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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.
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")
Thats almost 6,500,000,000,000,000,000 degrees!!!!
Additionally, the abstract says their research "provide[s] a strong argument" for a theory. I suppose these statements are way too hard-line for Real Science. Sheesh. These are people who know very well they're doing inference rather than deduction - including the submitter! - and you take them to task for jumping to conclusions.
You say:
The hypothesize/predict/experiment cycle isn't nearly as boolean as you make it out, even though we teach it that way in school.
If a result doesn't disprove a theory, it actually increases its probability among other possibilities. Bayesian statistics models this quite well, and scientists think about it that way but without such a rigorous foundation. For example, in all forces, we've measured the differential relationships among position, velocity and acceleration to ridiculous precision. Doesn't this increase the probability that we've got it right? In this area, if there's a conflict between predicted and expected outcomes, we regard the explanation that the theory is wrong as the less probable one - much less probable.
Part of the problem is classical statistics. Null hypotheses and tests against them are kludgy nonsense, everyone knows it, and everyone has their own way of doing it "properly". (Think about it this way: Pr(null hypothesis), where the null hypothesis has a continuous component - and this is done all the time - is ZERO.) Doing inference without priors is a misguided attempt at objectivity. These mindsets are well-preserved in scientific philosophy, and they've got to go. Nobody actually thinks about real inference the classical way. It'd be ridiculous to try it on any hypothesis of moderate complexity.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
But how many Libraries Of Congress On Fire is that?
So, if I need to cook a turkey, how long should I leave it in at 6,446,700,000,000,000,000 degrees?
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny