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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
"
I thought that if a trio of strange quarks hit any other matter it would convert it into the same?
Who knew Ferengi were so dense?
I think this was posted before.
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
scientists have found that multi-posts of stories on slashdot are due to a quirk matter that passes through the slashdot queue at the high speed of 100 submissions/day.
The Strangelet Article from last May on the same issue.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Getting hit by that random particle. What would it do to you? That's a lot of momentum.
No, a tonne is a "metric ton", which is 1000 Kilograms or about 2,200 US pounds.
Google is of course your friend.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
On the off chance you weren't being sarcastic or trolling:
No, a tonne is not (nor has it ever been) 2000 lbs. It's a metric unit, 1000 kg, which comes out to about 2204 lbs.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.
A tonne is, according to Merriam-Webster, defined as a metric ton, so no. It's 1000 kg, or about 2200 lbs, which is between a short ton (2000 lbs) and a long ton (2240 lbs).
The graphic at the top says that the Oct 22, 1993 particle entered at 09:55:47 and left at 09:56:14. That's 27 seconds.
The article says, "One event occurred on 22 October, 1993, when, according to the researchers, something entered the Earth off Antarctica and left it south of India 0.73 of a second later."
Which is it?
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
>> 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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Oprah.
Unfortunately, the seismography data that is not associated with earthquakes stopped being collected by the USGS (or at least, is not archived) since 1993.
:)
I suspect that funding an archive for this data would be far less expensive than the huge particle physics machines that are searching for similar matter
Not to mention - it might just be worth calculating the orbital path of the particles that were (or might be) detected, just to make sure that they aren't coming back. Given the energy they apparently release, this could even be an alternate explanation for the Tunguska explosion in Siberia. (Other than exploding meteorites that don't leave a crater, and a misfire of Tesla's Death Ray.)
Liquor
Sanity is a highly overrated commodity.
Will lining it with tinfoil help?
I called the BBC and they were no help at all.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
Anyone have any idea what kind of damage would be caused at the surface of the Earth by something like this? Seems to me that it would be significant, peculiar, and unique.
And in that case, shouldn't they visit the entry and exit points to see if such damage was caused? I don't see anything in the article that suggests this kind of investigation will, or should, be done.
I'm a bit puzzled.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
these events were meant to be caused by tiny black holes? At least thats what the last slashdot story like this said. IANAQP
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
250 Miles per second?
..
now that's what i call a .
QUARK EXPRESS
anything i tell you will cloud your opinion.
Isn't it interesting that data stopped being collected at the same time the last event was "detected". I think the solution lies much closer to home than speeding nuclearites. Before I set the conspirists afire I would suggest taking a look at how expensive it actually was to collect and store data, and who was responsible for the decision to stop.
It has to make you wonder what effect it would have if you had the (mis)fortune of standing on the entry or exit point. Spontaneous combustion anyone?
conundrum11
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
And there is no reasonable argument for the choice of 11 dimensions (1 time, 10 space, 6 compactified).
;)
Are you sure you are a mathematician?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Seriously though: can we detect if some civilisation wrecker size thingy is on its way.
These are sneaky bastards: more devious than NEOs come out at us in the direction of the Sun.
And we cannot even drill a nuke into these suckers.
Hmmmm.... that lifeboat thingy (posted yday) grows more pertinent by the minute.
In an article posted by BBC, a scientist has suggested that two "unassociated" seismic events that occurred earlier this afternoon were actually strange Beef matter passing through his GI tract at a speed of perhaps 250 miles per second. A spec of strange Meat the size of a human cell is said to be so dense that it could weigh a tonne! Also, the scientist commented, 'what the fuck do they put in that stuff? It tastes like meat paste, but it's greyish-beige!!? I won't fall for that again."
tconnors(UID #91126) posted a link to the original paper, the last time this was posted on /.
:), 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.
Not to karma whore or anything
This seems like an amazing amount of work - they went through nearly 10 million seismic event records, from 1981 to 1993.
My other sig is also a
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.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Odo: "I plan to investigate the Klingons, the Romulans, Quark, the visiting Tarellians..."
Sisko: "You think Quark had anything to do with it?"
Odo: "I always investigate Quark"
Any good amateur rocket/astronomy folks out there? If you shot something from Antartica opposite the direction of the tip of India at 450km/sec, on October 22, 1993, 09:55:57 GMT, where would it go?
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
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.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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.
People blame sub-atomic particles for everything now.
What caused those earthquakes? Quarks.
What destroyed the World Trade Center? Quarks.
Who left the toilet seat up? Quarks.
Its about time people took responsibility for their actions and quit blaming the poor quarks.
Trolling is a art,
Just for that I'm going to slap you with a herring.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
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.
Sometimes we can't remember if this is a duplicate story or not. These "repeat" posts are very helpful in figuring that out.
Besides, he wasn't karma whoring. He took the time to search the last strangelet article, get the url, and link it for us. If he was truly karma whoring, there would be no link. He would have worried about taking all that time getting us a link while giving up valueable time for some other person to post their "repeat" message.
---
Old actors don't die, they just go to Old Navy
Maybe this is finally a scientific reason for spontaneous human combustion?
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.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
each pound of it weighs over 10,000 pounds.
:))
(Yes, this comment is a rip-off, but it's my favorite Farnsworth quote
I thought it would suck to be one of those unlucky sots that get struck by lightening. Can you imagine how much your day would suck if the gods of quantum physics decided to smite you with one of those bad boys.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
If it could actually do damage to you, you'd enter the guiness book of records for being the most unlucky complex of proteins in the universe.
These guys could use some help. Here's my idea: Put the information on line, distribute a client to analyze it. Surely the possibility of a quark collision is at least as good as finding an intelligent signal from another planet?
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
an Earth shattering KaBoom!
That pesky Earthling has stolen my Strangium-238 Space Modulator!
Seriously, any one read David Brin's Earth?
Maybe they only winged us.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I find it difficult to formulate a serious theory about an event by relying on exotic (hence unproven) strangelets surrounded by electrons (which is what these so called nuclearites are/should be/may be), going on little more empirical evidence then activity on seismographs. I do not accept that SQM (strange quark matter) baryons, should they even exist, would have slammed into one side of the Earth and came booming out of the other with little more evidence then slight quakes.
he's using 11th dimentional math where you just make up whatever the fuck numbers you want. It's said that even U.S. school students pick up math pretty easily there.
Good thing I dont live in Antarctica! Ill stay here in good 'ol safe US of A! Keep them quarks south of the equator.
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.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
So, they know an approximate mass, they can guestimate how fast it is moving, and from the location of the Earth at that time, they know a relative position in the solar system.
Is this thing moving at an 'escape' velocity from our solar system? Is it in orbit around the sun like a comet? Can we calculate that orbit and see if it might hit us again?
If these things are so common that they found 2 events in 3 years worth of data, why don't we see buildings occasionally cruble as if hit by a missile?
"Quark Matter Blamed for Paired 1993 Seismic Events"
Quark visited Earth in the 40's, not the 90's. There's no way he altered history in such a way that it'd cause seismic events 50 years later!
It's a good thing I watch a lot of TV, I could have wasted time reading that stupid article.
"Derp de derp."
What about a bullet wound?
.22 of an inch projectile at near light speeds. The projectile will not expand and thusly will not release much energy. Merely punch straight through both sides and continue on untill the engery runs out.
Small and clean going in.
Big and messy going out.
Ok first of all a bullet is designed to expand and release it's engery in the form of expansion. Thusly thats why they have little holes going in and big holes going out as the bullet expands and releases alot of it's energy. Bullets that have a full metal case do not leave big holes at all.
The other thing is like many other people have brought up that this is smaller than the size of a cell and has the mass of of aprox 1 ton. I do not know how fast it is going but I saw a post that said 400k/sec. If it does not have enough frontal area or expansion ability (very small very dense) it will squish in and snap back on the surfance and thusly cause vibrations but the hole it would leave would be extremly small. It would also produce vibration as it traveld through the object and came out the other side but agian probably not do much damage.
Like that weapon they had in the movie "eraser" was total BS. It fired a
If I'm wrong please feel free to correct me/discuss it.
Vote early. Vote often. Vote CowboyNeal.
" As a mathematician I'm usually very spectical of ..."
"Usually there is some problems..."
Whether or not you're a mathematician is debatable, but I'm pretty sure you'll never get confused with an English major. You have some "specticalular" problems with subject/verb agreements...
"There is almost no experimental proofs for quantum field theory."
Psst! You're a mathematician. You're supposed to be satisfied when the equations work out. Experimental proof is something done by... well... physicists.
"And there is no reasonable argument for the choice of 11 dimensions (1 time, 10 space, 6 compactified)."
Forget the funky math you just did, if you made up new math functions as often as you made up new words ("compactified?"), you'd be the next Newton.
"can by explained much easier due to the fact that several cohomology groups of the Yang-Chibara manifolds are simple and the remaining ones freely generated."
Dude! Paramount is looking for you! They need you to help write the next Star Trek series!
"The other well known phenomena of earth core oszillations"
We're off to see the wizard! The wonderful Wizard of Osz!
When you get hit by a bullet, you absorb most of the kinetic energy carried by the bullet, so it tends to rip you apart. Your body structure is too dense for a bullet to pass through without energy loss, not true for a quark. If this quark had slowed down signifigantly or stopped in the planet, then it's energy would've been transfered into the planet, resulting in a 50kt blast (i.e. Second Impact, har). But it sailed right through, so we didn't feel much.
Damn Chi-Comms!
--
But then again I thought VCR+ was a stupid idea and would die a quick death--so what do I know?
...then why doesn't the Earth whistle as it spins?
Two reasons:
1. It's in a vacuum. It may be whistling, but you just can't hear it because there's nothing to transmit the sound.
2. Would you feel like whistling if you'd just had a hole punched through you?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
How do they know it's quark matter? Why not micro-black-holes or a chunk of neutronium? They may be right, but I'm just curious as to how they narrowed this peculiar effect down to this even more peculiar cause. Large quarks are, to my knowledge, no more or less theoretical than micron-level singularities or thimble-sized pieces of neutronium.
Dyolf Knip
Think of the probability bell curve. If we can have such quark matter of that size pass through even once a millennium, we should have enough smaller samples per hour that we can detect with all the equipment looking at the skies. The giant Kamiokande and Sudbury detectors would surely detect even tiny quantities of quark clumps, should I dare say single quarks? No the skies have been clear of such powerful thingies unless a single quark can cause earthquakes, THEN we can say the chances of them hitting the earth are so small, that we only had one in 93.
Secondly there have been enough earthquakes in earth-quake recorded history that we can expect almost simultaneous quakes sometime. The source that emitted even one quark of that much power towards us is likely a stellar event, sending more than one of these quarks or quarklumps. We should have had a series of earthquakes just like the leonids.
Thirdly, as I imagine tiny centers of enormous gravity, me thinks it should really break the rigid structure of rocks and other crystal-like things. Say we have one tonne of mass, on how much area should we put it to have enough pressure to crush rocks?? I think a little under a square inch. Therefore a little circle of this ballpark size can be discovered (assuming the material was about a tonne's worth of mass. If more, we get lucky with a bigger powdery circle). The circle would be dark with a burn and so easily noticed. Then again, shockwaves would move enough earth (if the can cause an earthquake)to form little mound circle.
This is just one of those junk pieces of news that get media attention since the physics behind it is so beautiful and believable. The publics appetite is wet for major scientific discoveries after a centurys bullish discoveries and a decade's slump.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
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.
Not really, he is saying that while the things have a hell of a lot of momentum (3e11 Newton seconds) it's impact area would be incredible small (smaller than a hydrogen atom in diameter) so it would just blast through a person without transfering its momentum to more than the cells it went through. So when it exits the individual it has left a wake, but a small one because of its incredible velocity.
This isn't billiards, where a ball transfers all its momentum to another, and it isn't like an ice burg where the oil station must be obliterated for passage. At 3e8 m/s it would pass through a meter of flesh in 1/3e8 seconds transfering energy to a few cells with very little mass themselves.
That's why he didn't think it would significantly damage a person. The Earth was both dense enough and large(volume) enough to take the blast.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
El Niño was getting sick of being the scapegoat.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
about 2,200 US pounds.
2204.6226 according to units(1).
Google is of course your friend
Google is indeed your friend, but its silly to use Google in a case like this when you could just "apt-get install units" (or whatever the equivalent is for your system).
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.
Sounded funny to my until I got all my records out and looked at them, a hole exactly through the center of every one of them!
Given its past location, velocity, and heading, we could get a rough idea of what its orbit is like. Then, someday, when the second Dark Age ends and Science is rediscovered, we can launch an array of SQUID (superconducting quantum interference devices) sensors to find it.
Or to put it another way, he (or she) has provided a link that anyone can easily follow to read other posts about this topic. Don't get so hung up on other people's karma.
Really there was no point in rolling back time at all, with the accuracy we're talking about it seems obvious that this ancient quark traveler would likely have been guided toward us by the graviational lens that is the mass of the LMC. That, or some unknown process in the LMC could conceivably have generated the strange stuff. Of course at a velocity of only .0015c it would have passed the LMC around 120 million years ago.
It seems pretty hard to say where it came from especially with this one piece of information, but we might very well be in for some surprises if we get enough seismic data in the future to plot against the COBE map!
Some interesting links here.
Does anyone know why this has to be strange quark matter, rather than a small black hole passing through the Earth? Is it because a black hole that small would explode from Hawking radiation?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Yes, if it was the same time, different place. It is not though, what is happening is that the object was traveling faster than the speed of sound in the earth. Thus the object enters and leaves the earth faster than the wave can propagate. To a seismograph, this would appear to be a long fault along the entire path the object took, rather than as a series of points along the path.
So the object enters the earth and leaves fractions of a second later, but all we see is a shock wave emanating along the entire path of the object. There is both a difference in time and distance for the entrance and exit points.
Sapere aude!
There is quite a bit of water between Australia and Antarctica. The closest points between the two (actually from Tasmania, an island, to Antarctica) are approximately 24 degrees latitude apart. This translates to about 1660 miles between the two.
Sapere aude!
You are using two different types of measurement. Thats like saying how many hours in a mile.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
sorry, misquoted simpsons, i really should know better Homer: Watch, I'll ask it how many leagues in a furlong. from AABF22 - Brother's Little Helper
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."