This is very cool and a pretty big deal. Find out why.

PREPARING FOR JOURNAL CLUB

Throwback Thursday to August 2015!

When thermodynamics gets fashionable: Kelvin Klein.

Where Does The Mass Of A Proton Come From?

If you divide the matter we know into progressively smaller and smaller components, you’d find that atomic nuclei, made of protons and neutrons, compose the overwhelming majority of the mass we understand. But if you look inside each nucleon, you find that its constituents – quarks and gluons – account for less than 0.2% of their total mass. The remaining 99.8% must come from the unique binding energy due to the strong force. To understand how that mass comes about, we need to better understand not only the average distribution of sea quarks and gluons within the proton and heavy ions, but to reveal the fluctuations in the fields and particle locations within. The key to that is deep inelastic scattering, and we’re well on our way to uncovering the cosmic truths behind the origin of matter’s mass.

space suggestion

the universe does not care if you messed up. it’s okay. you can try again tomorrow, my star.

Read the full story here.

The good stuff

me

Bring it boi

Black hole fact #1

Black holes do not suck! (literally). It’s a common misconception that a black hole sucks everything that comes too close to it, but they’re just like any other object in space, although with a strong gravitational pull. For example, if a star came in contact with it, it would shed its mass into stellar winds and fall into the gravitational pull of the black hole.

In fact you can form a stable orbit around a black hole. They’re really just an amount of mass but packed into an extremely dense region. If you replaced the sun with a black hole of the same mass, nothing about the Earth’s orbit would change. Everything would be normal except for the lack of sun in the sky

Gravitational waves’ sounds are not like Stephen Colbert expected - Full video

And we will find you, have no doubt.

Quarks are the elementary particles that makes up hadrons such as protons and neutrons

Cool things about quarks: 

More about quarks here!        Questions/corrections welcome

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHS9g72npqA)

Such an awesome introduction to GWs, if you’re looking for a different perspective to the usual fabric-of-spacetime based story :)

LIGO Reports Second Black-Hole Merger

Four months after announcing their epoch-making discovery of gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) team and Virgo collaborators announced today and reported in Physical Review Letters that they’ve detected a second gravitational-wave signal. LIGO spokesperson Gabriela Gonzalez called it “a promising start to mapping the populations of black holes in our universe.”

The signal, generated long ago by the space-quaking merger of two black holes, brushed the detectors on Dec. 26, 2015. It brings news that, 1.4 billion light-years away, a black hole with the mass of 14 suns combined with another of eight solar masses, forming a 21-solar-mass black hole. The remaining sun’s worth of energy was radiated as gravitational waves, whose existence Albert Einstein predicted 100 years ago.

In contrast to the loud “chirp” that LIGO detected last September, from a bigger black-hole merger, the second chirp was buried in background noise and required the full force of the team’s elaborate data analysis techniques to tease out. It was spotted in the noise with a process called matched filtering, in which templates of possible gravitational-wave signals are continuously compared with the data streams at LIGO’s two detectors, looking for matching hits.

With two detections now under their belt, LIGO scientists are beginning to gather statistics about the mysterious, invisible black holes that pervade the universe and influence the evolution of galaxies and the cosmos as a whole. Duncan Brown, LIGO member and professor of physics at Syracuse University, told Quanta that the two observations to date “tell us the black holes exist over a broad range of masses, from about seven to 36 times the mass of the sun. This is much broader than previously thought.”

In the coming years, Brown said, “LIGO’s observations will help tell us whether the black holes grew from the merger of small black holes, or if big black holes are formed in massive supernovae explosions of stars.”

(louder) FUCK TRUMP

we at the ocean protection council do not endorse donald trump in any way, shape, or form

We the snakes do not support him at all either

the aliens are scared because they think they’re illegal aliens

Chemistry will have nothing to do with him, he came from something we’re scared to think about.

all the particles are running away from him

the ecosystem wants to kick his ass

the solar system is ready to send a meteorite his way.

nasa will lose all funding that isn’t military related and we will cry

trump hates gravitational waves