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Origin of Cosmic Rays Confirmed
cats-paw writes in with news of research that seems to confirm and support current theories of how cosmic rays are created. The prevailing thinking has been that cosmic rays are generated in the regions where supernovas' shock waves interact with the interstellar medium. The new research used the variability in X-ray emissions from a supernova remnant to estimate the strength of the magnetic fields present in that environment. The results lend support to the possibility of protons and nucleii being accelerated in supernova remnants to energies of 1 PeV (10^15 eV) and beyond. Here is the abstract from Nature.
The Cosmos
research that seems to confirm and support current theories of how cosmic rays are created.
Oh, great, now that everyone knows how to make them, the Fantastic Four are going to be up to their eyeballs in supervillainry.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
It comes back with .00160217 joules. Isn't this a very small amount of energy, or am I missing something?
I've read Slashdot for the last 5 years, and now I start posting... Go figure
So this research confirms... supports...well lends support to the possibility. Care to soften it further?
they are created when God puts foil in his microwave :P
Monstar L
Give credit to cats-paw for giving us the link to the abstract for the original paper and to the editors for putting this up rather than a link to some half-baked pseudo-science blog about it.
I think if I was not an experimentalist, I would want to study this area of physics (supernova observation). Going through the steps of a supernova exposes you to some of the most amazing physics we know of, and this research only adds to that.
have they figured out how they get those small model ships in those glass bottles?
Stop trying to sound "smart" by ending words with "ii". To make Latin words ending "us" plural, remove the "us" and add ONLY ONE "i".
"nucleus" -> "nuclei"
"radius" -> "radii" (because there's already an "i" before the "us")
The research doesn't confirm anything. In fact, no science does. It just shows that there's yet another phenomenon which does not demonstrate the prominent possibility to be incorrect. It seems a minor distinction, but it's important to science that science can't "prove" anything - only attempt to disprove by null hypothesis.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Converting from eV to fahrenheit gives that these interactions are taking place at: 6,446,700,000,000,000,000 degrees! That's 6.4 billion billion degrees.
Cosmic ray soaring over...
Scientists wish for its egg...
Does haiku mod up?
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
I think "Cosmic Ray's" would be a great name for a futuristic bar. That, or the "Space Bar".
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
... they are shrapnel from some distant intergalactic war.
Have gnu, will travel.
First of all, the summary (but also the article) refer to "cosmic rays", as if they are all the same. Most, actually, come from the sun. The nature abstract talks about "galactic cosmic rays", which better, but there are thought to be many flavors of these as well, as there are many ways to accelerate charged partcles.
The poster child of uber-freaked out cosmic rays is a crazy bugger detected in 1991 that had an energy of 3.2 x 10^20 eV. One scientist compared it to dropping a brick on your toe! Cosmic rays with this much energy are too enegetic to fit the supernova shock wave model nicely. They might come from gamma ray bursts or black holes on a feeding frenzy.
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do. (Isaac Asimov)
Benjamin Jacob Grimm says "Wear your lead lined skivvies if your going into space, kids"
The Olbers paradox asks why the night sky is dark, and the answers usually invoke stars' finite lifetimes, the age and expansion of the universe. But if our eyes saw cosmic rays, would we think the sky is dark in the first place?
That explains it all.
All pass beyond reach of medicine. None pass beyond the reach of love.
So, if I need to cook a turkey, how long should I leave it in at 6,446,700,000,000,000,000 degrees?
Who would have thought?
Now I can sleep at night.
..........FULL STOP.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My roommate called me a WUS, so I said, "It takes one to know one!" Then we played a game of Bowling on our game console, the one with motion sensing . . . ach, what is it called???
$META_SIG_JOKE
Let me post a better reply: for those who don't get the joke, paco was a one shot post over on perlmonks. The post gained a lot of publicity over time, and perl monks all over await the return of paco.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
42
By thoroughly debunked, are you referring to Tim Thompson? There exists a rejoinder to his assertions which has yet to be responded to by anybody at http://www.electric-cosmos.org/Rejoinder.htm. By the way, Tim Thompson is well known for just throwing up a bunch of garbage to see what will stick. For instance, his assertion that the various Venus albedo values should be averaged in spite of the fact that some of the values were created in the late 1800's is a prime example. Even to this day, people continue to believe that he was victorious in those exchanges even though an unbiased review of the details demonstrates that Taylor did nothing more than repackage his assumption of Venus in thermal equilibrium into the conclusion. What's particularly unusual about that situation is that the wikipedia censors will not even allow mention of this fact onto wikipedia as they interpret the whole situation as you do without actually looking at ad thinking about the references that are being discussed.
Or perhaps you are talking about attempts to argue EU Theory on the Bad Astronomy Forum, as if these forums are not structured and wholly intended to defend the mainstream theories. On that forum, simplistic calculations are sufficient reason to discredit entire theories. People made a big deal, for instance, of the calculations that supposedly demonstrated that there was not enough charged particles to power the Sun. The problem is that the details of the solar wind's structure continue to reveal itself to be filamentary, and demonstrate that such calculations are now rather antiquated.
For the benefit of everybody, you should clarify exactly which attempt to debunk EU Theory you are referring to.
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.