Ringpiece!

A cheap joke for a rather interesting story. Wired.com has a piece about the rings of Saturn (see what I did there...), in that the 30-foot thick bands of rock and ice that girdle the planet are not entirely uniform.

In a nutshell, every fifteen years or so Saturn reaches its equinox, which results in some very different light angles, reflections and suchlike, and the latest one has allowed folks in Colorado to study the rings in some detail. In so doing, they've found some areas to be thicker than others, caused by the gravitational pull exerted by Saturn's moons. Pretty cool stuff.

From one ring to another: Ever wondered what makes gold and copper so different to the other shiny metals? Why one is yellow, another orange? As it turns out it's all to do with electrons; yes, that old chestnut again. See for yourself: these folks explain it all far better than I ever could.

Of course, ever since people began rummaging in the dirt we've always had a fascination for a bit of bling. I suppose with gold being so unusual a metal it became more than an object of fascination, it became currency. Copper, too, would once upon a time have been a prized material: copper ingots were used for trading a heck of a lot, as was lead of course. And yet, my Grandmother remembers when Aluminium was considered rare and precious: we now know it's probably the most abundant metal in the earth's crust. I reckon that's a result of all the takeaways we eat.

I thank you ladies and gentlemen, I'm here all week.

Isn't technology wonderful?

I saw this story on Reddit of all places, as you do, and was immediately fascinated: someone claims to have imaged the s- and p-electron orbitals in a single carbon atom. Then I saw the comments below the story: shurely shome mishtake seemed to be the order of the day: why are they not sp- hybrids? Anyway, the paper has only just been accepted by Physical Review B so it may be a while before we see the details. However, sp- or no sp-, it still seems incredibly exciting. We shall see.

Also, I see that the folks at the European Space Agency have basically given NASA a resounding "meh" following the latest Hubble images (see previous posts), and gone and released some of the images their own Planck telescope has started to capture.

Lest we forget, Planck is the coldest object in the sky, chilled to -273 deg C (can't do the ascii), designed to answer some of the most complicated questions posed by astronomers. One idea is that a model of the initial expansion of the universe may be accurately determined. So, from the very small to the very large; how splendid. Have a good weekend!

Even more interesting than usual

Ah yes, the humble electron; where would we be without it? Well, we wouldn't exist, for one thing.

For over a century the electron was thought to be indivisible - a single particle, incapable of being broken apart. However people used to think of the atom in the same way, until some bright Kiwi threw a bunch of radioactive particles at a bit of metal. Now we have protons, neutrons, bosons, quarks and of course, the electron. And you couldn't get smaller than an electron, could you? Why on earth folks thought this to be the case when ever smaller nuclear particles have been found (by smashing stuff up in a massive tube) is anyone's guess.

So, a few folks have published some work in Science detailing their experiments to split the electron, and it appears to have worked. Not by smashing things up in a massive tube, however. They actually crammed a whole mass of electrons into a very tiny tube, and electrons being electrons, they found each other so abominally repellent that they burst apart, a bit like a Daily Mail reader confronted with an Azerbaijani immigrant. And from this catastrophic fission the Spinon and Holon were released and identified. Pretty cool, huh?

So we've come a long way since the electron was first identified (did you know people used to refer to them as "corpuscles"? Poor, misguided fools, even if they were fellows at Trinity College). But there are still a whole lot of elementary particles and properties still to be identified and analysed. Fermilab still haven't found the Higgs, CERN is about to power up the LHC again, and Gordon Brown is going to eat his own head. Probably.