April 2017

24 people in attendance, including 3 visitors! Two at least were friends of Gordon Stallings, the featured speaker.

Our event calendar:

2017--

April 15 at Central Library, 2-4 pm:

Russia Space Day for students. Will have solar scopes; Rick will be there along with Jerry.

April 21 on the Bartlesville Community Center front lawn:

Star party open to the public from 6:30 pm (setup time) to midnight. Lashawn said this will be on the BCC outdoor marquee; it is also on the BCC web site events calendar.

May 12 at Ranch Heights Elementary School: presentations for students in grades 3-5 and also pre-K. We will be making two 30-minute presentations; Abby and Derek will be involved. Don’t know at this point if it will be morning/afternoon or both. There will be hands-on activities for the younger children (i.e. crayon drawing). Peggy Walker is bringing STEM-related items to show the students.

May 11-14 Rooster Days Fair in Broken Arrow, 10 am-11:30 pm each day. Connie and Jerry are going May 13 and 14.

August 21??: Have a star party here for those not going to Missouri or elsewhere to watch the solar eclipse? Would not be total here but partial eclipse would be visible (with proper filters).

September 30: Pawhuska Rocket Launch night launches of different grades of rockets. Have a star party?

2018--

We have been invited to co-sponsor an Astronomical League Conference in Tulsa June 15-17, 2018. The Astronomical League wants to focus on youth at this conference. One feature of this conference will be a moonlight walk at the Arboretum. Jerry would like Abby and Derek to give presentations. This will be a high-visibility conference for us. It will be held at the convention center and would have 200 people at most attending. TUBA, the Muskogee Astronomy Club (which has about 5 members) will also participate. Clubs from Norman and Stillwater will also likely participate.

Board meeting: May 1, before regular meeting.

Future club meeting presentations: Bob is on the lookout for people to volunteer to do main presentations at club meetings!

New scopes donated:

We have 2 new scopes donated to the club that we can use at public events. A 10-inch scope with lots of parts and a 10-inch Meade Orion go-to scope. The lady who donated the scope with “lots of parts” may also at some point give us some astronomy-related books.

John showed video he took March 29 of the ISS transiting Mars! He took it at the mall on the grass by Dillards. It has been posted to the BvilleAstro YouTube channel.

Main program:

Gordon Stallings presentation on CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which he visited a couple years ago.

What is CERN?

From https://home.cern/about :

At CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, physicists and engineers are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact, and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature.

The inst ruments used at CERN are purpose-built particle accelerators and detectors. Accelerators boost beams of particles to high energies before the beams are made to collide with each other or with stationary targets. Detectors observe and record the results of these collisions.

Founded in 1954, the CERN laboratory sits astride the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva. It was one of Europe's first joint ventures and now has 22 member states.

You can find more information about how CERN is governed and organised here.

The name CERN

The name CERN is derived from the acronym for the French "Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire", or European Council for Nuclear Research, a provisional body founded in 1952 with the mandate of establishing a world-class fundamental physics research organization in Europe. At that time, pure physics research concentrated on understanding the inside of the atom, hence the word "nuclear".

Today, our understanding of matter goes much deeper than the nucleus, and CERN's main area of research is particle physics – the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces acting between them. Because of this, the laboratory operated by CERN is often referred to as the European Laboratory for Particle Physics

About the Large Hadron Colllider:

From https://home.cern/topics/large-hadron-collider :

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. It first started up on 10 September 2008, and remains the latest addition to CERN’s accelerator complex. The LHC consists of a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets with a number of accelerating structures to boost the energy of the particles along the way.

Inside the accelerator, two high-energy particle beams travel at close to the speed of light before they are made to collide. The beams travel in opposite directions in separate beam pipes – two tubes kept at ultrahigh vacuum. They are guided around the accelerator ring by a strong magnetic field maintained by superconducting electromagnets. The electromagnets are built from coils of special electric cable that operates in a superconducting state, efficiently conducting electricity without resistance or loss of energy. This requires chilling the magnets to ‑271.3°C – a temperature colder than outer space. For this reason, much of the accelerator is connected to a distribution system of liquid helium, which cools the magnets, as well as to other supply services.

Thousands of magnets of different varieties and sizes are used to direct the beams around the accelerator. These include 1232 dipole magnets 15 metres in length which bend the beams, and 392 quadrupole magnets, each 5–7 metres long, which focus the beams. Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to "squeeze" the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions. The particles are so tiny that the task of making them collide is akin to firing two needles 10 kilometres apart with such precision that they meet halfway.

All the controls for the accelerator, its services and technical infrastructure are housed under one roof at the CERN Control Centre. From here, the beams inside the LHC are made to collide at four locations around the accelerator ring, corresponding to the positions of four particle detectors – ATLAS, CMS, ALICE and LHCb.

Gordon wanted to visit CERN to meet the engineers working there. He said that CERN was founded to stop the scientific/engineering brain drain from Europe to the U.S. that had started with Wernher von Braun and a number of his colleagues toward the close of WWII. (Now, people from the U.S. go to visit CERN!) CERN has a staff of over 2500 people and more than 10,000 users. Berkeley was the mecca for the type of research CERN does in 1950-53. Then the mecca moved to Chicago, then Texas, then to CERN in Switzerland.

The U.S. and Russia are not full members, but they are observing countries. The U.S. does not contribute to CERN’s budget.

CERN has spent over 6 years researching elementary particles. CERN is the largest user of super conductor materials in the world.

CERN has underground tunnels for very highly accelerated particles. Underground tunnels are needed to isolate the experiements from noise. There is a large tunnel with a smaller connected to it on the inside; the larger one measures 38 km in circumference. Protons whiz through at 99, 999 mph. Gordon discussed the layout of the CERN accelerators. When particles are run through, they start at low gear and then ramp up. The momemtum reached by the protons is equivalent to a fully loaded coal train--100 times E=MC2 Beams go both ways. When particles collide you get fireworks in all directions! Thousands of sensors—silicon wafers--take photographs 40 million times a second 24/7. Each silicon wafer plate is like a large digital camera. Data is collected in tiers. Resistance in these colliders is less than 10 nano ohms.

After there was an explosion at CERN due to resistance being too high, they put big pieces of copper tubing around the conjunctions. It takes a lot of power to cool things down; ¼ of the energy used at CERN is for cooling.

Gordon said that above-ground lake water motion has been detected due to lunar tides!

Gordon also discussed Higgs boson research done by CERN.

Here is a summary of what Higgs boson is and research done by CERN, excerpted from this article in Wikipdedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. It is the quantum excitation of the Higgs field,[6][7] a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory[7] first suspected to exist in the 1960s. Unlike other known fields such as the electromagnetic field, it has a non-zero constant value in vacuum. The question of the Higgs field's existence became the last unverified part of the Standard Model of particle physics, and for several decades was considered "the central problem in particle physics".[8][9]

The presence of the field, now confirmed by experimental investigation, explains why some fundamental particles have mass when, based on the symmetries controlling their interactions, they should be massless. It also resolves several other long-standing puzzles, such as the reason for the weak force's extremely short range.

Although the Higgs field is believed to permeate the entire Universe, proving its existence was far from easy. In principle, it can be proved to exist by detecting its excitations, which manifest as Higgs particles (the 'Higgs boson'), but these are extremely difficult to produce and to detect. The importance of this fundamental question led to a 40 year search, and the construction of one of the world's most expensive and complex experimental facilities to date, CERN's Large Hadron Collider,[10] in an attempt to create Higgs bosons and other particles for observation and study. On 4 July 2012, the discovery of a new particle with a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/c2 was announced; physicists suspected that it was the Higgs boson.[11][12][13] Since then, the particle has been shown to behave, interact, and decay in many of the ways predicted for Higgs particles by the Standard Model, as well as having even parity and zero spin,[1] two fundamental attributes of a Higgs boson. This also means it is the first elementary scalar particle discovered in nature.[14] More studies are needed to verify with higher precision that the discovered particle has properties matching those predicted for the Higgs boson by the Standard Model, or whether, as predicted by some theories, multiple Higgs bosons exist.[3]

There are plans to build an even larger network of tunnels that would dwarf the current ones in size.

Medical applications for CERN’s research include things like color Xrays.

In closing, Gordon played a video of FILK music, defined by Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filk_music as a musical culture, genre, and community tied to science fiction/fantasy/horror fandom and a type of fan labor. The genre has been active since the early 1950s, and played primarily since the mid-1970s.