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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.
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."?
Video Game cheats, hints a
Wouldn't a particle moving that fast with that much momentum leave some sort of exit point that could still be seen.
Two points in Antartica; the other two are in the ocean. Good luck finding any of those.
First of all, some basic particle physics:
There are 6 kinds of quarks (in increasing mass):
up, down, strage, charm, bottom (beauty), and top (truth).
The last of which was experimentally verified only recently.
All matter is made up of combinations of quarks, usually either in pairs (mesons), or trios (baryons).
For example, protons are made up of two ups and one down; neutrons are made up of one up and two downs.
Strange quarks are named such because the particles that contain them are produced fast and decay slow (ie., they have very long lifetimes), which is very odd considering that they are much more massive (heavier things tend to decay faster).
Strangelets now, are an odd beast. They usually contain more than 2 or 3 quarks, and can contain quarks other than strange quarks.
One variety (the more common one) contains a large mixture of up and some down quarks along with the strange, and has a net positive charge.
These are quite safe as they will bond with a pair of electrons and act like an unusually heavy helium isotope.
One that is mostly strange will have a net negative charge, and (I don't quite understand the process) gobble up all the positively charged atomic nuclei that it encounters.
As a side note, strangelets are supposed to only occur in conditions of high pressure and (relatively) low temperature, like inside of a neutron star.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
I don't think so.
If you shot a bullet at a piece of cloth or paper that was held taught, it would merely put a hole in the paper, not obliterate it.
If you shot it at point-blank, the explosion from the initial firing of the shell would have more effect on the paper than damage caused by the shell itself.
If such a strangelet shot through matter, it would probably do two things (both, not one or the other)...
1. It would create a tiny pin-sized hole in what it was passing through (as the only way matter can go through other matter is to push said other matter out of its way).
It's not like the particle would mushrooom like a hollowpoint round, think of it more as an AP round (DUC maybe?).
If a person gets shot with a depleted uranium shell (at a far enough range with a high velocity) It will merely pass through said person, whereas a hollowpoint (because of the mushrooming) would either leave a big exit wound or bounce around for a little while turn said person's guts into pudding... (no, don't say blood pudding... that's just a bad pun)...
2. A lot of the matter it passes through would be converted to some other form of matter, as the strangelet particle loses/gains other quarks from the surrounding matter it passes through. If effect, passing through something like a planet would probably take half its mass and at least some of its velocity as the energy is expended.
I wonder what kind of neat science tricks one can do with managable amounts of extreme density matter. The strangelets are one example, the problem of interacting with them has more to do with their speed than with their mass. If we could find a way to slow one down it could be very interesting to study. Perhaps we could magnetically contain it to prevent contamination with "regular" matter. The interesting thing would be to study the interaction of time and gravity. We have lots of things in the world which weigh many tens, hundreds or thousands of tons, however becauseof their more normal density we can not get close enough to the center of their mass to really study localized gravitational effects. With extreme density matter, we should be able to measure intersting things getting much closer to the center of gravity of a significant mass. Matter of this type might make an interesting component of a ground based anti-balistic missile system. The bullet would be microscopically small, but would have incredible mass and could hold significant kinetic energy, suitable for the destruction of a warhead. The energy source for the prime mover could be any typical huge ground based power plant. Because of the microscopic size of the projectile, air resistance would be insignificant relative to the kinetic energy.
Zoot
enough is too much
Only the "gun" uranium fission design works like that, and they are the simplest, most primitive form of nuclear weapon. None of the known nuclear powers uses these any more (the Hiroshima bomb worked like this, but not Nagasaki, and the only other use since was allegedly in South Africa's covert nuclear program because all they were interested in was a proof-of-concept). Implosion designs (the basis for later fission weapons and fusion-boosted designs) rely on multiple chunks of uranium and plutonium to be forced together by precisely-shaped bits of chemical explosive into a superdense, supercritical mass. If they don't go off in precisely the designed pattern, they don't explode.
Therefore, I'd expect the bomb to be turned into molten slag rather than explode.
IANA Nuclear Physicist, so I could be horribly wrong :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
:) I would worry about compression shock though, which would result in having a lot of bones break and lungs collapse and what not. Very mysterious death, I would say.
I'm sure you have heard the expression "Hollow Point" in regards to ammunition rounds. The way that most ammo works is it mushrooms as it makes contact. Having a hollow point round means it mushrooms larger, and you also have rifling (which causes the bullet to spin) in some cases. This is the primary factor in exit wound sizes. The amount of tissue damage that is done is directly associated with the compression (force of the bullet, hydrostatic shock is what it is called, IIRC) of the bullet moving through, and the current size of the round (remember, after it makes contact it expands.)
Most bullets do not fragment, unless they are designed to do so. I knew someone who had rifle rounds that had tips that were designed to break into eighths after contact with a hollow point center. The reason why I wouldn't worry about a pollen-size object travelling 900Kmph is because it's entrance and exit wounds would be nearly identical, because it's A) Going very fast, B) Very dense and C) theoretical
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
The problem with your estimate of the damage caused by a strangelet to a human being is that it is based on theories that only apply to projectiles made of normal matter. Strangelets are both extremely dense, and charged. To a strangelet, a human being would present a target as insubstantial as the foam in you bathtub is to you. However, any charged particles (electrons or protons) orbiting the strangelet would be stripped off, which would result in a huge potential difference between the strangelet and most of your body. In other words, you'll get electrocuted, and your body will be ripped apart by the rapidly changing electric and magnetic fields.