In the first university-based planetary science experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), researchers have gradually compressed a diamond sample to a record pressure of 50 megabars (50 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure). By replicating the conditions believed to exist in the cores of several recently discovered "super-Earths" -- extra-solar planets three to 20 times more massive than Earth -- the experiments could provide clues to the formation and structure of these and other giant planets, as well as the exotic behavior of materials at ultrahigh densities.
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Tag Archives: the-experiments
Feed SubscriptionLarge Hadron Collider achieves 2011 data milestone
Today at around 10:50 CEST, the amount of data accumulated by Large Hadron Collider experiments ATLAS and CMS clicked over from 0.999 to 1 inverse femtobarn, signalling an important milestone in the experiments' quest for new physics. The number signifies a quantity physicists call integrated luminosity, which is a measure of the total number of collisions produced. One inverse femtobarn equates to around 70 million million (70 x 1012) collisions, and in 2010 it was the target set for the 2011 run.
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