The Higgs boson has been discovered last year. There is no news today. It is merely the significance level that is a little higher now, but even a level of so called “five sigma” (don’t worry if you do not understand it, it is arbitrary anyway) does not prove anything.

The long and complicated journey to detect the Higgs boson might finally have reached its goal, said experimental physicists at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, near Geneva - and they said it with a telltale bump on a slide.

The Higgs boson is the final building block that has been missing from the "Standard Model," which describes the structure of matter in the universe. The Higgs boson combines two forces of nature and shows that they are, in fact, different aspects of a more fundamental force. The particle is also responsible for the existence of mass in the elementary particles.

[ The first three entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) and here (part 2) and here (part 3) and here (part 4) and

[ The first three entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) and here (part 2) and here (part 3) and here (part 4)].

[ The first three entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) and here (part 2) and here (part 3)]

[ The first two entries of this live blogging series are available here (part 1) and here (part 2) ]

This is the second post of a series of blogs that I am writing this morning, July 4th, to describe the ongoing happenings at CERN, where at 9AM the Higgs boson Observation will be announced by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations. Please reload this page at 10 minute intervals if you want to hear the latest news, or see the previous entries.

Entry 1 - Where's the queue ?

5.30 AM. Getting in at CERN through the B entrance I see no living soul. "Ha" -I tell myself- "I have been worrying too much".

5.36 AM. But the people is all here since last night ! There is a huge queue of 180 people already, extending from the doors of the Main Auditorium all the way up the aisle and back down on the other side. Most of the higgs enthusiasts have camped since last night here, and there is even a couple of guys with wide shoulders (but a polite smile) that direct newcomers to the end of the line.

Here are a couple of pictures of the queue as of now: the head of the queue close to the doors of the auditorium,

The so called “Free Thought Blogs” (FTB) has kicked out blogger Greg Laden and some other godless chap: “Thunderfoot”. Ed Brayton, the FTB high priest, writes that:

it was intended to be very “loosy-goosy,” where we would all make decisions together like a commune; it turns out that doesn’t work very well …

V1647 Ori resides 1300 light-years away in McNeil’s Nebula. It is a young Sun-like star spinning at high speed and spewing out super-hot plasma and astronomers have now been able to deduce what might be happening behind the dusty disc cloaking the star. 

Three telescopes, XMM-Newton, Chandra, and Suzaku, have kept their eyes on it during two multi-year outbursts. The first lasted from 2003 to 2006; the second has been under way since 2008.  During these extended outbursts the star displays faster growth in mass, a surge in X-ray emission and a dramatic increase in temperature to 50 million degrees celsius.