Wednesday, 25 November 2009

Crunch! Bang! Smash!

A Higgs Boson goes into a church, but is stopped by the priest.
"I'm sorry, you can't come in here," the priest says.
"Why not?" asks the Higgs. "Without me you can't have Mass."

...

Is that tumbleweed I see rolling across the screen?

Anyway, the Large Hadron Collider has been doing it's thing for nearly a week and so far no bits of bread have fallen into the mechanism, nor has a black hole swallowed Switzerland. Nor has a hypothetical Higgs appeared with the sole intention of wrecking the machine just to remain undiscovered, etc. etc. What has happened is that some collisions have taken place, and the folks at CERN are now starting to crunch through some data.

However exciting this may be, it could pale into insignificance compared to the massive collision that is taking place as we speak. Oh, did I mention it was on a galactic scale? It would appear that a "dark galaxy" - a barely discernible yet rather huge cloud of hydrogen (with rather a lot of matter within it to hold it together) is colliding with our own galaxy. Apparently this is not the first time it's happened; the very same dark galaxy did this around 70 million years ago. How cool is that?

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