Headline-Making W-Boson Anomaly Gone For Good

Figure: CERN/CMS

Two years ago, a collaboration from Fermilab published a headline-making result saying that one of the elementary particles – the W-Boson – might be so heavy that it would not be compatible with the Standard Model, a sign that new physics was required. They arrived at this conclusion from a re-analysis of old data, collected by the Tevatron collider that stopped operation in 2011. Their new data analysis was well off the previous measurement results – by more than 7σ – because they claimed to have been able to reduce the uncertainty with clever maths. Well, it seems that the maths wasn’t all that clever. Last year, the ATLAS collaboration from CERN published the results of their measurement of the W-Boson mass. Now we also have results from CMS, a different experiment at CERN, with a remarkably small error bar (see figure). Neither has found any discrepancy with the Standard Model. I think we can safely forget about this anomaly. Paper here. Press release here.

This episode of Science News covers our solar system. In a normal solar system, planets orbit the central star in the same direction on the same plane. Our solar system, though, is a bit different: while most of our planets follow similar orbits along one plane, some of the celestial bodies circle the sun at different angles – or in the entirely wrong direction. In a new paper, a group of researchers say they figured out why. Let’s take a look. You can take the quiz here.

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Earth Will Temporarily Have a Second Moon

Astrophysicists have found that Earth is about to capture an asteroid that will orbit around Earth once, making it a temporary second moon. It’s fairly small at just about 11 metres (33 feet) long, and won’t be visible to the naked eye. It will be captured at the end of September and take about 53 days to go once around our planet, then escape back into space. Paper here. More info here.

Bacteria Can Travel Thousands of Kilometres in Upper Atmosphere, Study Finds

During 10 data collection flights over Japan, scientists found that the air at altitudes between 1 and 3 kilometres contains viable microbes – both bacteria and fungi. The researchers say that winds can carry these microbes thousands of kilometres. I guess when the next pandemic hits, we’ll have to outlaw rain. Paper here, summary here.

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