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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.
RTFP:
9
http://xxx.adelaide.edu.au/abs/astro-ph/?020508
What, you trust everything the popular media says? You don't watch to CNN, do you?
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.)
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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