London, September 17 (ANI): The first collisions between subatomic particles will take place in the giant Large Hadron Collider (LHC) next week, among fears that it might create a doomsday-like scenario for our planet.

The LHC circulates particles in a 17-mile circumference underground tunnel straddling the French-Swiss border at The European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva, Switzerland, known by the acronym CERN.

According to a report in Telegraph, although there was much uproar last week about the first particles - protons - to whirl around the LHC at a shade under the speed of light, the real aim of the exercise is to bring counter rotating beams of particles into collision in the four "eyes" - detectors - of the machine to recreate conditions not seen since just after the birth of the universe.

This is the aspect of the experiment that has triggered all the angst and hand-wringing by doomsayers and Jeremiahs, who fear that the collisions will mark the end of the world, as it tumbles into the gaping maw of a black hole.

These fears have been dismissed as nonsense by Dr Evans, along with scientists such as Prof Stephen Hawking, who say that the end of the world is not nigh.

The original plan was to take 31 days from the first proton beams circulating in the LHC to smashing protons for the first time.

"We were going along at a real good lick," Dr Evans said of the days after particles first circulated.

But, the cryogenics that keep the great machine cooled went down on Friday, as a result of thunderstorms disrupting the power supply.

"We have had problems with the electricity supply for various reasons and the cryogenics is recovering from that, so we will not have a beam again, probably until Thursday morning," said Dr Evans.

The team now hopes to achieve collisions at between one fifth and one tenth of the full energy in a few days.

"We are very confident that we can go quite quickly. The experiments have asked us for some early collisions, at low energy. If we get stable conditions, we will get there next week," said Dr Evans.

The collisions will take place in the two general purpose detectors of the giant machine, called Atlas and CMS, though Dr Evans added that the team will also attempt collisions in Alice, which will study a "liquid" form of matter, called a quark-gluon plasma, that formed shortly after the Big Bang, and an experiment called LHCb, which will investigate the fate of antimatter in the wake of the Big Bang. (ANI)

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London, September 17 (ANI): An international team of scientists has predicted that our galaxy, the Milky Way, contains a disk of 'dark matter'.

The team includes astronomers Dr Justin Read, Professor George Lake and Oscar Agertz of the University of Zurich, and Dr Victor Debattista of the University of Central Lancashire, who have used the results of a supercomputer simulation to deduce the presence of this disk.

They have explained how the simulation could allow physicists to directly detect and identify the nature of dark matter for the first time.

Unlike the familiar 'normal' matter that makes up stars, gas and dust, 'dark' matter is invisible but its presence can be inferred through its gravitational influence on its surroundings.

Physicists believe that it makes up 22 per cent of the mass of the Universe, compared with the 4 per cent of normal matter and 74 per cent comprising the mysterious 'dark energy'.

But, despite its pervasive influence, no one is sure what dark matter consists of.

Prior to this work, it was thought that dark matter forms in roughly spherical lumps called 'halos', one of which envelopes the Milky Way.

But, this 'standard' theory is based on supercomputer simulations that model the gravitational influence of the dark matter alone.

The new work includes the gravitational influence of the stars and gas that also make up our Galaxy.

Stars and gas are thought to have settled into disks very early on in the life of the Universe and this affected how smaller dark matter halos formed.

The team's results suggest that most lumps of dark matter in our locality merged to form a halo around the Milky Way, but the largest lumps were preferentially dragged towards the galactic disk and were then torn apart, creating a disk of dark matter within the Galaxy.

"The dark disk only has about half of the density of the dark matter halo, which is why no one has spotted it before," said lead author Justin Read.

"However, despite its low density, if the disk exists it has dramatic implications for the detection of dark matter here on Earth," he added.

The 'wind' from the dark disk is much slower than from the halo because the disk co-rotates with the Earth.

This abundance of low-speed dark matter particles could be a real boon for researchers because they are more likely to excite a response in dark matter detectors than fast-moving particles.

This new research raises the exciting prospect that the dark disk - and dark matter - could be directly detected in the very near future. (ANI)

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Washington, September 17 (ANI): NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a rare alignment between two spiral galaxies, with images showing the outer rim of a small, foreground galaxy silhouetted in front of a larger background galaxy.

Skeletal tentacles of dust can be seen extending beyond the small galaxy's disk of starlight.

Such outer dark dusty structures, which appear to be devoid of stars, like barren branches, are rarely so visible in a galaxy because there is usually nothing behind them to illuminate them.

Astronomers have never seen dust this far beyond the visible edge of a galaxy, and they do not know if these dusty structures are common features in galaxies.

Understanding a galaxy's color and how dust affects and dims that color are crucial to measuring a galaxy's true brightness. By knowing the true brightness, astronomers can calculate the galaxy's distance from Earth.

Astronomers calculated that the background galaxy is 780 million light-years away.

They have not as yet calculated the distance between the two galaxies, although they think the two are relatively close, but not close enough to interact.

The background galaxy is about the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and is about 10 times larger than the foreground galaxy.

Most of the stars speckled across the image captured by the Hubble, belong to the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 253.

Astronomers used Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys to snap images of NGC 253 when they spied the two galaxies in the background.

From ground-based telescopes, the two galaxies look like a single blob. But the Advanced Camera's sharp "eye" distinguished the blob as two galaxies, cataloged as 2MASX J00482185-2507365. (ANI)

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Washington, September 17 (ANI): A team of engineers and scientists at the University of Texas at Austin, US, have shown the usage of graphene as a new carbon-based material for storing large quantities of renewable electrical energy.

They have shown that the material can be used for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power.

The researchers believe their breakthrough shows promise that graphene (a form of carbon) could eventually double the capacity of existing ultracapacitors, which are manufactured using an entirely different form of carbon.

"Through such a device, electrical charge can be rapidly stored on the graphene sheets, and released from them as well for the delivery of electrical current and, thus, electrical power," said Rod Ruoff, a mechanical engineering professor and a physical chemist.

"There are reasons to think that the ability to store electrical charge can be about double that of current commercially used materials. We are working to see if that prediction will be borne out in the laboratory," he added.

Two main methods exist to store electrical energy: in rechargeable batteries and in ultracapacitors, which are becoming increasingly commercialized but are not yet as popularly known.

An ultracapacitor can be used in a wide range of energy capture and storage applications and are used either by themselves as the primary power source or in combination with batteries or fuel cells.

Some advantages of ultracapacitors over more traditional energy storage devices (such as batteries) include: higher power capability, longer life, a wider thermal operating range, lighter, more flexible packaging and lower maintenance.

Ruoff and his team prepared chemically modified graphene material and, using several types of common electrolytes, have constructed and electrically tested graphene-based ultracapacitor cells.

The amount of electrical charge stored per weight (called "specific capacitance") of the graphene material has already rivaled the values available in existing ultracapacitors, and modeling suggests the possibility of doubling the capacity.

According to Ruoff, "Graphene's surface area of 2630 m2/gram (almost the area of a football field in about 1/500th of a pound of material) means that a greater number of positive or negative ions in the electrolyte can form a layer on the graphene sheets resulting in exceptional levels of stored charge."

This technology has the promise of significantly improving the efficiency and performance of electric and hybrid cars, buses, trains and trams.

Even everyday devices such as office copiers and cell phones benefit from the improved power delivery and long lifetimes of ultracapacitors. (ANI)

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