Its right to say that it has been a jolly good week in science. First of all, there was the small matter of the first flyby of Pluto! Data is still being sent (will be continuously sent up till the last few months of next year). It was our first glimpse of the Dwarf planet’s surface in considerable detail, along with its atmosphere, its moons and its “heart” that’s got everyone talking.
Apart from that, a new planet was discovered orbiting a sun-like star. This planet is causing goosebumps in the scientific community, as it orbits a Sun-like star, is close to Jupiter in size, and orbits its parent star almost exactly at the same distance as Jupiter orbits our Sun! They are already calling it Solar System 2.0, though that is a bit over-exaggerated to say the least.
Next up in the world of physics, an elusive particle that has been predicted for half a century was finally experimentally confirmed at the LHC. The LHC had a big upgrade last year, allowing it to collide protons at never before achieved energies. LHC physicists were optimistic to say the least before the discovery of the Pentaquark was released. A pentaquark is a particle which contains 5 quarks, the fundamental building blocks of all matter (or so we think). It is nonetheless disappointing that the most elusive particle of all time, the Graviton has not yet been discovered, which is a bummer.
There were other key developments in biology and paleontology as well, but I won’t go into detail about that (I am not to adept at Biology to be honest!). We can hope for more scientific discoveries in the weeks to follow, since new discoveries are made faster than conspiracy theories these days.. !!
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