Итоги года от Physics (APS)

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/139?referer=rss
Истории про космос:
Strangers from Beyond our Solar System
Detector experiments hunting for rare events can go years and never see anything out of the ordinary. So it was cause for excitement when IceCube, a giant neutrino telescope at the South Pole, reported the detection of two neutrinos with energies of around 1000 tera-electron-volts (TeV), roughly a billion times more energetic than those arriving from the Sun. Scientists at IceCube have since further analyzed their data and reported 26 more neutrinos with energies above 30 TeV. Researchers will need to observe many more of the neutrinos before they can be certain of their source, and that may require a larger detector. But they believe the particles were produced outside of the Solar System (experiments haven’t detected neutrinos from so far away since 1987) and may be carrying information about astrophysical events, like gamma-ray bursts, in distant galaxies.
Dark Matter is Still Obscure
2013 was an eventful year in dark-matter research, with leading search efforts releasing long-awaited results—though the puzzle of what makes up the dark matter remains unsolved. In April, the collaboration running the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer aboard the International Space Station reported the observation of an excess of positrons in the cosmic ray flux. This could well originate from the annihilation of dark-matter particles in space, but data at higher energies are needed to rule out other explanations. Two other Earth-bound experiments instead attempted to capture candidate dark-matter particles called WIMPs as they pass through Earth. The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) experiment at Fermilab in Illinois caused a stir when it announced it had detected a few blips in its scintillators that could potentially be assigned to WIMPs. But the excitement was soon dampened by the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment in South Dakota. LUX, with nominally much better sensitivity, saw no evidence of such dark-matter particles. Both experiments are now racing to improve their sensitivities and hoping to deliver unequivocal dark-matter signals.
Telescope Detects Twist in Ancient Cosmic Light
The cosmic microwave background (CMB)—the “afterglow” of the big bang—is our best source of information on the infant Universe. While researchers race to interpret the all-sky CMB map released in March 2013 by the Planck satellite, one of the year’s highlights in cosmology came from a terrestrial observation: A collaboration running the South Pole Telescope made the first detection of a subtle distortion in the CMB radiation known as B-mode polarization. The observed twisting occurs because the CMB light rays experience gravitational lensing as they encounter lumps of matter en route through the Universe to us. The achievement could lead to a map of the distribution of matter in the Universe, including the elusive dark matter.
What’s Inside a Black hole?
In 2012, a group of physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, proposed that an observer falling into a black hole would be destroyed by a firewall at the event horizon. If such a firewall existed, they argued, it would solve certain inconsistencies in black hole theory, but the idea sparked a heated debate among theoretical physicists: firewalls violate Einstein’s well-established equivalence principle, which says that an observer can’t distinguish between inertial motion and free fall and therefore shouldn’t be able to tell if he has passed the event horizon. This year, two of the original firewall proponents, have rekindled the debate. The authors developed a theoretical model to describe the interior of the black hole, suggesting an in-falling observer would encounter a sea of quanta of arbitrarily high energy, i.e., a “wall of fire.”