Friday Flyer - September 15, 2017
Welcome to our new QuarkNet website and to the first Friday Flyer of the new academic year!
Spotlight on the Eclipse of August 2017: Over 50 QuarkNet high school groups collected cosmic ray data during the solar eclipse on August 21, 2017 to find out if the rate of cosmic ray muons changes during a solar eclipse. The brainchild of Cosmic Ray fellow Nate Unterman, that measurement had never been made before with muons at the surface of the earth. The QuarkNet collaboration looks forward to announcing results later this fall. This data set from sixty detectors is now available in the Cosmic Ray e-Lab. Groups around North America and beyond are currently comparing their rate of muons during the eclipse to baselines when only the sun, moon, or just empty sky was present. There were four cosmic ray telescopes that tracked the sun, approximately 25 telescopes that remained at a fixed angle pointed in the direction of the eclipse, and most of the rest of the CRMDs were in a stacked condition to look for effects not in the sun’s direction. Read more at the QuarkNet eclipse website.
News from QuarkNet Central: If you are reading this, you are interacting with the brand new QuarkNet website. To get to our home page anytime, just type "quarknet.org" into your browser. Login credentials are the same as the old site, but the look and feel are all new. To learn more, read the introductory e-mail sent out on Wednesday.
Upcoming activities abound. The first International Masterclasses circular of the new academic year is available today; it is already time to start thinking about scheduling your masterclass. Before you inhale again, read the e-mail received here at QNC on the Eratosthenes Experiment to be conducted globally on September 22. Catch your breath again for November, kicked off early from Dark Matter Day on Halloween (really), then revved up with World Wide Data Day on November 14, and going out in style with International Cosmic Day on the very last day of the month. And we still get Thanksgiving!
Physics Experiment Roundup: Need a brief overview of the latest with CMS? Find it in this video with Fermilab superheroes Steve Nahn and Vivian O'Dell; they can explain anything. And here is a new use for CMS tech in symmetry. While we browse symmetry into astro-world, we find that the fight against light pollution goes on.
Resources: Students may ask what really goes on when protons collide in the LHC. Here are some insights on that from, again, symmetry. (They are on a roll.) Minute Physics delves into the quantum mysteries of Bell's theorem. And for those anticipating neutrino masterclasses, here is some insight into MINERνA events from Fermilab.
Just for Fun: More than fun, really . . . Physics Today captures it in a cool Q&A with Jim Gates.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu