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posted by Fnord666 on Friday September 11 2020, @01:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the dark-matters dept.

Dark matter hunter who found unexpected, giant 'Fermi bubbles' wins $100,000 physics prize:

Tracy Slatyer, known for hunting dark matter in our galaxy and discovering evidence of an ancient Milky Way explosion, has won a $100,000 New Horizons Prize in Physics.

Slatyer, an MIT physicist originally from Australia, is most famous as a co-discoverer of the "Fermi Bubbles." While looking for hints of dark matter's signature in the gamma rays emanating from the center of the Milky Way, she and her colleagues found never-before-seen structures extending far above and below the galactic disk — aftershocks of a black hole outburst from millions of years ago that came to be known as "Fermi bubbles" after the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. But Slatyer is still hunting dark matter and has found promising (though still tentative) hints of the stuff at the galactic center.

The New Horizons award, given by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation each year, goes to "early career" researchers like Slatyer, who got her Ph.D. in 2010 and was hired at MIT in 2013. New Horizons prizes are smaller than the $3 million prizes Breakthrough hands out each year, typically to older and more established scientists. Slatyer was the only solo winner of a 2021 New Horizons prize in Physics, with the other two awards going to research teams of four members each. The prize money is donated by a group of tech billionaires (Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, Yuri Milner, Julia Milner, Jack Ma and Pony Ma).

Breakthrough awarded Slatyer the prize "For major contributions to particle astrophysics, from models of dark matter to the discovery of the "Fermi Bubbles."

Slatyer spends a lot of her time refining models of dark matter — working out precisely how its particles might behave and the implications of those different possibilities. And the rest of her time is spent hunting them down.

"It was a complete surprise," Slatyer told Live Science. "The prize wasn't even on my radar."


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Bot on Friday September 11 2020, @02:04PM (4 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Friday September 11 2020, @02:04PM (#1049483) Journal

    -scientist
    -ω4τ
    -wat
    -that means wat in labratspeak
    -oh ok. wat is your quest
    -to find dark matter
    -found any
    -well i found fermi bubbles
    -wat are them
    -thingies which are named after the fermi telescope which is named after fermi which might be darkmatterish
    -oh k get a prize for dark matter then
    -cool, must have been a slow year huh
    -as usual

    --
    Account abandoned.
    • (Score: 5, Funny) by ikanreed on Friday September 11 2020, @02:42PM (3 children)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 11 2020, @02:42PM (#1049508) Journal

      Sometimes I wish there was a "Trying to be funny but is not funny at all" mod. It doesn't need to change the score, I'd just feel better for clicking it.

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 11 2020, @03:05PM (1 child)

        by Bot (3902) on Friday September 11 2020, @03:05PM (#1049523) Journal

        Spotted the lab rat.

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        Account abandoned.
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @09:18PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @09:18PM (#1049673)

          Spotted the idiot who hates science and loves sky-fairy tales!

      • (Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday September 11 2020, @08:08PM

        by shrewdsheep (5215) on Friday September 11 2020, @08:08PM (#1049648)

        But how to you intend to moderate your post before clicking "Submit"?

  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by Mojibake Tengu on Friday September 11 2020, @02:13PM (9 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Friday September 11 2020, @02:13PM (#1049489) Journal

    A group of billionaires had to form a collective to make a donation of 100k?

    What a shame.

    Frankly, this is exact metric of how our overlords value frontier science.

    --
    Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
    • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 11 2020, @03:10PM (7 children)

      by Bot (3902) on Friday September 11 2020, @03:10PM (#1049527) Journal

      By frequenting some, not every, rich people, you will notice they are quite resistant to give money away.
      Partially as a self defense mechanism, because being generous often generates a spiral of resentment instead of gratitude, but mainly because money is control and control is sacred in their religion. It's not a matter of self gaining money, it's about removing money from others to keep them down.

      This is why government man and mafia man behave essentially the same, it's all about finding novel ways to suck you out of some money.

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      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @04:34PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @04:34PM (#1049551)

        "because being generous often generates a spiral of resentment instead of gratitude"

        holy shit, that hits the nail...
        when i was young, i used to like to make people laugh, but i noticed, that instead of me scoring points, they got frustrated with me when on days, when i had nothing fun to say...

        when i was young i also liked to help people with their computers, until it became a duty, and more so my implicit fault that it did not function as expected... the mood became such that I felt for apologizing, and my apologies were accepted... but wtf?

        when i was young i also liked explaining tech and stuff to people, until i saw that . . . . . . .

        then there are the people who get an ego boost of having someone kowtow and humbly perform some favors for them, then they smirk and become arrogant...

        -Vlad

        never ever fucking do favors...

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by nostyle on Friday September 11 2020, @05:43PM

          by nostyle (11497) on Friday September 11 2020, @05:43PM (#1049573) Journal

          The alternate take-away is to always assume that any favor you do will go unappreciated and often even punished, but you do it anyway as a zen exercise for the betterment of the universe.

          Any who have parented children will understand this POV.

        • (Score: 2) by Bot on Friday September 11 2020, @08:30PM

          by Bot (3902) on Friday September 11 2020, @08:30PM (#1049655) Journal

          As the old saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished.

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          Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @05:40PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @05:40PM (#1049570)

        You can't amass wealth by giving it away or spending it; you have to save it. Its unsurprising that people who have saved a lot of it are still in the habit.

        • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @08:31PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @08:31PM (#1049656)

          Do they have a lot because they saved a lot, or do they have a lot because they get substantial breaks (captial gains, etc.) because they have a lot?

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @08:33PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @08:33PM (#1049658)

            wat?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @07:38PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @07:38PM (#1049635)

        You seem to not be very appreciative of what "trickles down" on you from them. THAT'S why we need to give them even more tax breaks.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @07:34PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 11 2020, @07:34PM (#1049633)

      It is fake science anyway.

      The government knows the sun will go mirconova in 2046 while the geomagnetic poles shift quickly at the same time. The combination of these two events will destroy nearly all life on the planet.

      The government does not want to tell people this because it would cause pandemonium and chaos and they do not want that because they need us to keep working and paying taxes. They need our labor and our money to build deep under ground military bases in an effort to survive the sun micronova.

      This event happens about every 12,068 years. Its called the Solar Clock cycle. All stars/suns do it. Ours has done it in the past and the elite know it. The people the rule the planet are ancient and have survived past events.

      Real scientists would help us with that.

  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:19AM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday September 12 2020, @01:19AM (#1049764) Journal

    Looking for DM and don't find it but HEY!, find something that we can say 'will' lead us to DM so we can keep the $$$ flowing in so we can keep 'searching' for something that doesn't exist instead of doing REAL science....

    .... don't mind that man behind the curtain. He keeps the money coming!

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @07:31PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 12 2020, @07:31PM (#1050071)

      Yeah, that's why I got into science. It is all the hundreds of dollars I get to do my research. I'm livin' large on that fountain of cash that pours in from all those suckers and punks like you who went into other fields. Sometimes I spread, literally, tens of dollars on the floor in singles and I lay back and roll around in it thinking how sweet the adjunct professor life is. KEEP THE SCAM ALIVE AND KEEP IT FLOWING BABY!

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