The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

	In hunt for dark energy THE newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded light from 8 billion years ago, scientists say. Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That light may hold within it the answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics — why the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Scientists in the international Dark Energy Survey collaboration announced this week that the Dark Energy Camera, the product of eight years of planning and construction by scientists, engineers and technicians on three continents, has achieved first light. The first pictures of the southern sky were taken by the 570-megapixel camera on September 12. “The achievement of first light through the Dark Energy Camera begins a significant new era in our exploration of the Cosmic Frontier,” said James Siegrist, DOE associate director of science for high-energy physics. “The results of this survey will bring us closer to understanding the mystery of dark energy and what it means for the universe,” he noted. The Dark Energy Camera was constructed at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, which is the southern branch of the US National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). With this device, roughly the size of a phone booth, astronomers and physicists will probe the mystery of dark energy, the force they believe is causing the universe to expand faster and faster. “The Dark Energy Survey will help us understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing due to gravity. It is extremely satisfying to see the efforts of all the people involved in this project finally come together,” said Brenna Flaugher, project manager and scientist at Fermilab. The Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, able to see light from over 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light-years away in each snapshot. The camera’s array of 62 charged-coupled devices has an unprecedented sensitivity to very red light, and along with the Blanco telescope’s large light-gathering mirror (which spans 13 feet across), will allow scientists from around the world to pursue investigations ranging from studies of asteroids in our own solar system to the understanding of the origins and the fate of the universe. “We’re very excited to bring the Dark Energy Camera online and make it available for the astronomical community through NOAO’s open-access telescope allocation,” said Chris Smith, director of the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory. “With it, we provide astronomers from all over the world a powerful new tool to explore the outstanding questions of our time, perhaps the most pressing of which is the nature of dark energy,” he added. Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration will use the new camera to carry out the largest galaxy survey ever undertaken, and will use that data to carry out four probes of dark energy, studying galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing. This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment. The Dark Energy Survey is expected to begin in December, after the camera is fully tested, and will take advantage of the excellent atmospheric conditions in the Chilean Andes to deliver pictures with the sharpest resolution seen in such a wide-field astronomy survey. In just its first few nights of testing, the camera has already delivered images with excellent and nearly uniform spatial resolution. Over five years, the survey will create detailed colour images of one-eighth of the sky, or 5,000 square degrees, to discover and measure 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters and 4,000 supernovae. — ANI
	Did a crashing meteor kick-start the Ice Ages? A gigantic meteor collided with the Earth about 2.5 million years ago, generating the mother of all tsunamis, hundreds of metres high, possibly plunging the planet into the Ice Ages, an Australian study says. Most scientists may have overlooked Eltanin meteor’s potential for immediate catastrophic impact, or its capacity to destabilise the entire planet’s climate system, when the 2,000m object crashed in the Southern Pacific Ocean. “This is the only known deep-ocean impact event on the planet and its largely been forgotten because there’s no obvious giant crater to investigate, as there would have been if it had hit a landmass,” says James Goff, Professor at the University of New South Wales’ (UNSW) Australia-Pacific Tsunami Research Centre. Goff led the study. “But consider that we’re talking about something the size of a small mountain crashing at very high speed into very deep ocean, between Chile and Antarctica,” adds Goff, the Journal of Quaternary Science reports. “Unlike a land impact, where the energy of the collision is largely absorbed locally, this would have generated an incredible splash with waves literally hundreds of metres high near the impact site,” adds Goff. “Some modelling suggests that the ensuing mega-tsunami could have been unimaginably large — sweeping across vast areas of the Pacific and engulfing coastlines far inland. But it also would have ejected massive amounts of water vapour, sulphur and dust up into the stratosphere. “The tsunami alone would have been devastating enough in the short term, but all that material shot so high into the atmosphere could have been enough to dim the sun and dramatically reduce surface temperatures,” Goff said. “Earth was already in a gradual cooling phase, so this might have been enough to rapidly accelerate and accentuate the process and kick start the Ice Ages,” concludes Goff. “There’s no doubt the world was already cooling through the mid and late Pliocene Epoch,” says study co-author Mike Archer, Professor and Goff’s colleague. “What we’re suggesting is that the Eltanin impact may have rammed this slow-moving change forward in an instant - hurtling the world into the cycle of glaciations that characterized the next 2.5 million years and triggered our own evolution as a species,” Archer said. — IANS
	THIS UNIVERSE PROF YASH PAL According to Boyle’s Law, pressure is inversely proportional to volume but when we blow a balloon, both volume and pressure increase. Please explain. Boyle’s Law can apply if the number of molecules in the balloon, or the container, remains the same. This is not true when you blow a balloon to increase its volume. It is a bad habit to mug up the language of a so-called law and try to apply it in every case. When the Big Bang occurred, why was it that all the planets formed in a spherical shape and not any other? The Big Bang, if that was the beginning of the universe, did not result in immediate formation of our solar system or the planets in it. It is believed that that was a time when even the elements that now constitute the solar system were not yet formed. All that came later. The spherical shapes of the planets probably resulted because they were formed through slow accretion of dust and material under action of gravity over a long period of time. Do astrological transits have real influence on the lives of individuals? A transit is an event when a heavenly body passes in front of another. I suppose you call such an event as astrological when the event is not too spectacular or ordinarily visible. All the same, it is an astronomical event and of interest in that sense. Attaching astrological significance depends on the imagination of the astrologer, nothing more. Readers can e-mail questions to Prof Yash Pal at palyash.pal@gmail.com
	Trends Arctic sea ice thaw may be accelerated by oil, shipping OSLO: Local pollution in the Arctic from shipping and oil and gas industries, which have expanded in the region due to a thawing of sea ice caused by global warming, could further accelerate that thaw, experts say. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said there was an urgent need to calculate risks of local pollutants such as soot, or “black carbon”, in the Arctic. Soot darkens ice, making it soak up more of the sun’s heat and quickening a melt. Scientists grow drug for rare disease in corn LONDON: Scientists have grown a drug to treat a rare genetic disease inside corn plants, potentially offering a cheaper way to manufacture a treatment that currently costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for each patient. The move marks an advance for the emerging field of molecular farming, which could one day see complex biotech medicines being mass-produced in plants rather than factories. — Reuters A protester against genetically modified organisms is chained to a vehicle while blocking a delivery entrance to a Monsanto seed distribution facility in Oxnard, California, in this September 12 photo. In a study that prompted criticism from other experts, French scientists said on Wednesday that rats fed on Monsanto’s genetically modified corn or exposed to its top-selling weedkiller suffered tumours and multiple organ damage. — Reuters photo