Two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, on the French-Swiss border, appear to confirm the existence of a subatomic particle, the Madala boson, that for the first time could shed light on one of the great mysteries of the universe - dark matter.

The Madala boson follows the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 "but the particles differ remarkably," said the team leader Bruce Mellado of South Africa's Witwatersrand University School of Physics. The Madala boson is heavier and disintegrates into the Higgs boson. "The Higgs boson in the Standard Model of physics is not able to explain several things, such as dark matter," Mellado added.

"The Madala boson is important for our understanding of the universe. Through this we can communicate with dark matter - we don't have an object that can do that. This could be the first," said Mellado. The boson appears to interact with energy that cannot be explained.

Mellado will summarize the reappearance of these features in the features in the proton-proton collision data collected during Run I by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider that were used to formulate the Madala hypothesis, and its implications.

These features in the data were interpreted as being due to the existence of a new scalar, the Madala boson, with a mass around 270 GeV. A conservative statistical combination yielded a three sigma effect. The ATLAS and CMS collaboration have just released new data at the international conference ICHEP2016.

In particular, Mellado will discuss a prediction, namely of the production of anomalously large 4 W bosons, leading to a striking and unequivocal signature.

Dark matter is the new frontier in physics, Mellado said, and scientists were racing to work out what it is. The Chinese and Japanese had declared intentions of building colliders that could be used to search for the identity of dark matter and dark energy. A team of 35 University of the Witwatersrand scientists today hosts a series of seminars about the Madala boson (Zulu for "old"), followed by other seminars in the US, UK, China and India.

The Daily Galaxy via wits.ac.za

Image credit: CERN

China is accelerating efforts to design and build a manned deep-sea platform to help it hunt for minerals in the South China Sea, one that may also serve a military purpose in the disputed waters, joining an exclusive club of countries that are capable of achieving human access to the deep sea. The other countries are the United States, Russia, France and Japan. The achievement will allow China to explore more than 99.8% of the ocean floor, Liu Cigui, director China's State Oceanic Administration (SOA), told the media.

China is accelerating efforts to design and build an oceanic “space station” would be located as much as 3,000 meters (9,800 feet) below the surface of the South China Sea, according to a recent Science Ministry presentation viewed by Bloomberg.

The project was mentioned in China's current five-year economic plan released in March and ranked number two on a list of the top 100 science and technology priorities.

"Having this kind of long-term inhabited station has not been attempted this deep, but it is certainly possible," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Manned submersibles have gone to those depths for almost 50 years. The challenge is operating it for months at a time."

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says the South China Sea has proved and probable reserves of about 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. China Cnooc chairman estimated the South China Sea holds around 125 billion barrels of oil and 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Modern nuclear attack submarines like the American Seawolf class are estimated to have a test depth of 490 m (1,600 ft), which would imply a collapse depth of 730 m (2,400 ft). Test depth is the maximum depth at which a submarine is permitted to operate under normal peacetime circumstances, and is tested during sea trials.

In June 2012, China's manned submersible Jiaolong successfully completed its deepest test dive, to 7,020 meters in the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific Ocean.

Researchers at Shanghai Ocean University have also developed a submersible movable laboratory capable of operating at more than 13,000 feet underwater.

Deepsea challenger has gone to the bottom of the ocean On March 26, 2012, James Cameron reached the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. The maximum depth recorded during this record-setting dive was 10,908 meters (35,787 ft).

Nearly 50% of the world's oceans are deeper than 4 kilometers, which provides vast areas for concealment and storage. Concealment provided by the sea also provides the opportunity to quickly engage remote assets that may have been dormant and undetected for long periods of time, while its vastness allows simultaneous operation across great distances.

The Daily Galaxy via Bloomberg, Nextbigfuture, China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, DARPA

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Scientists are speculating that virtually all of Earth's life-giving carbon could have come from a collision about 4.4 billion years ago between Earth and an embryonic planet similar to Mercury, approximately 100 million years after Earth formed.

In a new study this week in Nature Geoscience, Rice petrologist Rajdeep Dasgupta and colleagues offer a new answer to a long-debated geological question: How did carbon-based life develop on Earth, given that most of the planet's carbon should have either boiled away in the planet's earliest days or become locked in Earth's core?

“The challenge is to explain the origin of the volatile elements like carbon that remain outside the core in the mantle portion of our planet,” said Dasgupta, who co-authored the study with lead author and Rice postdoctoral researcher Yuan Li, Rice research scientist Kyusei Tsuno and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute colleagues Brian Monteleone and Nobumichi Shimizu.

Dasgupta's lab specializes in recreating the high-pressure and high-temperature conditions that exist deep inside Earth and other rocky planets. His team squeezes rocks in hydraulic presses that can simulate conditions about 250 miles below Earth's surface or at the core-mantle boundary of smaller planets like Mercury.

“Even before this paper, we had published several studies that showed that even if carbon did not vaporize into space when the planet was largely molten, it would end up in the metallic core of our planet, because the iron-rich alloys there have a strong affinity for carbon,” Dasgupta said.

Earth's core, which is mostly iron, makes up about one-third of the planet's mass. Earth's silicate mantle accounts for the other two-thirds and extends more than 1,500 miles below Earth's surface. Earth's crust and atmosphere are so thin that they account for less than 1 percent of the planet's mass. The mantle, atmosphere and crust constantly exchange elements, including the volatile elements needed for life.

If Earth's initial allotment of carbon boiled away into space or got stuck in the core, where did the carbon in the mantle and biosphere come from?

“One popular idea has been that volatile elements like carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and hydrogen were added after Earth's core finished forming,” said Li, who is now a staff scientist at Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Any of those elements that fell to Earth in meteorites and comets more than about 100 million years after the solar system formed could have avoided the intense heat of the magma ocean that covered Earth up to that point.

“The problem with that idea is that while it can account for the abundance of many of these elements, there are no known meteorites that would produce the ratio of volatile elements in the silicate portion of our planet,” Li said.

In late 2013, Dasgupta's team began thinking about unconventional ways to address the issue of volatiles and core composition, and they decided to conduct experiments to gauge how sulfur or silicon might alter the affinity of iron for carbon. The idea didn't come from Earth studies, but from some of Earth's planetary neighbors.

“We thought we definitely needed to break away from the conventional core composition of just iron and nickel and carbon,” Dasgupta recalled. “So we began exploring very sulfur-rich and silicon-rich alloys, in part because the core of Mars is thought to be sulfur-rich and the core of Mercury is thought to be relatively silicon-rich.

schematic of proto Earth's merger with a Mercury-like planetary embryo
A schematic depiction of proto Earth's merger with a potentially Mercury-like planetary embryo, a scenario supported by new high pressure-temperature experiments at Rice University.

Magma ocean processes could lead planetary embryos to develop silicon- or sulfur-rich metallic cores and carbon-rich outer layers. If Earth merged with such a planet early in its history, it could explain how Earth acquired its carbon and sulfur.

“It was a compositional spectrum that seemed relevant, if not for our own planet, then definitely in the scheme of all the terrestrial planetary bodies that we have in our solar system,” he said.

The experiments revealed that carbon could be excluded from the core — and relegated to the silicate mantle — if the iron alloys in the core were rich in either silicon or sulfur.

“The key data revealed how the partitioning of carbon between the metallic and silicate portions of terrestrial planets varies as a function of the variables like temperature, pressure and sulfur or silicon content,” Li said.

The team mapped out the relative concentrations of carbon that would arise under various levels of sulfur and silicon enrichment, and the researchers compared those concentrations to the known volatiles in Earth's silicate mantle.

“One scenario that explains the carbon-to-sulfur ratio and carbon abundance is that an embryonic planet like Mercury, which had already formed a silicon-rich core, collided with and was absorbed by Earth,” Dasgupta said. “Because it's a massive body, the dynamics could work in a way that the core of that planet would go directly to the core of our planet, and the carbon-rich mantle would mix with Earth's mantle.

“In this paper, we focused on carbon and sulfur,” he said. “Much more work will need to be done to reconcile all of the volatile elements, but at least in terms of the carbon-sulfur abundances and the carbon-sulfur ratio, we find this scenario could explain Earth's present carbon and sulfur budgets.”

The research was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

The Daily Galaxy via Rice University

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“Actually, it's quite possible that the planet has already been in some way imaged,” says Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute. “That happened with Uranus, Neptune and Pluto — they were observed but not understood before they were actually detected. Who knows, proof of Planet X {or Planet 9} may already exist in some observatory archive.”

Scott Shepard's team has been se arching for proof of Planet 9 using the Dark Energy Camera on the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tollolo Inter-American Observatory in the southern Atacama region of Chile (below) . They have also collected data on distant solar system objects with the Japanese Hyper Surpime Camera on the 8-meter Subaru telescope in Hawaii. (National Optical Astronomical Observatory)

Shepard is considering an alternative theory that involves a Planet 9 exoplanet that had been been kicked out of another nearby solar system that formed in the general vicinity of ours. Such things are known to happen.

“If this turned out to be the case, then we'd know that there were other suns being formed nearby our sun,” Shepard said. “It would have to be a very dense solar environment, and that would also tell us a lot about the formation of our solar system.”

Object V774104 shown at the top of the page was discovered in late October, 2015, and is one of the most distant objects ever detected in the solar system. It appears to be about half the size of Pluto, but with an orbit two to three times wider than Pluto's. (Scott Sheppard, Chad Trujillo and Dave Tholen: Subaru Telescope)

Sheppard's team is conducting the deepest survey so far for objects beyond Neptune and the Kuiper Belt, a circumstellar disk that lies some 30 to 50 times as far as the Earth is from the sun. It is filled with dwarf planets asteroids, comets, and balls of frozen compounds — remnants of the earliest days of the evolution of the solar system. The Kuiper Belt is the region that includes Pluto, the now dwarf planet demoted with heated debate  several years ago.

The team has observed nearly 10 percent of the sky using some of the largest and most advanced telescopes and cameras in the world. As they find and confirm these distant and faint objects, they analyze whether their discoveries fit into the larger theories about how interactions with a massive distant planet could have shaped the outer Solar System.

“Right now we are dealing with very low-number statistics, so we don't really understand what is happening in the outer Solar System,” Sheppard said. “Greater numbers of extreme trans-Neptunian objects must be found to fully determine the structure of our outer Solar System.”

He said that although astronomers believe there are thousands of these small objects, only about 15 have been positively identified. One discovered by Sheppard and Trujillo in 2014 — designated 2012 VP113 but nicknamed “Biden” — has the most distant known orbit in our solar system.

At the same time, Sheppard and Trujillo noticed that the handful of known extreme trans-Neptunian objects all clustered together and moved at similar orbital angles. These unusual dynamics lead the astronomers to propose that a substantial planet might be shepherding the smaller objects through its gravitational pull.

The search for Planet 9 is not the first to use the orbits of other bodies as a signpost to another planet. Indeed, Sheppard said that “we are now in a similar situation as in the mid-19th century when Alexis Bouvard noticed Uranus' orbital motion was peculiar, which eventually led to the discovery of Neptune.”

The other team most deeply involved with the Planet 9 hunt is led by Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology. They are the ones who made a big splash earlier this year with their predictions of a Planet 9, again based on the orbits of smaller objects.

In an email, we said that the newly detected object “fit perfectly into our Planet 9 hypothesis, so we remain pretty confident that the planet we predicted is indeed the right planet.”

Other groups searching the trans-Neptunian region for planets and information about the early solar system include the Canadian Outer Solar System Origins Survey and the international Dark Energy Survey.

Sheppard said that while the teams searching for Planet 9 are definitely in competition — a discovery would, after all, re-write the textbooks — they are also cooperating in terms of reporting back to each other if a region of the sky they study comes up with nothing to report. That way, he said, the teams won't duplicate efforts where there is no promise of reward.

While Sheppard's and Brown's teams have the advantage of access to more sophisticated instruments to work with, it is certainly possible that one of the others will make breakthroughs, and possibly THE breakthrough.

The Daily Galaxy via NASA and Marc Kaufmann

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Mysterious alien signals from a star system 94 light years from Earth picked up by Russian scientists last year did not come from an advanced extraterrestrial civilization, but from an old Soviet military satellite, says Russian news agency TASS, much to the disappointment of astronomers and alien enthusiasts across the world. But was it?

However, significant number of people around our globe are not convinced by TASS' version, believing it is one of the many cover ups aimed at deceiving us regarding the existence of advanced alien life from beyond our Solar System.  They question Russia's motives for the denial of the signals validity --you'll have to draw your own conclusions.

The Russian scientists who originally intercepted the enigmatic signals, said they believed that they came from a cluster of stars ninety-four light years away in the Hercules constellation. The signals' frequency and power suggested there was a good chance they were messages from smart extraterrestrials. Excitement in the scientific community suddenly spiked.

Scientists say that HD 164595 has a Neptune-sized planet that is about seventeen times the mass of Earth. Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, says its orbit is too tight it is too close to its sun for life as we know it to exist.

“We, indeed, discovered an unusual signal," said Alexander Ipatov, who works at the Russian Academy of Sciences in an interview with TASS. "However, an additional check showed that it was emanating from a Soviet military satellite, which had not been entered into any of the catalogs of celestial bodies. It can be said with confidence that no sought-for signal has been detected yet.”

On August 29th, we reported that an international team of astronomers detected signals coming from almost 100 light years away, that appeared to be a strong candidate for extraterrestrial contact, according to a document circulated by Alexander Panov, a theorectical physicist at Lomonosov Moscow State University --"a strong signal in the direction of HD164595, a planet system in the constellation Hercules was detected on May 15, using the RATAN-600 radio telescope (above) in the Russian Republic of Karachay-Cherkessia."

Subsequently, Eric Korpela, an astronomer with Berkeley SETI, downplayed the hype over this latest signal in a note reported by VOX on the Berkeley SETI website. "All in all, it's relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint." Korpela continued:

"I looked over the presentation. I was unimpressed. In one out of 39 scans that passed over star showed a signal at about 4.5 times the mean noise power with a profile somewhat like the beam profile. Of course SETI@home has seen millions of potential signals with similar characteristics, but it takes more than that to make a good candidate. Multiple detections are a minimum criterio

"Because the receivers used were making broad band measurements, there's really nothing about this "signal" that would distinguish it from a natural radio transient (stellar flare, active galactic nucleus, microlensing of a background source, etc.) There's also nothing that could distinguish it from a satellite passing through the telescope field of view. All in all, it's relatively uninteresting from a SETI standpoint."

"If the transient claimed originates from beyond the Earth, then, given what we currently know of the parameters of the RATAN search, such events ought to be common. The fact that they are not frequently seen in continuum imaging surveys suggests that the RATAN transient is likely due to instrumental interference or to some other artifact of human technology. While absence of evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence is by no means evidence of absence, our GBT observations did not detect ongoing emission from the direction of HD 164595 between9.1 and 11.6 GHz to a sensitivity of ∼ 10 mJy (10σ).

"Single-epoch transients are by their nature hard to confirm ordeny, illustrating the need for confirming followup, either at a later time, or as part of the observing strategy (whether triggered follow-up of interesting sources, or some form of onoff observing). We intend to re-observe HD 164595 as part of the Breakthrough Listen target list, along with ongoing observations of targets selected using a range of criteria."

The Berkeley SETI team concluded that they "welcome opportunities for partnership in order to quickly validate and analyze candidate signals, to continue to develop tools and techniques, and to share our excitement with those who, like us, seek to answer the question, “Are we alone?”.

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