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

More BBC 'science'..

[stratjakt]

>> They searched the world's seismographic records for so-called "unassociated events". They looked at more than a million records collected by the US Geological Survey between 1990 to 1993

Generally when you go looking through enough data, expecting to find something, you do.

An alternate theory, perhaps. Some drunken teenagers kicked the seismographs?

Not that this is something that really matters to anyone, alive or dead, either way.

Re:More BBC 'science'..

[krlynch]

Generally, when you go looking through enough data, expecting to find something, you do.

You only find it if you aren't doing your job right; when looking for events that match a certain profile, you also have to take into account the number of events that match the profile but that would be generated by different processes. Those other processes are called "background" processes. If you don't expect to see any background events, and you do see events, you have support for the foreground hypothesis. If you do expect background events, and you see exactly the number you expect to see, you don't have support for the foreground hypothesis.

This is a vast simplification of the process of teasing foreground from background, or course, not doing justice to the amount of work you have to do to understand what you are talking about ... and you aren't assured of getting it right, of course. However, the statements that this hypothesis has some support in the data was based on this exact type of analysis, and are clearly not of the "look at enough data you'll find what you want to" kind. You probably have to go to the original source article to find the details (the foreground/background analysis was most of the paper, if I remember correctly).

Your alternate theory, once properly formulated, would also make a prediction as to the number of events of this kind that are expected ... go make that prediction, and then we can test it :-)

Re:Surface Damage?

[RomikQ]

I think everyone here is overestimating the size of those things. They are really very very very small. There would be no visual evidence of the impact, not even microscopical - the particles would just rip through, and then the material they went through would collapse back onto itself.

Either my Math or Geography sucks

[Pr3d4t0r]

The article says:

It was estimated that the strange quark matter might pass through the earth at 400 km per second (250 miles per second), 40 times the speed of seismic waves.
-- and --
The other occurred on 24 November, 1993, when an object entered south of Australia and exited the Earth near Antarctica 0.15 of a second later.

So are Australia and Antartica 37.5 miles apart? Confused.

Re:Imagine..

[Arcturax]

Yes but it would only impart a tiny bit if that energy into you as it struck. It would for the most part just pass right through you and do little to no damage that you could notice in the process.

After all, if it dumped all its energy right then and there, it would create an energetic event equal to an asteriod hitting the planet.

While it does dump 50kt worth of energy on its way through Earth, think about how thick the Earth is and then calculate how much damage is done per square centimeter. Not a lot really.

So yes it has a lot of energy, but it loses it only a bit at a time as it zips through objects. It will have to zip through a lot more very large objects before it ever could be stopped (or hit with a huge enough repelling force which would require enormous amounts of energy to generate).

Re:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[product byproduct]

Actually we can do the math pretty easily:

article quote: "a one-tonne spec would release the energy of a 50-kilotonne nuclear bomb, spread along its entire path through the Earth."

So the energy released is something like 50 kilotonnes / 10,000 km
= 5 tonnes of TNT / km
= 5 kg of TNT / m
= 0.5 kg of TNT / 10cm

So this thing traveling through your skull would be like detonating a pound of TNT inside of your head. The brain damage would definitely register. :)