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.

Re:Old News...

[*xpenguin*]

No, everyone can get more karma by copy/pasting comments from the previous story.

Re:Old News...

[Anarchofascist]

"No, everyone can get more karma by copy/pasting comments from the previous story."

You cut-and-pasted that comment from a previous comment on a repeated story! And the next time this happens, I'm going to post this comment again.

Re:Old News...

[KILNA]

Your meta-comment regarding copy-paste karma whoring on repeated stories is intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. Please only subscribe me once, as I will no doubt post this comment again.

...in other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

More info, here on slashdot.

[Restil]

The Strangelet Article from last May on the same issue.

-Restil

Imagine..

[|<amikaze]

Getting hit by that random particle. What would it do to you? That's a lot of momentum.

Re:Imagine..

[the bluebrain]

I figure it this way: the article was talking about a body the size of a human cell, going at some outrageous speed. If a single one of your red blood cells suddenly decided to go an a supersonic hiatus (or, I don't know, maybe an aunt died, and it inherited a bundle of momentum) it would rip through the wall of whatever artery it was in at the time, continue through your body, and escape through the skin. Question is, what kind of hole would it leave behind? I would think a sort-of cell-sized one, and the hole wouldn't last for long, because the rubbery substance your body is made of would just splooch, microscopically, back in place. The hole almost certainly wouldn't be big enough, nor last long enough, for other blood cells to follow: i.e., it wouldn't bleed.

All in all, you probably wouldn't even feel it, or if you did, it'd be a sort of "huh? what was that? oh well, must be getting old" sort of feeling.
As for the seismic trace: that was several kilometers of decidedly non-sploochy stuff.

On the other hand, I don't *really* have a clue (as you probably gathered), and it might just be an explanation, finally, for spontaneous human combustion.

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: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: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

Doesn't add up...

[Mike Schiraldi]

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?

Re:Doesn't add up...

[nzhavok]

Perhaps they forgot to synchronize their watches? Scientists are terribly forgetful about things like this :)

Re:Doesn't add up...

[Liquor]

It's pretty obvious that the article has the amount of time wrong. The suggestion of speed given by the article is that the particles might travel at about 400 Km/s, and this particular track apparently went in near a pole and came out near the equator - a rough guess (somebody else can do the actual spherical trig.) is 8500 Km of travel through the earth, and at 400 Km/s that's about 21 seconds, which is on the close order of the 27 seconds you noted from the map.

Now if it WAS .73 of a second, then the alleged particle was travelling close to 12,000 Km/s - 4% of lightspeed - I suspect that 400 Km/s is more in tune with both the energies (not) observed, and the (escape) velocity that could be imparted by falling into the solar system from interstellar space. (At least, either way, it sounds like this one won't be coming back.)

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: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

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:More BBC 'science'..

[Jaeger]

Sounds like good science to me. They started with a hypothesis, which they then set out to prove or disprove. After pouring through "millions of millions of pages of data", they came up with evidence that seems to match what they were trying to find. So they do what all good scientists do -- publish their results, and let the rest of the scientific community review their findings.

I'm not sure where you learned the scientific method, but I recall "Come up with a hypothesis" as the number one step. A hypothesis is not a conclusion, otherwise there is no point to going through the rest of the experiment.

Re:More BBC 'science'..

[cappadocius]

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

You know, that's usually what I do for fun. I and 6 of my friends get drunk then each break into the seven nearest seismographic reseach stations. Then (with our watches synchronized) we all kick the seismographs at the same time then again .73 seconds later (cuz lets face it, .72 is just too hard to pull off).

These guys are real proffessionals though, we could never get to an antarctic station.

But we can't check to see if it happened again.

[Liquor]

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.)

Where can I get....

[GeneralEmergency]

...a quark repellant hat?

Will lining it with tinfoil help?

I called the BBC and they were no help at all.

Now that's FAST!!

[vizualizr]

250 Miles per second?

now that's what i call a . ..

QUARK EXPRESS

If this thing punched a hole through the Earth...

[GeneralEmergency]

...then why doesn't the Earth whistle as it spins?

Re:I don't think so.

[Xerithane]

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? ;)

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.

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.

I know that Quark is responsible

[dandelion_wine]

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"

So where did it come from?

[mengel]

Okay, so we know where it came in, and where it went out, and fairly precisely what time it was... So then you are in a pretty good position to extrapolate the path of the object backwards, and figure out where it came from, right? If it was moving at 400km/h, its patj would have been warped somewhat by the sun's gravitation, but that should be able to be figured in. Then you should point all your best telescopes off in the direction that it must have come from, and see what's there.

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?

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.

[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. :)

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:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[Wiwi Jumbo]

Wouldn't that mean there should be a "impact point" where it hit?

Something that we'd be able to see?

Then again, what the hell do I know? :)

Re:Not a whole hell of a lot.

[pod]

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. :)

At least they're right about ONE thing: it probably wouldn't hurt at all :)

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.

Slackers..

[grub]

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.

Re:Slackers..

[CNERD]

Nah, its more like this..

What caused those earthquakes? Terrorists.
What destroyed the World Trade Center? Terrorists.
Who left the toilet seat up? Terrorists.

Now lets all rip on the bill of rights and fight those terrorists!

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.

Jealous he beat you to it?

[helix400]

We're all aware that /. editors post repeats..., and we hear about it ad nauseum from twerps like yourself who are looking for a quick, cheap karma boost.

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

Spontaneous human combustion?

[Phosphor3k]

Maybe this is finally a scientific reason for spontaneous human combustion?

Re:Spontaneous human combustion?

[aWalrus]

Why was the parent moderated funny? I think it's interesting instead. I though about spontaneous combustion too when I read the article and saw some of the posts. There are enough documented cases of human combustion to at least give some credence to the phenomenon, and this certainly sounds like something that could cause such an effect.

There is a problem in that we don't know what the likelihood of one of these particles hitting earth is (much less of it hitting a person). The study registers very few cases, but it can hardly be said to be very extensive or conclusive (or even correct).

Anyways, when new, previously unknown phenomena is theorized or observed, it is always a good idea to look for prior evidence or see if it can explain other things, even if they were at some time dismissed as lunatics' ravings. An excellent example of this can be found in this recently posted article about a theory that would provide a reasonable explanation to the accounts of witnesses that said they heard sounds produced by meteorites instantly (when they saw them).
--

Re:Spontaneous human combustion?

[Jboy_24]

I believe that in most cases 'Spontanious Human Combustion' it has been shown that the person died from a slow burn of their fat in an oxygen depleted atmosphere. Most = 99%.

In these cases, the person was always

a) alone
b) in a closed room
c) smoking or near a lit fire
d) either intoxicated to the point of unconciousness or already dead from natural causes
e) Mildly to Fully Obese
f) Room has heavy waxy soot on ceiling or high points of the wall

In fact because of the extremely high rate of intoxication among the victums it was thought at one point they died from the alcholol in the blood stream combusting.

What happened really was:
a) Person passes out
b) Cigarette or Fire catches clothing on fire
c) Due to lack of oxygen fire become a slow burn
d) fat from body melts from fire
e) clothing uses molten fat as fuel, ie a human candle

While the heat is strong at the point of the burn, it doesn't turn into a huge fire, thus the lack of damage to other features in the room.

THus, in the end, no Paranormal activties needed.

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.

Your name would live forever

[ehiris]

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.

quark@home?

[TarPitt]

They looked at more than a million records collected by the US Geological Survey between 1990 to 1993 that were not associated with traditional seismic disturbances, such as Earthquakes

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?

Re:Surface Damage?

[Guppy06]

"I think everyone here is overestimating the size of those things."

Man, are you crazy? Leaving the house? There are neutrinos out there, man! Nothing can stop them! We're all going to die!

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:I don't think so.

[Guppy06]

" 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!

here's an explanation

[SHEENmaster]

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.

Re:Probably not...

[foniksonik]

Nope cause bullets are traveling very very very slow compared to the speeds these are supposedly traveling, remember they say something like 250 miles per SECOND not per hour.

This would go through you soo fast your body wouldn't even have a chance to react much less explode, etc. The internal combustion thing is the only possibility here for damage... just from the shere amount of friction heat generated as it passed through you.

Re:Probably not...

[Swaffs]

Bullets leave a bigger hole on the way out because they're (usually) made of lead, which is soft, and they get mushed and expand as they travel through the object. A bullet that has gone through something doesn't look anywhere near the same as it did before it was fired.

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.