South Dakota
The elemental poetry of an underground particle accelerator in South Dakota
4,850 feet beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota, there’s an underground particle accelerator in a former gold mine. Here, a motorcycle-riding nuclear astrophysicist named Mark Hanhardt thinks about the poetry of Alfred Tennyson while recreating the quantum alchemy of a 13-billion-year-old star.
Pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope contain a glint of what its eye can not yet see, an ancient spectrum of light that Hanhardt peers into with his team. Here, he maps the primordial chemical lineage of the universe back to the Big Bang. Here, with a poem, his doctoral thesis begins:
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower — but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.”
If any poem could describe the scientific research being conducted with the Compact Accelerator System for Performing Astrophysical Research (CASPAR) in South Dakota, you’d be hard pressed to find a more perfect fit than the Romantic-era metaphysics of Tennyson’s “Flower in the Crannied Wall.”
“CASPAR appeals to me, specifically because of the poetry of it,” Hanhardt said in a release from the Sanford Underground Research Facility where CASPAR is housed.
Scientists have had a love affair with Tennyson, known as “the poet of science”, since 19th century naturalist William North Rice was reconciling his love of geology with his Methodist faith. Even Joseph Norman Lockyear, founder of the academic journal Nature, was enchanted by Tennyson’s simultaneous hunger for study and embrace of the unknowable. Hanhardt’s chosen verse is short, concise — packing all the star-struck wonder of the universe into just six lines about a flower, connecting the infinite to the minute.
And that’s what CASPAR is all about for the scientists who work with it.
“With CASPAR, physicists are literally tracing our chemical lineage.”
“The idea that understanding these tiny reactions on the smallest quantum scale gives us the ability to understand the universe on the grandest scale possible is amazing. It helps us recognize and appreciate how profound the images coming back from James Webb Space Telescope really are,” Hanhardt said.
Nearly a mile beneath the Black Hills of South Dakota at the Sanford Underground Research Facility, a small particle accelerator called CASPAR is premiered by scientists at the machine’s official ribbon-cutting. (Sanford Underground Research Facility)
And the telescope, for all its power, needs the help. What scientists like Hanhardt need to find out is beyond the Webb’s reach. What was going on inside those 400-million-year-old stars that appear in the Webb’s pictures? What were the main elements that made them up, and what does that tell us about how the universe — and all matter — evolved into its current state after the Big Bang?
“With CASPAR, physicists are literally tracing our chemical lineage,” he added. “The atoms that make up you and me were forged inside the heart of the stars. And we’re studying how that happens. CASPAR is helping James Webb Space Telescope tell the story of how we got from there to here.”
Proton in a crannied star
That path is winding and subatomic. Early stars burned out fast — made of only helium and hydrogen — but when they exploded they scattered entirely new elements out into space. Because that process was so much different for early stars than supernovas that can create elements today, we don’t know exactly how those early elements (thus, new atoms) were even formed.
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But South Dakota Mines physics professor Frank Streider is working on it. He said the key to charting the known universe’s path through time is in untangling a complex process known as stellar nucleosynthesis, and then deciphering the subatomic-level reactions inside that process. CASPAR is making this possible by taking the ancient light spectrums captured in Webb photos, and then analyzing their signatures to figure out exactly which elements were producing that light in combusting stars.
“A comprehensive answer to this discrepancy remains elusive to date.”
“Stars of significantly greater mass than our Sun usually serve as the cosmic cauldrons, actively ‘polluting’ the universe with heavier elements,” Strieder, one of the principal investigators leading CASPAR, said in the release. “As soon as you understand the full reaction chains that happen inside the stars, and have all the parameters, you can exactly predict how the star evolves and how long it lives.”
A researcher calibrates underground equipment during the famous Homestake experiment, which measured solar neutrinos from 1970 to 1994 in the same subterranean location where the CASPAR particle accelerator is used by physicists today. (Anna Davis / Sanford Underground Research Facility)
One of those heavier elements is lithium, the third element to be formed in the universe. The fourth element to be formed was beryllium. Here’s where things get weird. Lithium was forged inside stars when atomic reactions transformed a helium atom with one extra proton and neutron. Then, as far as we understand, lithium was somehow transformed into beryllium — but some lithium building blocks can be so unstable by themselves that they seemingly fall apart way too quickly for beryllium to emerge.
At that point, the metaphorical bridge of elemental production gets broken. And, since beryllium clearly exists somehow, scientists are squinting into CASPAR to find out how the chain of elemental production managed to continue across the gap in this broken bridge.
“A comprehensive answer to this discrepancy remains elusive to date,” Strieder said, describing how the amount of lithium we expect to see in early stars is different than the amount we’re actually seeing.
Strieder said the gap isn’t just between two main elements like lithium and beryllium, but also appears between multiple types of a single element — when going from lithium-5 to lithium-6, for example, by adding one additional proton. You need both a proton and neutron to keep the balance. But when a balanced lithium atom gets an extra proton and turns into lithium-5, it’s half-life in total seconds equals 10 to the negative-20th power. That’s one one-hundred-quintillionth of a second.
“This is a prominent gap … it’s because there are no mass five stable nuclei,” he said, adding that lithium-8 (the one that comes before beryllium) has a similar problem. “So, you can produce a small amount of lithium 6 and lithium 7, but to go higher is a challenge.”
To see the stars underground
Strieder said that with the power-combo of CASPAR and the Webb telescope, physicists like he and Hanhardt are plotting out research for the future which could finally fill these gaps in our knowledge about the earliest moments in the existence of the universe.
When a balanced lithium atom gets an extra proton and turns into lithium-5, it’s half-life in total seconds equals 10 to the negative-20th power. That’s one one-hundred-quintillionth of a second.
Like atomic building blocks, one iteration of technology sits atop the next at the Sanford Lab. The former Homestake Gold Mine that now houses the lab was, for many years, the busiest mine in the state, delving some 8,000 feet underground, where whitetail deer roam through the valleys now and otter families are spotted by researchers in waterways of the Black Hills.
From 1969 to 1994, the Homestake mine was the site of some of the earliest solar neutrino experiments in history. Called the Homestake experiment, chemist Ray Davis began his work in 1965 in the mine aiming to count neutrinos from the stars with a 100,000-gallon tank of dry cleaning fluid and a wild theory: that when the neutrinos hit the chlorine in the dry-cleaning fluid, they would turn into argon atoms. He was right — or at right enough to win a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2002.
“To my surprise, a whole new field of neutrino physics has developed in directions I never imagined in the Homestake days,” Davis wrote that year.
Just as Davis was winning his Nobel Prize in 2002, something else happened — the Homestake mine closed down. Without continuous pump operations, it didn’t take long for the waters to begin rising in the old mines.
It took scientists and advocates years of sweat and governmental paper-chasing to secure the site — a premium location for carefully controlled particle experiments — and to turn the mine into the gleaming 12-mile sprawl of underground research facilities and state-of-the-art tech that it is today. Its experiments have injected hundreds of millions of dollars into South Dakota’s economy and household incomes. Its work has attracted partnerships with countries and organizations around the world.
Strieder and Hanhardt are just two of the lab’s roughly 120 staff members, 50% of which the lab says are former Homestake Mining Company workers. Their depth of institutional experience in navigating the old underground mining drifts now forms the foundation of the new scientific knowledge that the Sanford Lab — from the belly of the earth, is culling from the stars.
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The South Dakota Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.
Here’s a look at May 10, 2026, results for each game:
Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from May 10 drawing
01-03-20-35-46, Bonus: 05
Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
Are you a winner? Here’s how to claim your prize
- Prizes of $100 or less: Can be claimed at any South Dakota Lottery retailer.
- Prizes of $101 or more: Must be claimed from the Lottery. By mail, send a claim form and a signed winning ticket to the Lottery at 711 E. Wells Avenue, Pierre, SD 57501.
- Any jackpot-winning ticket for Dakota Cash or Lotto America, top prize-winning ticket for Lucky for Life, or for the second prizes for Powerball and Mega Millions must be presented in person at a Lottery office. A jackpot-winning Powerball or Mega Millions ticket must be presented in person at the Lottery office in Pierre.
When are the South Dakota Lottery drawings held?
- Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Mega Millions: 10 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
- Lucky for Life: 9:38 p.m. CT daily.
- Lotto America: 9:15 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
- Dakota Cash: 9 p.m. CT on Wednesday and Saturday.
- Millionaire for Life: 10:15 p.m. CT daily.
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a South Dakota editor. You can send feedback using this form.
South Dakota
After Standing Rock, could a canceled mine project offer a roadmap for opponents of a new oil pipeline in South Dakota?
Almost exactly a decade since the start of the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline gained national and international attention, new disputes are simmering over tribal rights in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Earlier this month, an environmental organization and a Native American advocacy group sued the US Forest Service, claiming that an exploratory graphite drilling project on national forest land threatened a recognized ceremonial site on mountain meadows known as Pe’ Sla, or Reynolds Prairie.
But on Friday, Pete Lien and Sons, the company behind the project, abruptly withdrew, saying it would perform reclamation on the site and would not seek to file another plan. The decision came as a striking victory for Native American tribes and environmental groups that had opposed it – but other projects in the works may not meet the same conclusion.
The project, claimed nine groups within the Sioux Nation, including the Standing Rock Sioux, would “directly and significantly” affect the use of Pe’ Sla, which sits within Ȟe Sápa, the Lakota name for the sacred Black Hills of South Dakota, itself the locus of Lakota creation myths.
A second exploratory project by a Canadian company looking to mine uranium on state-owned land could affect Craven Canyon, an area that contains 7,000-year-old sites of importance to Indigenous tribes, historians and archaeologists.
Opposition to the twin projects – backed by Pete Lien, of Rapid City, and by Clean Nuclear Energy Corp – comes as a proposed Alberta-to-Wyoming pipeline for carrying Canadian crude oil to the US is close to securing commitments from oil companies after Donald Trump granted permitting through an executive order.
All the projects have at their heart issues of extraction, water safety and sacred sites, much as the Standing Rock dispute of 2016 that saw “water protesters” gather in a standoff with law enforcement over concerns regarding water safety and sacred sites.
That case began when the Standing Rock Sioux passed a resolution stating that “the Dakota Access Pipeline poses a serious risk to the very survival of our Tribe and … would destroy valuable cultural resources” and was a violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty guaranteeing the “undisturbed use and occupation” of reservation lands surrounding the pipeline.
In the aftermath, the environmental group Greenpeace was ordered to pay damages of $345m by a North Dakota judge to pipeline company Energy Transfer and subsidiary Dakota Access in connection with the protests, an order that is set to go to appeal. Greenpeace claims the legal action is designed to silence activists.
Most of the current disputes relate to energy, reflecting the Trump administration’s drive toward US energy independence and away from dependence on foreign sources, particularly China. Graphite, used in electric vehicle batteries, is almost exclusively imported. Roughly 95%–99% of uranium is purchased from foreign sources, including Russia and Kazakhstan.
The pipeline deal, meanwhile, is expected to help increase oil output from Canada, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to around 6.1m barrels a day, up from 5.5m now. Bridger, the company behind the Alberta-to-Wyoming pipeline, has said the project was being developed in response to identified market interest.
Wizipan “Little Elk” Garriott, a member of NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights group opposing the mining at Pe’ Sla, says the entire process of approval for the planned mine “happened in the dark”.
“There was no notice that they were proceeding provided to us, nor to the sovereign tribal nations,” he says, in violation of environmental and cultural impact study requirements and consultations with the tribes.
Lilias Jarding, director of the Black Hills Clean Water Alliance, one of the parties in the victorious Pe’ Sla action, says the decade since Standing Rock has seen a huge growth in projects attempting to mine tribal lands and areas of ceremonial significance.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, the push for both minerals extraction and energy has dramatically increased. “They’re being more aggressive,” Jarding says. In the case of Pe’ Sla, he adds, the company didn’t stop drilling when the lawsuits was filed: “They started drilling 24 hours a day.”
The alliance, along with tribes, claim the graphite project violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and that the US Forest Service improperly used a process known as a “categorical exclusion” to bypass reviews.
Oglala Sioux president Frank Star Comes Out said in a statement that the Sioux tribes never ceded to the US the lands in the Black Hills, which, he said, “remain the spiritual center of the Great Sioux Nation and they are not for sale, lease or exploitation” and that the lawsuit is a “united tribal response to protect a sacred site from those who continue to desecrate our ancestral lands”.
Oglala activist Taylor Gunhammer said that drilling at Pe’ Sla was akin to “drilling under the Vatican or at a sacred site in Jerusalem”.
A representative of Clean Nuclear Energy Corp, Mike Blady, said the company was “aware of the cultural significance and are doing everything in our power to ensure that there is no collateral damage”.
Will this amount to a populist action similar to Standing Rock?
The Pe’ Sla dispute did not provoke the kind of Indigenous-led, grassroots resistance to fossil-fuel infrastructure projects that accompanied the Dakota Access pipeline, which in some ways became a template for contemporary protests, powered by social media, celebrities and politicians.
The tribes were not in favor of following in that direction, Jarding says: “It’s a deeply sacred spiritual and ceremonial site, and elders have made it clear that it’s not a good place for another Standing Rock with thousands of people. They say this is not the place.”
Under the Biden administration, the tribal groups felt they were entering into a period of co-management policy over federal lands that in many cases lie within treaty agreements. But under the Trump administration, that sense of co-operation has diminished.
“We’ve seen a ramp-up of opening up federal lands for mineral and gas exploration, but as a planet we need to be moving away from fossil fuels and toward policies that are sustainable into the future,” says NDN’s Garriott.
What was planned for Pe’ Sla now, or was happening at Standing Rock a decade ago, or has indeed happened over a long history of disputes between sovereign tribal groups and the US government, he says, is “protecting our land and protecting our water, not only for ourselves but for the planet. We’re not random protesters out there – we’re protecting our own land”.
The South Dakota Lottery offers multiple draw games for those aiming to win big.
Here’s a look at May 9, 2026, results for each game:
Winning Powerball numbers from May 9 drawing
15-41-46-47-56, Powerball: 22, Power Play: 2
Check Powerball payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Lotto America numbers from May 9 drawing
08-12-13-27-42, Star Ball: 04, ASB: 04
Check Lotto America payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Dakota Cash numbers from May 9 drawing
01-02-04-08-18
Check Dakota Cash payouts and previous drawings here.
Winning Millionaire for Life numbers from May 9 drawing
08-11-17-29-49, Bonus: 02
Check Millionaire for Life payouts and previous drawings here.
Feeling lucky? Explore the latest lottery news & results
Are you a winner? Here’s how to claim your prize
- Prizes of $100 or less: Can be claimed at any South Dakota Lottery retailer.
- Prizes of $101 or more: Must be claimed from the Lottery. By mail, send a claim form and a signed winning ticket to the Lottery at 711 E. Wells Avenue, Pierre, SD 57501.
- Any jackpot-winning ticket for Dakota Cash or Lotto America, top prize-winning ticket for Lucky for Life, or for the second prizes for Powerball and Mega Millions must be presented in person at a Lottery office. A jackpot-winning Powerball or Mega Millions ticket must be presented in person at the Lottery office in Pierre.
When are the South Dakota Lottery drawings held?
- Powerball: 9:59 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday.
- Mega Millions: 10 p.m. CT on Tuesday and Friday.
- Lucky for Life: 9:38 p.m. CT daily.
- Lotto America: 9:15 p.m. CT on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
- Dakota Cash: 9 p.m. CT on Wednesday and Saturday.
- Millionaire for Life: 10:15 p.m. CT daily.
This results page was generated automatically using information from TinBu and a template written and reviewed by a South Dakota editor. You can send feedback using this form.
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