The twin goliaths of 20th century theoretical physics - general relativity and quantum mechanics - helped explain an enormous number of developments in astronomy, from black holes to cosmology to the various processes by which light is emitted and absorbed in stars, galaxies and the spaces in between. In recent years, rapid developments in physics and astronomy have kept pace with each other. This discovery allowed astronomers to determine the chemical composition of stellar atmospheres, and in fact, their work later came back to help physicists the element helium was discovered in spectra from the Sun nearly 30 years before it was found on the Earth. Later on, in the 19th century, astronomers who were studying stellar spectra (the light from stars split up into its component colors) began to notice that the patterns they saw matched those that occurred when light was shined through different gases in laboratories here on Earth. Isaac Newton provided one of the first examples of the link between physics and astronomy in the 17th century, when he reasoned that the force of gravity which pulls objects to the Earth is the same force which keeps the Earth and other planets in orbit around the sun.
In addition, the extreme environments encountered in astrophysical situations provide a "laboratory" to test these theories under conditions that we could never hope to recreate ourselves. In order to explain what we see in the night sky, therefore, we appeal to theories originally developed to explain physical phenomena on the Earth. Physics is the study of the laws that govern the universe, and to the best of our knowledge, those laws are the same here and now as they were long ago and far away. It was one of the two LHC experiments involved in the discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson in July 2012.This isn't a surprise, because astronomy and physics are intimately tied together. ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus) is one of the seven particle detector experiments constructed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland. Although our website is about astronomy, we receive many questions that are related, in whole or in part, to the science of physics.ĪTLAS experiment at LHC.