Back in April 2022, the CDF experiment, which operated at the long-ago-closed Tevatron particle collider. presented the world’s most precise measurement of the mass of the particle known as the “W boson“. Their result generated some excited commentary, because it disagreed by 0.1% with the prediction of the Standard Model of particle physics. Even though the mismatch was tiny, it was significant, because the CDF measurement was so exceptionally precise. Any disagreement of such high significance would imply that something has to give: either the Standard Model is missing something, or the CDF measurement is incorrect.
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2ND UPDATE: Auroras are indeed being observed. (I myself am a bit too far south and skies are hazy, making the moonlight blinding; but I am reading reports from northern Europe.)
UPDATE: Something has happened at the ACE satellite around 2300 UTC (0100 Europe time, 7 pm New York time. See the plot added to the bottom of this post.
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Still waiting for a possible outbreak of auroras (northern/southern lights) tonight; a tremendous blast from the Sun, launched from a sunspot two days ago, is believed likely to make a glancing impact on the Earth, and to do so within the next 12 hours or so. That means a possibility of bright northern lights tonight if you’re north of, say, New York City’s latitude.
BUT always keep in mind that forecasting auroras is part science, part art, part luck. Our chances are decent, but the forecast can always be wrong.
As far as timing, the best way to monitor what’s going on, I’ve found, is to use https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/ace-real-time-solar-wind and look for sudden activity in multiple data channels. If that happens, then the ACE satellite (about a million miles away) has detected a sudden change in the solar wind, and a geomagnetic storm is likely to start at Earth within an hour or so.
Whether you will see auroras or not during the storm depends on how powerful it is, which determines how far from the poles the auroras will reach and how bright they will be. While the forecast is for a strong storm, we’ll just have to see…
At 2300 UTC (about one hour before this posting) you can see jumps occurred in many channels below. That means that the solar storm may begin right around now (0000 UTC, 8 pm New York Time)
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON September 16, 2024
I’m delighted to tell you that Quanta Magazine has published an essay I have written on the *real* story of how the Higgs field gives mass to particles — avoiding those famous false analogies. There’s a musical connection, too. I hope you enjoy it! https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-higgs-field-actually-gives-mass-to-elementary-particles-20240903/
If you are curious to learn more about the main points of the essay, feel free to ask me questions about it in the comments below or at Quanta Magazine. (I also go into more detail about these subjects in my book.)
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON September 3, 2024
Though I’ve been busy with a number of physics and writing tasks, I’ve been beefing up the “Reader Resources” section of this website, devoted to extending the experience of readers of my book. [BTW, the audiobook is due out at the end of September.]
The book has many endnotes (available separately here, in case [like me] you hate paging back and forth between the text and the endnotes, and would like to have the endnotes more easily available on a separate screen.) A number of these endnotes have asterisks, and for those endnotes I promised to provide more information here on this website. Well, that information is going up, step by step.
For example:
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POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON August 20, 2024
[Update: indeed, both meteors and auroras are visible tonight, at least as far south as Massachusetts, so residents of northern-tier states should definitely be looking!]
Tonight, if the sky is clear and dark in your vicinity, would be a good night for staying up late, going outside, and looking up. Not that it’s an exceptional night for star gazing, necessarily; I wrote “sky-gazing” for a reason. The two phenomena you’re most likely to see are much, much closer than the stars. Both occur in the Earth’s upper atmosphere, and are generated by effects that occur within the solar system (i.e., the Sun, its planets, and their neighborhood.)
The phenomena in question? Meteors, for sure; and auroras, just maybe.
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POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON August 11, 2024
[Update July 30 8:00 am NYC time: there was a weak impact of a coronal mass ejection about 12 hours ago, but nothing big yet.]
After a few significant solar flares over the past few days, the chances of auroras (i.e. northern and southern lights) is high enough that it’s probably worth keeping an eye on polar skies for the next couple of nights. At the moment the forecast is for the best chances to be in Asia, but forecasting auroras is far from an exact science, and there could be surprises.
To know when to start looking, I keep an eye on data from the ACE satellite. When a cloud of slow particles from a solar flare’s coronal mass ejection arrives, ACE’s data goes all haywire; you’ll see it as a sudden change in the plots’ appearance, as in the example shown below. ACE satellite sits 950 thousand miles [1.5 million kilometers] from Earth, and is located between Earth and the Sun. At that vantage point, it gives us (and our other satellites) a little early warning, of up to an hour.
Another good place to look is NOAA’s space weather dashboard. Its first panel, an example of which is shown below, displays three plots; the bottom plot is called “Geomagnetic Activity”. When that plot goes deep orange or red, then there’s probably some serious auroras going on in areas where they aren’t so often seen.
But be warned — the plot shows not what is happening now but what happened in a three-hour interval that is already past. If a geomagnetic storm is long enough, that’s still useful, but be aware that the data is out of date by the time we get to see it. That’s why the ACE satellite may well give you the best heads-up.
POSTED BY Matt Strassler
ON July 29, 2024
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