One of the best podcasts I've heard. The guest is brilliant. Sabine is against another particle accelerator but this makes a very strong case for building a NG collider(s).

Right now, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the most powerful particle accelerator/collider ever built. Accelerating protons up to 299,792,455 m/s, just 3 m/s shy of the speed of light, they smash together at energies of 14 TeV, creating all sorts of new particles (and antiparticles) from raw energy, leveraging Einstein's famous E = mc² in an innovative way. By building detectors around the collision points, we can uncover all sorts of properties about any known particles and potentially discover new particles as well, as the LHC did for the Higgs boson back in the early 2010s.

But the LHC has a limited lifetime, and by the 2030s, will complete its data-taking runs. If we want to go beyond the LHC, we need to start planning for a new particle collider now, and there are four great options that can take us beyond the current frontier: a linear lepton collider, a circular lepton collider, a circular hadron collider, and a potentially new innovation of a circular muon collider. In this episode of the Starts With A Bang podcast, Dr. Cari Cesarotti joins us to discuss all of these options and much more, as we look ahead to the future of particle physics.

The serious question isn't whether we should build one (we definitely should), but which approach will be most fruitful in pushing our suite of knowledge beyond the known frontiers. There's an entire Universe to explore at the subatomic level, and those of us curious about the Universe want to know what's out there better than ever before! Follow Cari's attempts to support the future of a muon collider on Twitter @muoncollider.

(This image shows the expected signature of a Higgs boson decaying to bottom-quark jets around the collision point inside a muon collider. The yellow lines represent the decaying background of muons, while the red lines represent the b-quark jets. Credit: D Lucchesi et al.)

Starts With A Bang #108 - A Future Particle Collider

Meteosat Third Generation Sounder-1 (MTG-S1) is the second satellite launch in the MTG constellation and is equipped with the Infrared Sounder instrument. It also carries the Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission, which monitors air quality with its ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared light (UVN) spectrometer.


Cristian Bank, Eumetsat Director of Programme Preparation and Development

How long will MTG-S1 be operational?

The Copernicus Sentinel-4 mission, part of the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme, will monitor air quality with its ultraviolet, visible, near-infrared light spectrometer. The mission will be able to provide hourly observations, in a breakthrough for air quality monitoring from space.


Simonetta Cheli, ESA’s Director of Earth Observation Programmes

What is the role of the Copernicus Sentinel-4 spectrometer?

When we search for life in the Universe, it makes sense to look for planets that are similar to Earth. To most of us, those signatures would look the same as the ones we'd see if we viewed our planet today: blue oceans, green-and-brown continents, polar icecaps, wispy white clouds, an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen and oxygen, and even the modern signs of human activity, such as increasing greenhouse gas emissions, planet modification, and electromagnetic signatures that belie our presence.

But for most of our planet's history, Earth was just as "inhabited" as it is today, even though it looked very different. One fascinating period in Earth's history that lasted approximately 300 million years resulted in a planet that looked extremely different from modern Earth: a Snowball Earth period, where the entire surface, from the poles to the equator, was completely covered in snow and ice. This isn't just speculation, but is backed up by a remarkable, large suite of observational and geological evidence.

So what was Earth like during this period? How did it fall into this phase, how did it remain trapped in that state for so long, and how did it finally thaw again? To help explore this topic, I'm so pleased to welcome PhD candidate Alia Wofford to the program, who conducts intricate climate models of early Earth to try to reproduce those early conditions. From that work, we're learning about what we should be looking for when it comes to potentially inhabited exoplanets, because Earth has been inhabited for around 4 billion years, and wow, has its appearance changed over all that time. Have a listen and see for yourself!

(This illustration shows a frozen-over planet, but one that still possesses a significant liquid ocean beneath the surface ice. Many worlds in our Solar System may be described by this scenario at various points in cosmic history, including even planet Earth more than two billion years ago. Credit: Pablo Carlos Budassi/Wikimedia Commons)

Starts With A Bang #118 - Snowball Earth

Launched in May 2024, ESA’s Earth Explorer EarthCARE mission has already been delivering remarkable data. Its four instruments have brought us groundbreaking insights into clouds, aerosols and Earth’s energy balance. The mission is being featured in an immersive installation called Hakuryu, which is Japanese for White Dragon, at the Living Planet Symposium in Vienna and here’s the accompanying sonification of atmospheric data downloaded from the EarthCARE satellite.

EarthCARE data transformed into a dragon’s song for peace

Every day, the Sun sends out bursts of energetic electrons into space. As these electrons collide with other charged particles, they produce radio waves—captured by the Radio and Plasma Waves (RPW) instrument on ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft.

This track is a sonification of one six-hour data segment from a five-year dataset compiled by a team at Radboud University and Paris Observatory. Each drop in pitch represents electrons travelling further from the Sun, where fewer particles are left to interact with—causing the radio frequency (and now sound) to drop.

Listen for the distinctive “pyoong” sounds—real solar radio bursts, each starting sharp and fading low. The data has been sped up for your ears; that dramatic burst at the centre? It lasted three hours in space.

Credit: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/RPW, sonification by Katerina Pesini
Acknowledgements: Philippe Zarka (IDL script), Alan Loh (Python script), Dimosthenis Bitzilos (video editing support)

Starts With A Bang #108 - A Future Particle Collider

Ethan Siegel

Recent comments

Joshua

Related tracks