CERN finds a new particle + News alerts for the cosmos

New views of reality, from the discovery of a “super-heavy” subatomic particle to an alert system announcing changes from the universe.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  WNYC Studios is supported by Wise. Wise, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the world. With a Wise account, you can send, spend and receive in up to 40 currencies with only a few simple taps. Be smart, get wise. Download the Wise app today. Terms and conditions apply.

• 0:17Ira Flatow?

  Science Friday is supported by MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

• 0:36Flora Lichtman?

  Hi, it's Laura Lixman, and you're listening to Science Friday. Heads up, subatomic lovers, a new particle just dropped. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced that they have discovered something like an extra-heavy proton. Here to tell us what that means is Hassan Jawaheri, a member of the LHCb experiment. Welcome, Hassan.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks for the invitation. I'm happy to talk about the LHCb result.

• 1:03Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, so describe this this new little particle for us. It's been described as like a proton. What is it exactly?

• 1:11Speaker 03

  So that's actually a very good description, which you put there as a heavy proton. So what's been discovered by LHCb is the first observation of a composite particle, which contains two charm quarks and a down quark. So it's a it's a proton-like particle because ordinary proton contains actually two up quarks and one down quark. So this in this particle, the two up quarks have been replaced by the charm quark, and the charm quark being so heavy makes this particle about four times heavier than the ordinary proton.

• 1:51Flora Lichtman?

  Put the finding in context. I mean, is this like discovering a new species of frog or an astronomer finding a new exoplanet? Or, you know, even more fundamental than that?

• 2:02Speaker 03

  So I think, yes, what you just described is really more of a finding an extra planet. We haven't discovered a new fundamental particles, but these particles are made up of fundamental particles. The fundamental particles here are the quarks. We are all made up of of quarks, but the kind of quarks which participate in the in the structure of the ordinary matter are the lightest ones, which we call them up and down quark. Those are relatively light and they form. For example, the proton is made up of two up quark and one down quark, and a neutron is made up of two down quark and one up quark. Everything else which we see around us, in the stars, in the galaxies and so on, are made up of the same quarks.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  In this case, we've seen a particle which is made up of a heavy quark. Normally, we don't have those quarks in nature. They are only produced in very high energy collisions of particles, and they were around when the universe was formed at the very early time after the Big Bang. After that, we have to make them in the lab. And so the laws of nature, the laws that we've discovered about these constituents, the way they interact with each other, suggests that there should be a proton-like object made up of these quarks. The fact that we see the properties corresponding to the predictions based on our theory

• 3:24Speaker 03

  is very important because it gives us insight into how accurate these theoretical foundations are.

• 3:31Flora Lichtman?

  Yes, I was gonna ask that. I mean, is is this particle something you expected to find? Or is the data ahead of the theory in this case?

• 3:40Speaker 03

  So, yeah, that's a very good question. And if this particle was expected to be found, and in fact, its mass and some of its properties were predicted. And the fact that we see it now is really have to do with the fact that these are very heavy objects. So we have to improve our experimental sensitivity to see it.

• 3:59Flora Lichtman?

  You upgraded the machine, basically.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right.

• 4:03Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so how long does this particle exist?

• 4:06Speaker 03

  So yeah, the difference between this particle as a, even though we call it a proton-like, proton lives forever, as far as we know. Its lifetime is known to be more than 10 to the 31 years or so on. But this particle, made up of heavy quarks, only lives a few trillionth of a second. Actually, less than, less than a few trillionth of a second.

• 4:27Flora Lichtman?

  Lives fast, dies young.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it doesn't really live long enough to form any object, for example, an atom made of it or something beyond that. So, but the fact that we see them shows that the laws which we understand about how the quarks interact are as we expect them to be.

• 4:46Flora Lichtman?

  Well, does this particle tell you anything new about the forces that bind these fundamental particles together? You know, bind quarks together?

• 4:57Speaker 03

  But that's something that we will eventually extract from them because we don't still know all their properties. So we have seen it, they are the right mass, and we've seen that this lifetime is short, but we haven't seen all the other properties. So there are many other properties that we have to study when we have a larger fraction of them, and that's why the experiments we've been running for years. When we do that, then we might actually discover effects which will be, will tell us aspects of the theories that we know. So we are not there yet, but that's, that's one of the goals.

• 5:28Flora Lichtman?

  What comes next? Do you just crank up the power knob?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  So yeah, we will be running for many years and eventually what we want to see in this line of research is another particle, which is another proton-like object, which will have the two charm quarks and a strange quark. But one of the major line of research in LHCB is to study the B quark. And that is at the core of one of the biggest mysteries that we have in nature, which is why, even though the universe seemed to have been produced symmetric between matter and antimatter at a very early time, yet the universe is all made up of matter rather than antimatter. And so what happened to all that antimatter?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  So really, the biggest, biggest mission of LHCB is to uncover the reason behind that.

• 6:20Flora Lichtman?

  I can't wait to follow along. Thanks, Hassan.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 6:23Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Hassan Jawaheri is a distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and a member of the LHCB consortium. After the break, turning from the ultra-small to the ultra-big, getting news alerts for the entire universe. Stick around.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  Science Friday is supported by PBS, presenting Going Wild. If you love learning about the natural world and meeting the scientists who help us understand it, be sure to check out the new season of Going Wild with Dr. Ray Wynn Grant. It's the chart-topping and Webby Award-winning podcast from the folks at Nature on PBS, now with a video companion series. In this season of Going Wild, host acclaimed wildlife ecologist Dr. Ray Wynn Grant heads out into the field to explore the animals, people, and stories that make nature worth saving. Stops include a hibernating black bear den in Arkansas and an underwater shipwreck site off the Florida coast. If you're looking for a place to start, check out the season's debut episode, where Ray joins beloved biologist and influencer Jordan King in the Florida Everglades to learn about

• 7:31Speaker 00

  his unlikely journey into science and how to study a wetland when it's not very, well, wet. So don't miss out. Follow Going Wild with Dr. Ray Wynn Grant on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  Support for Science Friday comes from the William K. Bose Junior Foundation.

• 7:55Flora Lichtman?

  There's news alerts, emergency alerts, and now we bring you astronomy alerts. The Rubin Observatory, you know it, the telescope on a mountaintop in Chile, aims to take a movie of the entire southern sky every night. And it recently tested its own alert system to give astronomers a heads-up when the telescope spots an unusual change in the sky. Guess how many times it went ding that first night?

• 8:23Flora Lichtman?

  800,000. Here to tell us why we shouldn't silence those alerts is Dr. Eric Bellum. He's head of the group that developed the alert system for Rubin. Hey, Eric.

• 8:33Speaker 05

  Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me.

• 8:35Flora Lichtman?

  Thanks for being here. I'm picturing some grad student just having their phone blowing up 800,000 times. Is that mental image correct?

• 8:45Speaker 05

  I hope not. The Rubin alert stream is, as you said, it's extremely large. But typically, a scientist who's trying to find things to follow up in real time is only interested in a relatively small handful. So they're going to try to filter down that huge stream of notifications to just a handful that are of interest to them.

• 9:07Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, so what kinds of things trigger an alert?

• 9:09Speaker 05

  Anything that we see that is moving, or changing, or brightening in the sky. And so astrophysically, that includes things like asteroids, exploding stars like supernovae, variable stars that are brightening and dimming, as well as rare types of all of those things.

• 9:27Flora Lichtman?

  And how fast do the alerts come?

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Just in a couple of minutes after the image is taken. We're trying to make sure that scientists can very rapidly follow up the things that they care about.

• 9:37Flora Lichtman?

  Well, I wondered, like, in that hundreds of thousands of alerts that first night, were there any real, like, wow, I can't believe this is their things?

• 9:48Speaker 05

  We're just getting started, and so scientists are sort of tuning their algorithms to find the things they most care about. So it's a little early to say. There definitely were some asteroids that folks noticed were rotating very rapidly. So that was one of the things that came out of that first night's observations.

• 10:04Flora Lichtman?

  So how does this alert system actually work? What's the flow of data?

• 10:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, so Rubin is down in Chile, and every 30 seconds, it takes an image of the night sky. And that image is transmitted over fiber optic networks up to California, where at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, there's a data facility that processes the images. And then we compare it against a stack of images from that position of the sky where we had previously observed. And so by differentiating those two images, we're able to find anything that is changing from the previous stack of images.

• 10:41Flora Lichtman?

  Were you surprised by the volume?

• 10:44Speaker 05

  No, we're expecting actually an even larger volume once we're up to full operation, something like 7 million alerts a night total.

• 10:52Flora Lichtman?

  I mean, there must be an art to filtering down to the most important things. I mean, what's the trickiest part about building an alert system like this?

• 11:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, the filtering is the most challenging part. That's where the art and the practice and the experience come in. The challenge is to tune the criteria so that you can pick out the thing you most care about without being overwhelmed by hundreds or thousands of other objects that you have to sort through on your way to finding the thing you really are interested in.

• 11:22Flora Lichtman?

  Well, I mean, is there machine learning involved? Like, will the alerts become more and more precise as you go along?

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Yes, we definitely use machine learning, both in the production of the alerts and scientists as well use various classification algorithms, just like perhaps your email client or something tries to pick out the emails you most care about. And those are things we're going to be tuning up in the next weeks and months as the survey sort of scales up.

• 11:51Flora Lichtman?

  That does seem like the sort of operative problem, that you have so much data coming in, that figuring out which data to pay attention to, you know, seems very important. Does it feel like a lot of pressure, Eric?

• 12:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, certainly for these things that may be fading away quickly or disappearing, there is a challenge to try to find it in real time while you can still follow it up. And that's, that's why we have this real time alert stream to make sure that scientists have the best opportunity.

• 12:18Flora Lichtman?

  Do the alerts go to people or are they telling, you know, a telescope somewhere else to turn on or look at a particular thing?

• 12:26Speaker 05

  There definitely are fully automated systems that will take the alert stream and follow it up in, in real time, based on some preset criteria. There also are scientists who may have telescope time that they've been awarded, who really want to put their eyes on the data before they commit to using that telescope time. So I would say it's still most common that at the end of the procedure, there's a human somewhere in the loop saying, yes, this is the event I really want to see. Let me trigger the Hubble Space Telescope or James Webb Space Telescope to follow it up.

• 12:57Flora Lichtman?

  Is this for, you know, professional academic astronomers only? Or are you interested in amateurs using this as well?

• 13:06Speaker 05

  Our first goal is, again, to make discoveries about the universe. And so professional astronomers are our first audience. But there definitely is room for amateurs to contribute. And Rubin has a large education and public outreach team that is planning some specific projects around the alert stream that could help highlight objects that amateurs might be interested in following up.

• 13:28Flora Lichtman?

  OK, can I sign up? And then, like, will it actually ding my phone? Because this is the kind of news alert I feel like I need in my life.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  I don't know if you need millions of them every night. But yes, I think there will be facilities that you can get a summary at least of the previous night's discoveries.

• 13:43Flora Lichtman?

  I do feel like it would be very cool to get a news alert or, you know, an astronomical alert that was like, new black hole nearby.

• 13:52Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. I agree.

• 13:54Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Eric Bellum is the Alert Product Group Lead for the Rubin Observatory and a Research Associate Professor at the University of Washington. Thanks, Eric.

• 14:03Speaker 05

  Thanks, Flor.

• 14:04Flora Lichtman?

  This episode was produced by Charles Burquist. And if you've got questions about the universe, big or small, we want to know about them. Please give us a call. The listener line is always open, 8774-CYFRI, 8774-CYFRI. I hope you have a charmed day. I'm Flora Lichtman. Thank you for listening.