun at a distance of roughly 15,000 times further than Earth is from the sun or…about 3 light months away.
* Cosmic census finds crowd of planets in our galaxy – Yahoo! News
Scientists have estimated the first cosmic census of planets in our galaxy and the numbers are astronomical: at least 50 billion planets in the Milky Way. At least 500 million of those planets are in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold zone where life could exist. The numbers were extrapolated from the early results of NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope.
* ‘God Particle’ May Not Exist If No Evidence Found Before 2013 Wired UK
If the Large Hadron Collider does not prove the existence of the Higgs boson in the next two years, physicists say the entire Standard Model theory of subatomic structure must be reassessed….“We know the Standard Model is wrong at some level,” said Thomas LeCompte, physicist and coordinator for the LHC’s ATLAS detector. “We know that something lies beyond that. The Higgs is the simplest and most elegant way to push it to the next level, but nature may have something else in mind.”
Dubbed the antihypertriton, the newfound antimatter is the heaviest yet detected. What’s more, it’s the first type of particle that contains what’s called an antistrange quark, which puts the antihypertriton in a new plane on the periodic table of elements…. After smashing together gold ions more than a hundred thousand times, researchers sifting through the particulate “rubble” found about 70 antihypertritons. The particle is about 200 milli-electron volts heavier than the previous most massive record holder, antihelium. “People think we are strange because everyone wants to turn things into gold,” said RHIC researcher Zhangbu Xu. “We turn gold into exotic antimatter.”
