Quark Matter Blamed for Paired 1993 Seismic Events

Ethanon writes "In an article posted by BBC, scientists have suggested that two "unassociated" seismic events that occurred in 1993 were actually strange Quark matter passing through the Earth at a speed of perhaps 250 miles per second. A spec of strange Quark matter the size of a human cell is said to be so dense that it could weigh a tonne! Check it out "

Comments

Old News...

[Ironix]

I think this was posted before.

More info, here on slashdot.

[Restil]

The Strangelet Article from last May on the same issue.

-Restil

Re:is a tonne still

[Soko]

No, a tonne is a "metric ton", which is 1000 Kilograms or about 2,200 US pounds.

Google is of course your friend.

Soko

Link to original paper

[abhinavnath]

tconnors(UID #91126) posted a link to the original paper, the last time this was posted on /.

Not to karma whore or anything :), but this is a fascinating paper. They talk about how Strange Quark Nuggets contain strange, up and down quarks, which makes them stable enough to exist without condensing into protons and neutrons. It also talks about how SQNs are dark matter candidates - so these paired seismic events may be proof of this form of dark matter.

This seems like an amazing amount of work - they went through nearly 10 million seismic event records, from 1981 to 1993.

Re:I don't think so.

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

There is almost no experimental proofs for quantum field theory

How about the prediction of the anomalous electron magnetic moment to quite a few decimal places? That prediction uses QFT.

And there is no reasonable argument for the choice of 11 dimensions

What does that have to do with it? QFT works in 4 dimensions. Are you confused between QFT and supersymmetric QFT? And strangeness has nothing to do with supersymmetry. I think you should go back to your mathematics.

Hmmm...and I've never heard of Yang-Chibara manifolds and they aren't mentioned anywhere in arxiv.org.

OK, I've been succesfully trolled.

Not a whole hell of a lot.

[RatBastard]

Sure, it's heavy. Sure, it's going really fast. But the impact area is only the size of a cell. It would rupture cells along the path through your body, but the holes created wouldn't be big enough for blood to flow out of, and unless it struck a nerve cell you'd never feel it. The mass is not high enough for it to have any tidal effects. Even if it did hit your brain it probably wouldn't do enough damage to register.

Re:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[pVoid]

You're not really taking into account that this thing has seismic effects felt around the globe.

It's like saying f'(x) = df/dx is 0 because df is almost zero... you are neglecting the very important fact that dx is almost zero too.

To apply it back to this case: (a previous post mentionned it too) if that thing weighed only a gram, but was traveling at the speed of light, you'd probably vaporize from the energy it would release in you. In the same veine, if it were traveling at reasonable speeds, weighed only 1kg, but the impact point was concentrated into one square nanometer, the damage done might just as well rupture every single cell in your body.

Another example is icebergs, those giants move at something like 2-3 km/h, but the energy they would release if they hit a oil-platform is greater than the energy a 747 would if it were to crash into the platform at cruising speed.

The bottom line is you have to know how much energy the particle contains, and also, how much of it would be released in your body. The fact that it's small doesn't indicate anything whatsoever...

My uninformed guess is that if this thing can cause mini-earthquakes, it could be quite a powerful blast on the body.

Re:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[joggle]

Just because the particle doesn't stop doesn't mean that it can't release energy. What we are really dealing with is the likelihood of a collision between this high-energy particle and a particle in your head. Over the course of its travel through the earth, it evidently collided with enough particles to convert 50 kilotonnes of energy from its momentum. If this particle is actually the size of a cell, then there is basically a 100% chance that it will collide with particles in your head resulting in substantial damage, although the change in the particle's velocity will be nearly zero.

Other high energy particles, such as gamma rays, which are substantially smaller, almost always pass through your body without any collisions resulting in zero damage, of course.

Re:Real reason

[GoatEnigma]

Not exactly. Seismic signals are filtered for blast signatures, as well as things like heavy trucks passing on the highway and "kicks from drunken teenagers", although this is usually difficult as very few seismographs are secured out in the open for anyone to walk up and kick (although there are some....).
In fact, many governments do seismic monitoring (read: spying) specifically for underground blasts so they know who's letting off bombs.

I have worked at the Pacific Geoscience Centre in Sidney, BC, Canada for 4 years and have a close friend who worked on doing signal interpretation for several months.

"Unassociated events" are the ones they can't put a finger on what caused it. That's why these scientists were looking at those specific records.

Larry Niven.

[RatBastard]

It was Larry Niven. And his microscopic killer was a quantum black hole. And it was the tidal effects of the tiny piece of matter that killed the guy.

Re:Doesn't add up...

[Safety Cap]

the shockwave itself, traveling at the speed of sound, took 27 seconds

Neither P, S, nor Body waves travel at the speed of sound. Their speed depends upon the medium; remember that liquid mediums do not transmit waves as fast as solid ones; liquid mediums also do not transmit shear waves.

You can compute the speed of compressional waves with the formula V=sqrt((k+.75mu)/rho), where mu is the rigidity and k is the bulk modulus.

Air is typically 330 m/s at sea level whereas Granite is around 5k-7k m/s.

Re:Some info about strangelets

[ShavenYak]

All matter is made up of combinations of quarks, usually either in pairs (mesons), or trios (baryons).

Bzzt. Not all matter. Electrons, positrons, and neutrinos, and their respective muon and tau counterparts, are all in the lepton family and do not consist of quarks. Not to mention bosons (photon, gluon, W, Z) but those shouldn't count against you because they aren't typically thought of as constituting matter.

Re:Imagine..

[fenix down]

Actually, it probably wouldn't be that much worse getting one to the head than the rest of your body. I got a nail right into the back of my head once, and it did basically nothing. Admittedly, I was a springy-brained kid at the time, but a needle of a line through most any part of your brain is no real problem to work around.

Anybody remember that thing a few years ago about how MRI's don't show brain activity until after you do something? That wasn't really saying that your life is random and you're just rationalizing it, it just pointed out that your higher brain really isn't doing that much most of the time. 90% of the time you're coasting on the middle and lower brain. Conversations with coworkers are predictable and formulaic, so your big fancy brain hands it off to your brain stem and saves some glucose in case a puma tries to eat you.

For this post, the most my higher brain probably put in was the subject. Then some subroutines just stuck together memories and turned them into text. I didn't even have to consider typing it, that got handed off when I first sat down.

This means a lot for brain damage. Like in Hannibal. If somebody scoops out the right brain-bit, you could actually loose your subroutine for manners. There are actually people who've had strokes and lost certain, highly specific abilities. Like the ability to name fruit, in one textbook case. Just fruit, vegetables are fine, and just names. Show them an apple, they'll know it gets made into pies, they'll know if they like it or not, but the name they'll be clueless about. You could tell them it, and they'll remember as long as it's in their short term memory, but a few seconds later, it'll be gone, because the fruit naming call-up function got crushed by a blood clot.

From what I understand, that kind of thing will get adapted to in most cases, like your brain will start putting fruit under vegetables, and making a meta-function to deal with that irregularity.

Not like that stuff happens every time you get knocked in the head, it's just cool. My point is, a cell-sized hole through your head would have to be lined up incredibly well to kill you. You probably wouldn't even notice. And I'm not a neurosurgeon, I just play one on TV.

Re:Doesn't add up...

[spectecjr]

Neither P, S, nor Body waves travel at the speed of sound. Their speed depends upon the medium; remember that liquid mediums do not transmit waves as fast as solid ones; liquid mediums also do not transmit shear waves.
You can compute the speed of compressional waves with the formula V=sqrt((k+.75mu)/rho), where mu is the rigidity and k is the bulk modulus.

Air is typically 330 m/s at sea level whereas Granite is around 5k-7k m/s.

The values you've given are the speed of sound in air and rock.

Yes, they do travel at the speed of sound. Why? Because that's the speed at which a wave travels through a medium if the wave isn't light.

You probably meant "they don't travel at the speed of sound in air"

Simon

Re:Doesn't add up...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at the original article you find that .73 seconds is the "RMS residual" of the first event. In other words, it is a statistical measure of how well the data fits the model. According to the article, this is a very good fit.

So .73 seconds has nothing to do with how long it took the particle to pass through the earth. As the diagram indicates, that time is 27 seconds.

Another detail: although the researchers located a "pair" of events (that is to say, "two" events) they are NOT "paired", that is to say, associated with each other.

They found one event in October of 1993 and another event in November of 1993. They make no claim that the two events were caused by the same particle.

--Brent

Math & Music

Probably not...

[E-Rock]

If this were the case, then a bullet would only leave a bullet sized hole in things. Even shooting an empty paint can with a .22 leaves a MUCH bigger hole on the way out.
I'd guess with that amazing amount of mass (F=M*A) it's mess you up pretty bad. Like gooey pile of what used to be you bad.

Re:Is that a particle in your pocket

[spiro_killglance]

Depends on the net charge of strange quark
nuggets. Physicists can't yet do the calculations
to work out the average charge per baryon on
strange quark matter. If has a negative charge it
would suck in a nucleii and grow, while if it is
positively charge it will reply ordinary nucleii
and only be able to grow from neutron and in
neutron stars.

My guess would be Strange quark nuggets would
be positive, why: a equal miss of u,d and s
quarks is neutral, but the s (charge -1/3), is
more massive than the other two, so you would
have a prepondance of u and d quarks (Charges +2/3 and -1/3), so it the charge would be something positive.