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Do Strangelets Pass Through Earth?
Weirdolet writes: "Ananova are reporting that ultra-dense, pollen sized strangelets (aka nuggets of strange quarks) travelling at 900,000 miles per hour hit the earth, violently pass through it and have done on at least two occasions already. It's also reported, allegedly, in the Sunday telegraph but I haven't found it there yet :P
Coming to a particle accelerator near you soon ... ?" Another reader has found the story at the Telegraph.
Apparently, these things move at 900000mph, or a few times the speed of light.
Isn't that impossible? I thought it took an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
If I may make an unqualified suggestion, any uplets or downlets would probably be too small to cause a significant impact, and bottomlets, toplets, charmedlets are likely too big to be stable. Please can any particle physicists out there explain what's going on?
Ceci n'est pas une sig
The people around you might need to take a bath afterwords.
And they use this rather sketchy data to make claims about a very extraordinary discovery... an until now completely unknown form of matter.
This isn't the first time I wish a bit more critical thought had been applied by the journalist. Or the reviewer for that matter.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
Question: Can you get the six names of quarks: up, down, top, bottom, strange and charmed into one sentence without it being nonsensical and without being clever like writing, "There are six types of quark: up, down, bottom, strange and charmed."?
I remember my physics teacher saying that the Europeans preferred the quark names truth and beauty to top and bottom. Unfortunately, top and bottom seem to have won out.
So I think that top and bottom should be replaced with truth and beauty in the challenge!
Yes, these things have a kinetic energy of .5*several_friggin_tons*9E10 Ton Miles^2/Hour^2, but that doesn't mean that all that energy is lost in the passage through the earth. A BB can rip through a sheet of paper and leave a small puncture rather than tear the thing apart - imagine what a BB traveling at a thousand miles per hour would leave... just a hole of its own size most likely. These things have such high mass and velocity that they're hardly going to scatter off of anything or slow down much after they vaporize anything in their path.
:)
Now what you should really worry about is a strangelet collision
No. The Big Bang wasn't an explosion outwards from some center; there is no center, and no preferred direction.
How did they know at what angle the stranglets hit the earth at?
Ripping through the earth at what angle makes a large difference. Imagine 2 stranglets hit NY NY at the same time. One is comming from a north west direction and the other is comming from south east. The one comming from north west will exit the earth thousands of miles from where the south east one will...
This tells me that the scietists just looked for any seismic activity that resembled the first (entry) hit. Seismic measurment tools are not all that precise, especially equipment 10 years ago (I had a 486 10 years ago just to give you an idea) and the fact that they are looking for the impact of a particle that is 1/10 of a hair in size. There "proof" relys on the fact that in the past ten years there were two seismic activitys on different parts of the planet that were similar to eachother. Not much proof if you ask me....
Well, I'm hardly an expert, but off hand I'd say it's worth seriously asking whether you would even notice?
Obviously these carry huge kinetic energies and it would only take only a small percentage of that energy to totally fry a human being. The real question is how much of the energy can a human actually absorb?
These things have enormous amounts of momentum, and keep in mind that the whole EARTH isn't enough to stop one of these. How much could the soft tissues or even the bones of a human really do to stop one? Passing through at 900,000 mph, these would certainly leave a pollen grain sized hole straight through your body, but how much does it disrupt the surrounding tissues?
I have been told (though perhaps someone can verify this?) that exit wounds decrease in size as a) bullet size decreases, b) velocity increases, c) less tissue is disrupted along the bullet path. In fact, IIRC exit wounds are larger primarily because of fragementation of the bullet and fragments of bones that get carried out with it. Entry wounds of course just reflect the cross-section of the bullet.
So a very tiny, very massive, and very fast projectile might well have an exit wound of similar size to the entry wound. In which case the soft tissues of the body might just fill in and you'd never actually know that a pollen grain hole had been made through your body.
It's really not even worth considering, much like being hit by a meteor. OK, a bit of quick, incredibly inaccurate math:
Let's assume, for a second, that you're Joe Average. You have a 32-inch waist, so your cross-sectional area (assuming you're perfectly circular) is pi*(32/(2*pi))^2, or 81.5, square inches (using 3.14 as pi).
The Earth is about 24,000 miles around. Assuming it's a sphere, that makes its surface area 4*pi*(24,000*5,280*12)^2, or 2.90 x 10^19, square inches.
Assuming an equal distribution of strangelet hits over the surface of the Earth, you will be hit by 2*(81.5 / 2.90 x 10^19) of the strangelets that hit the Earth's surface, which rounds off to approximately a 2 x 10^-17 chance of an impact per strangelet.
Assuming 2 is the average number of strangelet events in a given year, your odds of being hit by a strangelet are 1 in 3 x 10^15 (3 quadrillion) or so in your lifetime (if you live for 80 years). Those odds are equivalent to winning the lottery back-to-back, then rolling a pair of dice once and getting snake eyes. To put it another way, it's equivalent to getting hit by two bolts of lightning at the same time and then rolling a 00 on two consecutive D100s.
(Disclaimer: I am not a statistician, and I don't even have a calculator, so this was all back-of-the-envelope math and is probably grossly inaccurate.)
Not quite sure, but from reading that it looked like they looked for earthquakes on exact opposite sides of the earth. If they just looked for earthquakes within a few seconds of each other, they would find hundreds, most likely.
Wait a second. Who says the stragelet has to hit Earth at a 90 degree angle?
Although I bet it would look VERY cool if it just skimed the surface of some city.... suddenly theres holes in the walls and a trail in the air, a few random people fall down.. would be very good for hollywood...
Hmmmm, maybe this explains spontaneous human combustion? I don't believe that people can spontaneously combust, perhaps they are just being hit by these strangelets...???
Talk about an excedrin headache
Oooh, I'm sure the authors of the scientific paper had a tough bunch of high-energy-particle physicists at The Sunday Telegraph reviewing their submitted paper :-)
I mean, it's nice to see something having to do with physics make the Sunday Paper (at least I'm not listening to the Joe Jackson song that disparages that media) but shouldn't we have slightly higher standards for something to make the Slashdot front page?
A pollen-sized grain of anything weighing over a ton and travelling at 900,000 miles an hour would leave a crater so large
No, it will make a disruption a bit larger than a pollen grain. Kind of like firing a rifle bullet at a piece of tissue paper.
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Considering that a strangelet passes through thousands of kilometers of stone, without significantly slowing down implies that the interaction of strangelets with "ordinary matter" is close to nil. I think that being hit by a strangelet will be more like being hit by a bunch of neutrons; most of them pass through your body without doing any damage. Atoms are mostly empty space.
According to Prof Herrin, the two events agree with predictions for strangelet impacts, which are expected to occur about once a year. He added, however, that finding more would be difficult, as seismic databases now automatically remove all signals not linked to earthquakes. He said: "To find more events we need to get at the data before that happens."
In other words, various governmental sources have gotten tired of seismologists finding underground nuclear testing and told them to quit revealing the secrets. And they did.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)