Month: March 2016

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Collider gets set to take on antimatter mystery

Image: Belle II detector
Scientists and technicians insert one of the optical components into the iTOP particle identification detector at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan. The “Imaging Time of Propagation” apparatus, or iTOP, is part of SuperKEKB’s Belle II detector. (Credit: PNNL)

What happened to all the antimatter? A particle-smasher in Japan is well on its way to addressing that question and others on the frontier of physics.

The SuperKEKB accelerator is designed to smash together tightly focused beams of electrons and anti-electrons (better known as positrons) and track the subatomic particles that wink in and out of existence as a result.

The collider will follow up on an earlier round of experiments at the KEK laboratory in Tsukuba. Over the past five years, KEK’s 1.9-mile-round (3-kilometer-round) underground ring has been upgraded to produce collisions at a rate 40 times higher than the earlier KEKB experiments did. Europe’s Large Hadron Collider may smash protons together at higher energies, but SuperKEKB will trump the LHC when it comes to the “Intensity Frontier.”

On Feb. 10, scientists circulated a beam of positrons around the SuperKEKB ring at nearly the speed of light. Then, on Feb. 26, they sent a separate beam of electrons at similar velocities, but going in the opposite direction. These “first turns” serve as major milestones on the way to next year’s first physics run, when both beams will circulate simultaneously and smash into each other in SuperKEKB’s upgraded Belle II detector.

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Which tech jobs are most meaningful?

Image: SpaceX, Tesla and Space Needle
SpaceX and Tesla Motors both received a publicity boost when SpaceX announced last year that it was opening up an office in the Seattle area. (GeekWire photo)

What do the employees at two of billionaire brainiac Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, think about their job situation? Newly released ratings from Seattle-based PayScale suggest that they don’t draw the highest salaries in the tech world, but see their jobs as extraordinarily meaningful (and stressful).

The two ventures lead a list of 18 top tech companies when it comes to the percentage of survey respondents who say their jobs have lots of meaning (92 percent for SpaceX, 89 percent for Tesla) and high stress (88 percent for SpaceX, 70 percent for Tesla).

That’s in line with the companies’ difficult but rewarding missions: Tesla aims to revolutionize the automotive and power industries with its approaches to electric cars and in-home batteries, while SpaceX aims to lower the cost of spaceflight and eventually turn humanity into a multiplanet species.

Based on PayScale’s data, the employees’ compensation isn’t as high-flown as their aspirations. On the scale for early-career median pay, Tesla ranks 13th at $81,400 a year. SpaceX is one notch lower at $78,500. That’s well above the median U.S. household income ($53,657 for 2014) but relatively low on PayScale’s list.

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Boeing’s first 727 jet makes its last flight

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Fire trucks greet the Boeing 727 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The final flight of the first Boeing 727 prototype jet ever produced was one of the shortest trips it’s made in its 53-year history: a 15-minute jaunt from a restoration hangar at Everett’s Paine Field to Seattle’s Boeing Field and the Museum of Flight.

But in another sense, it took decades to make the journey.

The three-engine jet was used as a test prototype when Boeing started flying the 727s in 1963, and was delivered to United Airlines in 1964. The plane put in nearly 65,000 hours of service with United, and made more than 48,000 takeoffs and landings.

The three-engine jet made its last commercial voyage in 1991, and then United donated it to the Museum of Flight. At the time, the museum couldn’t accommodate the plane in Seattle, so it was put into storage in Everett. Some of its parts were scavenged for other planes.

For 25 years, a volunteer team toiled to raise money, acquire spare parts (mostly donated by FedEx) and refurbish the plane for one more flight. Once the plane was judged airworthy, the Federal Aviation Administration issued a special permit to clear the way for the March 2 flight under visual flight rules.

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Hubble sets new mark for farthest-out galaxy

Image: GN-z11
This image locates galaxy GN-z11 in the northern hemisphere field of the Hubble GOODS survey, which takes in tens of thousands of galaxies stretching far back into time. GN-z11, shown in the inset, is seen as it was 13.4 billion years in the past, just 400 million years after the big bang, when the universe was only 3 percent of its current age. (Credit: NASA / ESA / Oesch et al.)

Like the rockers in “This Is Spinal Tap,” astronomers cranked the dials on the Hubble Space Telescope up to 11 to identify what they say is the farthest-out galaxy ever detected, from a time when the universe was a mere 400 million years old.

The light from the galaxy in the constellation Ursa Major, known as GN-z11, was sent out 13.4 billion years ago, astronomers report in a study to be published in theAstrophysical Journal. That light-year measurement surpasses the distances that were recorded for two faraway galaxies over the past year.

The researchers say this record is likely to stand until NASA’s next-generation James Webb Space Telescope comes online.

“We’ve taken a major step back in time, beyond what we’d ever expected to be able to do with Hubble,” Yale astronomer Pascal Oesch said in a news release.

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Boeing puts out the call for memorabilia

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Boeing historian Mike Lombardi holds memorabilia from the company’s history. (Credit: Boeing)

Think of it as “Antiques Roadshow” for the aerospace set: The Boeing Co. is looking for historical artifacts and memorabilia that will help the company tell the story of its first 100 years in the Puget Sound region.

Your item could go on display at a centennial exhibit due to open at Seattle’s Museum of Flight in May.

“Check your attics, check your basement, check your trophy cases,” Mike Lombardi, Boeing’s corporate historian and archivist, said in a video about the effort. “Find all that Boeing memorabilia, those models, those photographs.”

The company is particularly interested in subjects such as the company’s role in the local community during World War II, the first flights and rollouts of Boeing airplanes, Seafair activities and the 1962 World’s Fair.

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Look for places where aliens are looking for us

Image: Earth transit
When Earth passes in front of the sun, it blocks a small part of the sun’s light. Potential observers outside our solar system might be able to detect the resulting dimming of the sun and study Earth’s atmosphere. (Credit: Axel Quetz / MPIA / NASA)

The past decade has brought about a revolution in astronomers’ ability to detect potentially habitable planets, and there’s much, much more to come. The problem will be identifying the likeliest places for life to lurk, and two newly published studies address that problem from two dramatically different perspectives.

One study takes an inward-looking perspective: If we were the aliens, how would we know about Earth?

The best planet-detection method that’s currently available to earthly astronomers looks for the telltale dimming of light as a planet crosses the disk of its parent star. But that dimming, known as a planetary transit, can be seen only when the planet and the alien star are lined up with Earth.

That suggests that Earth is most likely to be detected by observers on alien planets in a narrow strip of the sky where our planet can be seen crossing the sun.

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Scott Kelly returns to Earth after year in space

Image: Scott Kelly
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly flashes thumbs-up signs after his return to Earth. (Credit: NASA)

Capping off a year in space, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly breathed earthly air for the first time in 340 days today after a successful, safe trip from the International Space Station to the steppes of Kazakhstan.

Since last March’s blastoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, the 52-year-old Kelly circled the planet more than 5,440 times, saw more than 10,800 orbital sunrises and sunsets, and put almost 144 million miles on his cosmic odometer.

The mission set a U.S. record for continuous spaceflight and blazed a trail for much longer trips to Mars and back. But to get a true sense of how long Kelly has been in space, consider this: The last time he was on Earth, Jeb Bush was the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.

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