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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.
For those of you freaking out, here's a link Strangelets are strange but not dangerous
The speed of light is about 185,000 miles per second, or 11,100,000 mph, so these things are moving at 0.1c. Still not inconsiderable, mind you, considering their mass...
Ceci n'est pas une sig
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
It was strangely charming to see her bottom go up and down while I should've been more interested in watching her top, this being a jump-rope contest after all.
I went up the elevator to the top of the building, where everyone lives a charmed life, then I took it back down to the bottom where the sysadmins are strange.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
As she was smiling down at the bottom row of people, I glanced up at the top row, to see the woman who charmed me with her strange eyes.
Sig
It's funny how all the replies list different speeds of light in mph..
I understand that life's not fair, just why is it never unfair in my favor?
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.
Could these be the long-awaited explanation for spontaneous human combustion? ;o)
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"You spilled my egg... I needed that egg."
Tell the military they can weaponize this. See how long it takes them to allocate the funds to restart the superconducting supercollider. Just fire a negatively charged strangelet at the chinese and watch the entire country dissapear... sure, the entire planet would be destroyed too, but that was the case with nuclear weapons, and it never stopped their deployment.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
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
A pollen-sized grain of anything weighing over a ton and travelling at 900,000 miles an hour would leave a crater so large that it could fit the entire quantity of bullshit pseudo-science that comes out of Southern Methodist University.
Amazing.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
As I grabbed her bottom, she got up, took off her top, gave me a strange glance, then went down on me and charmed ol' one-eye.
However, a small fraction of these *could* be due to strangelets hitting the Earth. It's not very scientific, but a search on Google for 'unexplained explosion' comes up with over 14,000 items...
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
The big bang is not an explosion with a epicenter -- a common misconception perpetuated by the popular media. It started everywhere, and the results of the explosion are going outwards from every point. The diagrams at the Cosmology FAQ help:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/nocenter.html
It's not very scientific, but a search on Google for 'unexplained explosion' comes up with over 14,000 items...
;-)
Yes, but a search on Google for "unexplained fish" comes up with over 23,000 items. What's your point?
Since when is a mile defined in terms of meters? You must work at NASA.
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.
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?
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?)
Huzzah - Go Light!
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.
Strangelets in the night....
</Sinatra>
It's OK, I was just leaving anyway.
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.
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?
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.
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)