upsilon
/ʌpˈsʌɪlən
/ /juːpˈsʌɪlən/ /ˈʊpsɪlɒn / /ˈjuːpsɪlɒn/noun
1The twentieth letter of the Greek alphabet (Υ, υ), transliterated as ‘u’ or (chiefly in English words derived through Latin) as ‘y’.Typesetters typically confuse Greek letters in setting Greek quotations: nu with upsilon, theta with phi....
- Look lower down the alphabet - theta perhaps, or even upsilon.
1.1 (Upsilon) [followed by Latin genitive] Astronomy The twentieth star in a constellation: Upsilon Scorpii...
- The system they focused on, three huge Jupiter-like planets orbiting the central star Upsilon Andromedae, was the first extrasolar multi-planet system ever discovered by Doppler spectroscopy.
- The discovery comes only seven months after the first multi-planet system outside our own, around the star Upsilon Andromedae, was identified.
- For example, Upsilon Andromedae is now known to possess a system of three large planets.
1.2 (also upsilon particle) Physics A meson thought to contain a b quark bound to its antiparticle, produced in particle accelerators.Use of the tracking information told the energies and momenta of the muons - which could then be traced back to find the new upsilon particle and its mass....
- Similarly, the bottom quark was inferred from the discovery of the upsilon particle by Leon Lederman in 1977 at Fermilab.
- Some colleagues were surprised that he had not won a Nobel earlier, perhaps for the discovery in 1977 of the upsilon particle, the most massive nuclear particle yet found.
Origin
Greek, literally 'slender U', from psilos 'slender', referring to the need to distinguish upsilon from the diphthong oi: in late Greek the two had the same pronunciation.