Show Date:September 28, 2005  
Pam Eastlick for THE DEEP on line

LEARNING WHAT YOU’RE MADE OF
AND
WHAT’S UP WITH THE SUN?

Greetings and welcome to The Deep column and the deepest radio show on Earth. The Deep is the science talk radio program that takes you from the depths of the ocean to the farthest reaches of the universe. This week on The Deep, aired at 6:00 this evening on K-57, we’ll talk about the monster machine that has the capability of unlocking the secrets of the universe. Then we’ll have some expedition calls. We’ll also have some science news updates and we’ll be taking your phone calls. Tune in tonight and join host Jim Sullivan, Pam Eastlick and our expedition coordinator Peter Melyan for the latest in scientific news! Then log on to www.thedeepradioshow.com for more information on all the latest and deepest news!

ZEROING IN ON THE GUT	Despite the heading above, our topic this week has nothing to do with digestion; it has (literally) to do with everything. Our topic has to do with 1800 scientists who will use the world’s largest machine to recreate conditions very similar to those present at the time of the Big Bang. A far-reaching topic indeed. Three hundred feet below the surface of an area on the border between France and Switzerland; a large tunnel is being dug. It lies adjacent to CERN, an institution that’s home to an international consortium of scientists. This tunnel is a huge circular racetrack that’s five miles wide and 17 miles in circumference. It’s called the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC for short.
A detector in the LHC system

It is a racetrack, but there are no horses or cars here. Instead, giant magnets accelerate two streams of fundamental particles like atoms, ions and electrons to close to the speed of light. They will race around and around the tunnel gaining incredible speed with every circuit. At the appropriate time, the two particle streams smash into each other. The debris holds the secrets of the origin of everything and how it all works together.

Physicists have been building colliders for about fifty years now but the LHC will be, by far, the largest ever built and it will have astounding capabilities when it comes on-line in 2007. Scientists hope to create ‘little bangs’ that mimic the Big Bang that started it all.

They already used a smaller collider at CERN to recreate conditions that existed just after the Big Bang. A beam of lead ions was slammed into stationary targets, creating temperatures hotter than 2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, or more than 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. The violent collisions created matter so hot and dense that the forces that held the ions together were loosened. This allowed the building blocks of atoms (called quarks) to swim free for a moment mimicking the primordial soup present just after the Big Bang.

CERN is the home of the World Wide Web, the largest repository of data in the world and they’re experts on handling large amounts of data. It’s a good thing too, since the data generated by the LHC during one year of operation will exceed 15 Petabytes. And what’s a Petabyte? That’s 2 to the 50th power or 1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes. That’s about 1% of the worldwide production of information today in digital and non-digital forms. That’s certainly more info than I can get MY brain wrapped around!

To cope with this flood of information, CERN has launched the first phase of what could be the future of computing. The CERN grid will link computer centers around the globe, creating a virtual resource service. A scientist who is signed up for the service will be able to harness the power of a supercomputer in another country as though it were in the next room.
The World Wide Web gave a user-friendly face to the Internet and CERN plans to take that thinking a step further. The new system is analogous to the power grid. Users don't care where electricity comes from, only whether it's available.
The Grid initially will link up computer centers in 16 countries. Data analysis testing has begun to see if the system is up to the challenge of handling a complex workload. The European Union is funding planned Grids for science and industry, and companies have shown an interest in the new technology.
No one knows what implications Grid computing will have in the future. No one forsaw the impact of the World Wide Web and providing people with unheard-of resources will probably promote another quantum information leap.
Some people have expressed concern over the possibility that the LHC itself could be dangerous. They fear that recreating the Big Bang could have cataclysmic side effects — such as the creation of matter-swallowing black holes but most physicists say there is no danger. Such high-energy collisions, they say, occur frequently in nature, including high-energy cosmic rays slamming into the moon and the Earth’s atmosphere, without any world-ending consequences.
Mountains of data from a brand-new machine with unforeseeable consequences. Our guest tonight is Dr. Tony Weidberg. He’s a professor at Oxford University and a member of the Atlas team. It’s a whole new scientific world and we’ll discuss it tonight on The Deep.

SOLAR MAX?
Earlier this month on 7 September, a huge sunspot came into view on the Sun’s eastern edge. Shortly after it appeared, it exploded, producing one of the brightest x-ray solar flares ever observed. In the days that followed, that sunspot exploded eight more times. Each “X-flare” blacked out short-wave radios on Earth and caused a radiation storm around our planet. The blasts hurled clouds of magnetic particles into space and when they hit Earth on 10 and 11 September, auroras were seen as far south as Arizona.

Ah, solar minimum! Actually, solar minimum, the lowest point of the Sun’s 11-year activity cycle is due next year, but our space weathermen expected 2005 to be a quiet year for the Sun. They were wrong. 2005 began with an X-flare on New Year's Day and since then, we've had 4 severe geomagnetic storms and 14 more X-flares. Now compare 2005 to the most recent solar maximum in 2000. In that year, there were 3 severe geomagnetic storms and 17 X-flares. This year registers about the same in both categories. Solar minimum is beginning to look strangely like solar maximum.

An X-flare photographed on Sept. 9th by Birgit Kremer of Marbella, Spain.

How can this be? Although there have been fewer sunspots in 2005, they’ve done more than their share of exploding. Sunspot 798/808, the source of the Sept 7th superflare and eight lesser X-flares has made Sept. 2005 the most active month on the sun since March 1991 all by itself.

Weird? It only points up that we don’t know a whole lot about the most important star in our sky. X-ray observations of flares by NOAA's Earth-orbiting satellites began in 1975, and those big explosions (coronal mass ejections or CME’s) were discovered only a few years earlier by the 7th Orbiting Solar Observatory. Before the 1970s, our solar records are pretty spotty.

This means we don't know what is typical. Scientists have monitored only three complete solar cycles using satellite technology and it’s risky to draw conclusions from such a short span of data. Scientists are scrambling to learn all they can, because if the energy output from the Sun changes dramatically, watch out!

Whether we’re learning about the Big Bang or our Sun, The Deep, hosted by Jim Sullivan with Pam Eastlick and Peter Melyan is the place to be on K-57 tonight at 6:00 p.m. Don’t miss it!