So, well, hi everybody. Welcome to the weekly space hangout. My name is for July 5th, 2012.

My name is Fraser Kane. I am the publisher of Universe Today. And I'm joined this week by Alan Boyle from MSNBC's Cosmewog.

Jay Major from, well, from Life of the Dark in Universe Today and all of the kinds of places.

Let's go with like a permanent way to describe you. Nancy Ackinson from Senior Editor from Universe Today.

And Nicole Galucci, the noisy astronomer from Cosmewog.

And so this week we are going to be talking mostly about the dramatic discovery of the slow motion discovery of the Higgs boson.

In case of the disappearing dust cloud, the death of astronaut Alan Boyle Dexter and a speedy, speedy pulsar.

Well, I think we need to definitely start with the big news this week, which is the discovery of the Higgs boson.

So, Alan, why don't you start and sort of give everyone the big explainer on that.

Okay, I'll correct you. First of all, they say it's not the discovery of the Higgs boson, it's the discovery of what is likely A Higgs boson.

And so it's been interesting to see how they explain all this that for decades this thing that's called the Higgs boson has been hypothesized.

You know, there's this very successful theory in particle physics called the standard model.

And it works great. Only there's one little thing about it that people came across as they were developing it in the 60s is that it said that all particles should just be massless like photons.

And they should be just zooming around the universe at the speed of light and nothing would really stick together.

And so Peter Higgs, who is a Scottish professor of physics, came up with this idea along with some others that there would be some sort of field that was created just an instant after the big bang that would give some particles mass, other particles, not so much mass.

And some particles, no mass at all. For example, there are a couple of particles called the W and the Z boson that are very heavy.

On the other side of the spectrum, there's the photon, the carrier for light for electromagnetic energy, which has no mass and of course goes at the speed of light.

Who knew? Anyway, they've been looking for this evidence of this Higgs field.

And a particle that's associated with it called the Higgs boson for a long time. And in fact, that's the main reason why this $10 billion particle collider known as the Large Hadron Collider was built because it had the energy that should be able to detect this particle that has a role in giving everything else mass.

People have compared it to the sea that the universe is swimming in. So it's been an intriguing thing, a little hard to explain. And hopefully if people have questions about it, we might be able to tackle that in the question and answer phase of it.

But the bottom line is that they've been looking at the LHC for this darn thing for a couple of years. And they finally got what's called 10 inverse femtobarns of data.

It's basically the equivalent of one quadrillion proton on proton collisions. And that gives you enough statistical information to do something with.

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