Twitpics from space: astronaut Astro_Wheels sends pictures to Earth via Twitter

Douglas H. Wheelock is an astronaut on the International Space Station who regularly sends pictures back to Earth via his Twitter account. To see more, check out his Twitter page.

You must have heard about the LHC experiment – the Large Hadron Collider. If not its scientific aspects, at least the doomsday theories surrounding it! LHC is a particle accelerator on the Switzerland-France border, 100m below the earth. The experiment consists of two beams of hadrons(either protons or lead ions) colliding head to head, after gaining high levels of energy, with each successive lap inside the circular accelerator. This is an attempt to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang and will be used by physicists to study the smallest known, fundamental particles, the ‘brick and mortar’ of our Universe, that is expected to be created in the collisions. A number of detectors will assist the physicists in this job and one such detector is called ATLAS.

So what is LHCsound?

LHCsound: the sonification of the ATLAS detector data output.

LHCsound is funded by the STFC as a public outreach project, but also has potential as a physics analysis/ detector monitoring tool and as a resource for musical composition and performance.

(Source:LHCsound Blog)

In other words, the results of the ATLAS detector has been turned in to sounds! The benefit for physicists is that, since the ear is more tuned to detect changes in patterns than the eye, it is likely that anomalies in expected patterns(new particles), if any, can be detected far more easily if the results were presented as sounds. This project is the brainchild of Lily Asquith, a high energy physicist working on the ATLAS and Richard Dobson, a musician and a software developer. And the results are über cool!

Listen to the Decay of a God Particle!
HiggsJetHarmSig2.mp3

For a detailed explanation on this sound file, please click here. For the complete set of sounds, here.

Image Courtesy of Toya Walker

(Thanks to Rishi, my physicist friend who works at CERN – his link to this BBC article on Facebook led to this post.)

Eruption in Eyjafjallajökull

(Originally uploaded by Gunnar Gestur)

Came across a fantastic Flickr gallery of photos of the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland. For your viewing pleasure.