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Critics take aim
at fast neutrinos
By Devin Powell
A new study puts the brakes on faster-than-light neutrinos.
In September, a group at Italy’s
OPERA experiment reportedly clocked
neutrinos traveling the 730 kilometers
from CERN in Switzerland to Italy’s
underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory about 60 nanoseconds faster than
light would have covered that distance in
a vacuum (SN: 10/22/11, p. 18). But if this
were true, most of the neutrinos would
have shed energy en route, a new analysis
by Boston University physicists suggests.
OPERA should have detected this
radiation, say the physicists, if its claims
are to be believed. It didn’t.
“I would be ecstatic to see some kind
of new physics coming from this experi-
ment,” says Andrew Cohen, a theoretical
physicist who, with Nobel Prize–winner
Sheldon Glashow, reports the new find-
ing in an upcoming Physical Review
Letters. “It’s just hard to accommodate
that, given this [lack of ] radiation.”
To follow up on this idea, a second
neutrino experiment at Gran Sasso
called ICARUS searched for signs of this
radiation and found none.
Antennas reveal Antennae
The ALMA radio telescope array has released its first test
images, spectacular views of star formation in the colliding
Antennae Galaxies. In the image at left, orange and yellow
patches highlight stellar nurseries that are normally hidden
from observers’ eyes. Views from other instruments —
including the Hubble Space Telescope — fill out the blue, white and
pink patches of the galaxies, which lie about 70 million light-years away. ALMA is a set of radio dishes in chile’s Atacama
Desert that is still under construction, but even with just a
third of the 66 antennas planned for 2013 collecting data, the
images already surpass any other telescope’s detail. In the
coming months the array will peer at nascent exoplanet systems and the gargantuan black hole lurking in the Milky Way’s
core. The array will also hunt for some of the universe’s first
galaxies. When completed, ALMA’s movable antennas will span
up to 18 kilometers. — Camille M. Carlisle
