Last December CERN announced a collection of unexpected observations at the Large Hadron Collider. Scientists quickly submitted over 500 papers, each inventing a new way to explain the observations, which seemed to challenge the foundations of the long-standing but tottering Standard Model. Now, in a new paper uploaded last night, CERN makes it clear that the exciting December measurements were mere statistical blips, flips of the hadron coin so to speak.

Despite the discovery of the existence of the Higgs Boson on July 4, 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, puzzling questions about the nature of the universe remain unanswered. For example, the essential properties of neutrinos are still a mystery. And dark matter and dark energy, which together constitute 95 percent of the universe, are today still astonishing enigmas. The Higgs particle is unlike any other particle we have ever encountered. Why is it different? Are there more? Neutrinos are very light, elusive particles that change their identity as they travel. How do they fit into our understanding of nature? Are there new hidden dimensions of space and time?

Known particles constitute 1/6 of all the matter in the universe. The rest we call dark matter. But what is it? Can we detect these particles in our labs? Are there other undiscovered particles in nature? There are four known forces in nature. Are these manifestations of a single unified force? Are there unexpected new forces? Both matter and anti-matter were produced in the Big Bang, but today our world is composed only of matter. Why? Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating?

A similar red herring event occured in 2012 when the LHC to reach previously unachieved energies, the accelerator started up again after improvements, and ATLAS and CMS both saw extra photons summing to 125 gigaelectronvolts. Teams searched again a few months later to check their results—and continued to see photons at the exact same energy. They were definitely observing a brand-new particle. At the time, though, there remained a single unconfirmed piece of the Standard Model: ATLAS and CMS had found the Higgs boson, the final piece of the puzzle. The Higgs is a huge step toward understanding how particles acquire mass—and measured “theta one-three”—an important number that may lead to a better understanding of neutrino properties and nature's imbalance between matter and antimatter.

But, unlike the Higgs discovery, the photons announced in December 2015 were a blip of particularly interesting noise. “This is pretty unfortunate,” theoretical physicist Michele Redi wrote Wired in an email, “as it would have been the greatest discovery in several decades in our field.”

It seems likely that with the Higgs, we're seeing only the tip of the iceberg. The Higgs field seems to give mass to just some particles; others are still complete mysteries. Meanwhile, we're working to understand why there's matter and not antimatter everywhere we look. What's more, there are particles out there like neutrinos about which we are still almost completely ignorant. And then there's the elephant in the room—the “dark universe” of dark matter and dark energy.

The Daily Galaxy via CERN, Symmetry.org, Wired.com

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NASA has announced that the space agency has suspended future live TV feeds from the International Space Station. UFO theorists will now surely look at NASA's move as further confirmation after a live NASA video feed by the ISS was cut on July 9th as a blurry round object was seen descending from the upper-right corner on the live feed before the screen went dark as the UFO appeared to stop and a notice followed indicating technical difficulties. The incident was captured on a You Tube video that prompted alien hunters and conspiracy theorist to think that NASA was covering up the sighting.

 NASA spokesman Daniel Huot told the Daily News in an email that the camera's signal was simply interrupted. The video was part of an experiment researching how ordinary cameras function in the harsh environment of space. Huot said sometimes the cameras lose connection with satellites used to transmit video to the ground, which is what happened in this case.

"It's very common for things like the moon, space debris, reflections from station windows, the spacecraft structure itself or lights from Earth to appear as artifacts in photos and videos from the orbiting laboratory," Huot said.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA Video, YouTube, Nature World News

Image credit top of page: static.guim.co.uk

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"Our Milky Way had an encounter with a small galaxy or massive dark matter structure perhaps as recently as 100 million years ago," said Larry Widrow, professor at Queen's University, part of a team of astronomers from Canada and the United States who have discovered what may well be the smoking gun of such an encounter, one that occurred close to our position in the galaxy and relatively recently, at least in the cosmological sense. "We clearly observe unexpected differences in the Milky Way's stellar distribution above and below the Galaxy's midplane that have the appearance of a vertical wave -- something that nobody has seen before," Widrow added.

"Our part of the Milky Way is ringing like a bell," said Brian Yanny, of the Department of Energy's Fermilab. "But we have not been able to identify the celestial object that passed through the Milky Way. It could have been one of the small satellite galaxies that move around the center of our galaxy, or an invisible structure such as a dark matter halo."

"The perturbation need not have been a single isolated event in the past, and it may even be ongoing. Additional observations may well clarify its origin," added Susan Gardner, professor of physics at the University of Kentucky.

When the collaboration started analyzi ng the SDSS data on the Milky Way, they noticed a small but statistically significant difference in the distribution of stars north and south of the Milky Way's midplane. For more than a year, the team members explored various explanations of this north-south asymmetry, such as the effect of interstellar dust on distance determinations and the way the stars surveyed were selected. When those attempts failed, they began to explore the alternative explanation that the data was telling them something about recent events in the history of the Galaxy.

The scientists used computer simulations to explore what would happen if a satellite galaxy or dark matter structure passed through the disk of the Milky Way. The simulations indicate that over the next 100 million years or so, our galaxy will "stop ringing:" the north-south asymmetry will disappear and the vertical motions of stars in the solar neighborhood will revert back to their equilibrium orbits -- unless we get hit again.

The Milky Way is more than 9 billion years old with about 100 billion stars and total mass more than 300 billion times that of the sun. Most of the mass in and around the Milky Way is in the form of dark matter. 

Scientists know of more than 20 visible satellite galaxies that circle the center of the Milky Way, with masses ranging from one million to one billion solar masses. There may also be invisible satellites made of dark matter. (There is six times as much dark matter in the universe as ordinary, visible matter.) Astronomers' computer simulations have found that this invisible matter formed hundreds of massive structures that move around our Milky Way.

Because of their abundance, these dark matter satellites are more likely than the visible satellite galaxies to cut through the Milky Way's midplane and cause vertical waves.

"Future astronomical programs, will be able to map out the vertical perturbations in our galaxy in unprecedented detail," Widrow said. "That will offer a strong test of our findings."

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The Daily Galaxy via Fermi Lab

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National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Kepler-186f, seen here in an artist's rendering and discovered in 2014 by a team of astronomers, is one of more than 200 “exoplanets” that researchers say lie within the “habitable zone” of their stars and could potentially have life. (NASA image by Danielle Futselaar)

This figure shows the habitable zone for stars of different temperatures, as well as the location of terrestrial size planetary candidates and confirmed Kepler planets described in new research from SF State astronomer Stephen Kane. Some of the Solar System terrestrial planets are also shown for comparison. (Image by Chester Harman)