Donetsk shelling militia DPR Cyborg Airport 24 01 2015 Ukraine War Today News – Video

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Donetsk shelling militia DPR Cyborg Airport 24 01 2015 Ukraine War Today News
Ukraine War. Latest Hot News! Subscribe to the channel! Thank you for joining us! There is a war between the Russians, the local population that lives here 1000 years and the Nazi government...

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Donetsk shelling militia DPR Cyborg Airport 24 01 2015 Ukraine War Today News - Video

SLIDE-SHOW OF: Our Trip to France to see the D-Day Beaches in Normandy and the American Cemetary – Video

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SLIDE-SHOW OF: Our Trip to France to see the D-Day Beaches in Normandy and the American Cemetary
The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial is a World War II cemetery and memorial in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, that honours American troops who died in Europe during World War.

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SLIDE-SHOW OF: Our Trip to France to see the D-Day Beaches in Normandy and the American Cemetary - Video

Myth of Orion: Constellation Quest – Astronomy for Kids, FreeSchool – Video

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Myth of Orion: Constellation Quest - Astronomy for Kids, FreeSchool
Have you ever seen the constellation Orion in the night sky? Find out how to identify it, when to see it, the myth of Orion the Hunter, and a little bit about the great Orion Nebula in this...

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Myth of Orion: Constellation Quest - Astronomy for Kids, FreeSchool - Video

Astrophysicist Ruth Murray-Clay Receives 2015 Warner Prize

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The American Astronomical Society (AAS) has awarded UC Santa Barbaras Ruth Murray-Clay the 2015 Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy for her theoretical studies of star and planet formation.Presented annually in recognition of a significant contribution to observational or theoretical astronomy during the five years preceding the award, the Warner Prize is given to an astronomer who is under 36 years of age in the year designated for the award, or within eight years of receiving his or her Ph.D.We are proud of Ruth for winning the 2015 Warner Prize, said Philip Pincus, chair of UCSBs Department of Physics, where Murray-Clay is a newly appointed assistant professor. We were delighted for her to join our faculty. She brings a wealth of expertise to UCSB, not only in the area of planet formation, but also in the evolution of their atmospheres and how they migrate.I feel very honored to win the Warner Prize, said Murray-Clay. I really like doing this work partly because there are all sorts of different physics involved. What really drew me to this subject is that its about where we came from and how the Earth formed -- and, by extension, how we came to be.The prize committee also cited Murray-Clays substantial contributions to numerous other areas of astrophysics. Her citation states that she has advanced models of planet formation by clarifying the role of gravitational instabilities, illuminating how orbital migration leads to short-period hot Jupiters and exploring photoevaporation of close-in exoplanets.According to the AAS, Murray-Clay follows up testable predictions of her theoretical models by delving directly into the observational data. The committee noted that she also has made outstanding contributions to the theoretical interpretation of G2, an ionized gas cloud plunging toward the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.In addition to planet and star formation, Murray-Clay is interested in the extrasolar planetary systems recently discovered by NASAs Kepler spacecraft and by ground-based direct imaging. One place where we can really learn a lot about planet formation right now is by studying planets that orbit far from their stars -- farther than our most distant planet, Neptune, she explained. In particular, there is the first directly imaged planetary system, HR 8799, which has at least four very large planets with very wide separations. We know that this kind of system is the tip of an iceberg. Is it the tip of star formation on a small scale? Or could it be that the processes that we think formed Jupiter and Saturn, our giant planets, actually do work at very large distances and that we havent figured out how yet?This is an exciting place to be looking because there are several big direct imaging surveys ramping up now, Murray-Clay continued. So were really going to be able to study these giant planets and their wide separations, which will help us distinguish between different types of models.Murray-Clay received her bachelors degree in physics and astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard University in 2001 and her masters degree and Ph.D. in astrophysics from UC Berkeley in 2004 and 2008, respectively. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvards Institute for Theory and Computation from 2008 to 2010, at which time she became a federal scientist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and an astronomy lecturer and then an affiliate of Harvards Department of Astronomy. She is a Kavli fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.At UCSB this past fall, Murray-Clay taught a graduate seminar on magnitude estimation; in the spring quarter, she will teach Astronomy 1. Im excited to be at UCSB and on the faculty of an excellent physics department, she said. Murray-Clay is UCSBs second recipient of the Warner Prize. Lars Bildsten, director of the campuss Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, received the award in 1999.Contacts:Julie Cohen+1 (805) 893-7220julie.cohen@ucsb.eduGeorge Foulsham+1 (805) 893-3071george.foulsham@ucsb.eduRuth Murray-Clay+1 (805) 893-5489murray@physics.ucsb.edu

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Astrophysicist Ruth Murray-Clay Receives 2015 Warner Prize

Weird X-Rays Spur Speculation about Dark Matter Detection

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Scientists must now decide whether the anomalous signal is truly exotic or has a more mundane provenance

When astronomers recently discovered x-rays with no obvious origin, it sparked an exciting hypothesis. Credit: Chandra X-Ray Observatory

Many major discoveries in astronomy began with an unexplained signal: pulsars, quasars and the cosmic microwave background are just three out of many examples. When astronomers recently discovered x-rays with no obvious origin, it sparked an exciting hypothesis. Maybe this is a sign of dark matter, the invisible substance making up about 85 percent of all the matter in the universe. If so, it hints that the identity of the particles is different than the prevailing models predict.

The anomalous x-rays, spotted by the European Space Agencys orbiting XMMNewton telescope, originate from two different sources: the Andromeda Galaxy and the Perseus cluster of galaxies. The challenge is to determine what created those x-rays, as described in a study published last month in Physical Review Letters. (See also an earlier study published in The Astrophysical Journal.) The signal is real but weak and astronomers must now determine whether it is extraordinary or has a mundane explanation. If that can be done, they can set about the work of identifying what kind of dark matter might be responsible.

If the [x-ray emission] line is conclusively shown to be due to dark matter, the implications are of course profound, wrote University of California, Irvine, astrophysicist Kevork Abazajian in a commentary published December 15, 2014, in Physical Review Letters.

If this observation sounds familiar, it is because researchers using NASAs Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope detected anomalous gamma rays near the Milky Way center, which some think could be from dark matter particles colliding and annihilating. The difference between the Fermi and the XMMNewton observations is the energy of the light involved, which is connected to the masses of the hypothetical dark matter particles that created it. Fermis gamma rays are more than a million times more energetic than the x-rays, so the particles that created the former would be more massive than a proton.

The x-rays, on the other hand, would have to originate from particles significantly lighter than an electron. (For those keeping track at home, the x-rays have an energy of about 3.5 kilo-electron volts, corresponding to less than one one-hundredth of the electron mass.) If the XMMNewton detection is a sign of dark matter, however, it would not be due to weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), which are researchers most popular candidates for what constitutes dark matter.

Other potential dark matter particles could include sterile neutrinosheavier cousins of the types produced in many nuclear reactionsor more exotic possibilities such as axions, originally predicted to solve an unrelated problem in particle physics. Both of these particles remain hypothetical, but if they exist, they would be much less massive than electrons.

If the culprits are sterile neutrinos, they would possess masses slightly larger than the energy of the x-ray photons. They decay into the well-known standard neutrinos, with the rest of their mass converted into x-ray lightthe very signal seen by XMMNewton. This idea, however, presents a few problems: there are no equivalent x-rays in the Milky Way and other experiments hunting for sterile neutrinos have turned up empty.

By contrast, axions are stable but they transform into photons in the presence of strong magnetic fields. Because galaxies and galaxy clusters generate such intense magnetism, they are prime axion makers. The particles (technically axionlike particles) required to make the anomalous x-rays would be of higher mass than the typical axion, but within constraints allowed by some theories.

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Weird X-Rays Spur Speculation about Dark Matter Detection