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.

Comments

Re:What about...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:What about...

[Skyfire]

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.

Re:Would these actually create an entry/exit wound

[Consul]

Could these be the long-awaited explanation for spontaneous human combustion? ;o)

Some info about strangelets

[ChenLing]

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.

Re:Some info about strangelets

[stevelinton]

To explain a bit more, a system is only stable, if it can't get to a lower energy state without breaking some rule. Since one kind of quark can turn into another pretty freely, this favours systems made up to the lowest energy quarks, namely up. However, two things combine to make the proton stable (uud) rather than the particle with three up quarks, whose name I can't recall:

One is ordinary electrostatics. up quarks have positive charge (2/3 of a unit, as it happens), down quarks negative (-1/3) so cramming three u quarks together involves overcoming more electrostatic repulsion that forming a proton.

The other is a litle subtler. Many of you will be familiar with the idea of "shells" of electrons inside an atom, representing groups of possible energy levels for an electron, each able to hold just one electron. Something similar goes on in any compact collection of quarks: isolated baryon, atomic nucleus, strangelet or neutron star core. Each energy level can be occupied by at most one quark <emph>of each flavour</emph>. This favours structures with reasonably equal balances between the types of quarks. So a proton, uud with the us in the two lowest energy states and the d in the lowest state, ends up with lower total energy than uuu, which would have to use three enegry states.

OK. Now what happens when we try and compute the stable options for clusters of quarks.

With small numbers of quarks, we have to strike a balance between the fact that u are lighter and the goal of balancing u & d to keep the energy levels low and the electrostatic problems to a minimum. Solutions to this make up all the stable atomic nuclei from 1H (uud) to lead nuclei with 250--300 quarks of each type.

Somewhat larger stable clusters do not form, the electrostatic repulsion and the high energy states into which the quarks would be forced mean that they can lose energy by splitting into two smaller clusters, so they do, hence nuclear fission.

When cluster sizes get very large, then gravity starts to play a role. Solar mass sized clusters of u and d quarks (2 downs to 1 up, so the whole thing is neutral) can be stablized, despite the energy cost of all the down quarks, by the mutual gravitational attraction. The result is a neutron star. The fact that quarks are in different spatial locations also helps with the energy level problem.

It is suggested that collections of quarks intermediate in mass between nuclei and neutron stars may be stable, if they contain a significant portion of strange quarks. Although basically heavier and so more energetic than u and d quarks, they would be free to occupy the lowest energy levels. Estimates of how massive these clusters would need to be to be stable vary wildly. One the one hand people are looking for extra-compact neutron-star like objects on the other hand for "stranglets" a few microns across and massing tons.

Strange fantasy!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:formed in the big bang?

[bertok]

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

Re:Entrance/Exit Point

[foobar104]

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? ;-)

Re:Would these actually create an entry/exit wound

[damien_kane]

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.

Re:what?

[tconnors]

RTFP:

http://xxx.adelaide.edu.au/abs/astro-ph/?0205089

What, you trust everything the popular media says? You don't watch to CNN, do you?

Re:Would these actually create an entry/exit wound

[dragons_flight]

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.

Re:Stragelets are strange but not dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Horseshit.

[Alsee]

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.

-

Re:Would these actually create an entry/exit wound

[bertok]

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.