Eideard

A 10-year study has revealed that the electron is very spherical indeed.

To be precise, the electron differs from being perfectly round by less than 0.000000000000000000000000001 cm. To put that in context; if an electron was the size of the solar system, it would be out from being perfectly round by less than the width of a human hair.

The Imperial College team behind the research, which was conducted on molecules of ytterbium flouride, used a laser to make measurements of the motion of electrons, and in particular the wobble they exhibit when spinning. They observed no such wobble, implying that the electron is perfectly round at the levels of precision available, reflected in the figure above…

The next step is to up that precision level even further, using new methods to cool the molecules to extremely low temperatures and control their motion. The results are important in the study of antimatter, and particularly the positron — which should behave identically to the electron but with an opposite electrical charge. If more differences can be found, it could help to explain why far less antimatter has been discovered in the universe than predicted by theory.

Keep on rockin’. Just imagine what sort of rotation could be achieved with spheres like this as the contact points in a bearing race?

A space telescope has accidentally spotted thunderstorms on Earth producing beams of antimatter.

Such storms have long been known to give rise to fleeting sparks of light called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes.

But results from the Fermi telescope show they also give out streams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons…

It deepens a mystery about terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, or TGFs – sparks of light that are estimated to occur 500 times a day in thunderstorms on Earth. They are a complex interplay of light and matter whose origin is poorly understood…

The Fermi space telescope is designed to capture gamma rays from all corners of the cosmos, and sports specific detectors for short bursts of gamma rays that both distant objects and TGFs can produce…

“One of the great things about the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor is that it detects flashes of gamma rays all across the cosmic scale,” explained Julie McEnery, Fermi project scientist at Nasa.

“We see gamma-ray bursts, one of the most distant phenomena we know about in the Universe, we see bursts from soft gamma-ray repeaters in our galaxy, flashes of gamma rays from solar flares, our solar neighbourhood – and now we’re also seeing gamma rays from thunderstorms right here on Earth,” she told BBC News…

But within that gamma-ray data lies an even more interesting result…”the discovery that TGFs produce not just gamma rays but also produce positrons, the antimatter equivalent to electrons…”

Steven Cummer, an atmospheric electricity researcher from Duke University in North Carolina, called the find “truly amazing”.

“I think this is one of the most exciting discoveries in the geosciences in quite a long time – the idea that any planet has thunderstorms that can create antimatter and then launch it into space in narrow beams that can be detected by orbiting spacecraft to me sounds like something straight out of science fiction,” he said.

“It has some very important implications for our understanding of lightning itself. We don’t really understand a lot of the detail about how lightning works. It’s a little bit premature to say what the implications of this are going to be going forward, but I’m very confident this is an important piece of the puzzle.”

RTFA for detail on the mechanisms and processes involved. As far as we know.

There are some talented, knowledgeable folks working away on this and waiting for their periodic reports is as tantalyzing as being a kid standing outside the neighborhood drugstore waiting for the next issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories to arrive.

Minos Experiment

Scientists have made their most accurate measurement yet of the mass of a mysterious neutrino particle. Neutrinos are sometimes known as “ghost particles” because they interact so weakly with other forms of matter.

Previous experiments had shown that neutrinos have a mass, but it was so tiny that it was very hard to measure.

Using data from the largest ever survey of galaxies, researchers put the mass of a neutrino at no greater than 0.28 electron volts. This is less than a billionth of the mass of a single hydrogen atom, the scientists say.

Their nickname is fitting: a neutrino is capable of passing through a light-year (about six trillion miles) of lead without hitting a single atom…

The neutrino particle comes in three “flavours”: muon, tau and electron. In a recent experiment, physicists caught a neutrino in the act of changing from one type to another…

Scientists used the largest ever 3D map of galaxies in the Universe, based on data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

They were able to determine a new upper limit for the neutrino particle by analysing the distribution of galaxies across the Universe…

I didn’t see any notice taken of angels by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Not even by on pinheads.