The LHC In Space?

Study of the stars has always driven mankind forward.  From the earliest urge to look above ourselves, when Orion’s Belt truly belonged to an immense being above us, through navigation of the seas in exploration of our own planet, to untangling spacetime itself, the sky has always showered us with information.  Now some say space could show us the legendary Higgs boson -for free.

The thing about the universe is that it’s indescribably big, and any astrophysical event we can conceive of has probably already happened.  This is part of why the anti-LHC crowd are so retro: claiming that a few monkeys bashing rocks together on Earth could tear a hole in a universe which has been blowing things up on unimaginable scales since day one.  They defend their mistake by explaining “but we’re slamming energetic particles into each other, and in space that doesn’t happen,” which shows such staggering lack of understanding you’re allowed to pretend you can’t hear them.  But don’t do that (it’s their tactic), so simply explain that yes, energetic particles do occasionally encounter each other - even in space!  (You may work your way up to explaining especially in space if you make progress.)

One cosmic collision experiment which may already be happening is the production of Higgs bosons.  Professor Tim Tait of the University of California and colleagues suggest that this could occur when dark matter particles, which act as their own anti-matter, hit each other and annihilate.  According to the model they use most such reactions would generate a pair of equal energy gamma rays, but some would shunt most of the mass energy into the Higgs Boson - leaving a weak gamma ray signal we could see.

The best thing about this experiment is that we can already observe it.  The HESS (High Energy Stereoscopic System) telescope, VERITAS (Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System) telescope and FERMI (Not Actually An Acronym) satellite systems would all observe the resulting gamma ray spectra.  And since observing the universe is what they do already, it isn’t even any extra work. 

It’s such a good sign of mankind’s progress - there is just so much stunning stuff to be found, it’s only a matter of what we know how to look for.  When you get to the point of dark-matter annihilation-created standard model particles, we’ve come a long way from thinking giant all-powerful voyeurs were watching us at every moment.

Luke McKinney

Higgs in Space? http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427384.100-higgs-in-space-orbiting-telescope-could-beat-the-lhc.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=cosmology