As you read this, the world’s finest scientists and engineers are hard at work planning and building a telescope one hundred times more powerful than any other in existence. The Square Kilometre Array, known as the SKA, will become the world’s biggest radio telescope, surveying the sky ten thousand times faster than ever before. You might be imagining a vast, single telescope. But the reality is more like thousands of antennas. All dotted across...
Category - Physical Sciences
In 2008, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN began smashing protons together, the world held its breath. As scientists prepared to recreate the big bang in a 17-mile tunnel beneath the French-Swiss border—it was the stuff of science fiction. Yet the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator is a very real attempt to understand the universe. And its home to some of the most important physics experiments of our time. But just...
The world has an energy issue: with demand likely to triple before the end of the century, the race is on for a sustainable and abundant energy supply. Energy generated from nuclear fusion could be one answer and ITER – one of the most ambitious energy research projects ever seen – is at the forefront of fusion research. WHAT IS ITER? 35 nations have joined forces in the ITER project, by far the largest international experimental campaign that...
BELLE II: The particle detector to better understand the universe Theoretical dark matter is one of the most elusive substances in the world and an important puzzle piece to decode the complexities of the universe’s movement and structure. Even the most practiced Standard Model, which is the golden rule for particle behaviour, does not explain all physics mysteries. Enter: Belle II is a new particle detector being developed to help researchers...