Carnival of Space Week 73 – Alice’s Astro Info

Image from Alice's Astro Info website
Image from Alice's Astro Info website

This week’s marvellous Carnival of Space is being hosted by Seattle-based astronomer Alice Enevoldsen at Alice’s Astro Info. To celebrate 50 years of NASA, Alice has written a rather creative CoS, using the letters from HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU DEAR NASA! to form an acrostic for each submission from the space blogosphere. I love it!

From Astroengine, I decided to submit my article about the experimental evidence that radioactive decay rates do not vary with distance from the Sun, according to the power output from Cassini’s RTGs as the craft travelled from Earth to the orbit of Mars. Kinda puts a dampener on the previous terrestrial findings that decay rates may vary with distance from the Sun. Perhaps there’s another, more obvious reason for the correlated decay rate variations. I have my theory, but I’ll leave that for another day…

Particle Zoo: The Higgs Boson For Sale

Collect them all! The Standard Model of plushie particles (© Particle Zoo & Julie Peasley)
Collect them all! The Standard Model of plushie particles (© Particle Zoo & Julie Peasley)

Astroengine exclusive interview with Particle Zoo founder, Julie Peasley

The hunt for the Higgs particle may have come to grinding halt until 2009, but that doesn’t mean you can’t discover the elusive particle for yourself. In fact, it’s not just the Higgs boson that awaits discovery in the zoo of Standard Model particles. And what a zoo it is! We have protons, neutrons, the quarks that make up said hadrons; plus all the force carriers, neutrinos, photons, electrons and anti-particles. There is a delicious and varied array of subatomic particles out there, but they are too small for us to see. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what these quanta actually look like?

It seems that Particle Zookeeper Julie Peasley has an intimate connection with the tiny “beings” that make up all known matter in the Universe. She has single-handedly set up her own business putting faces to the complex particles, giving us a unique view into the quantum world we would otherwise forget in the soup of theoretical physics equations. The Particle Zoo is a Los Angeles company, where Julie brings particles to life in her “sweatshop of one,” sewing beautifully-made plushie toys of all the Standard Model particles so we can collect them all…
Continue reading “Particle Zoo: The Higgs Boson For Sale”