Slashdot Mirror
Beamlines To Reveal Secrets of the Mummies
Hugh Pickens writes "A British X-ray with a light ten billion times brighter than the sun is to be used to reveal the secrets of statues, mummies, sarcophagi and other ancient artifacts to analyze their composition and how they were made. Three Egyptian bronze figurines from the British Museum will be among the first treasures to be investigated by the Joint Engineering, Environmental and Processing beamline, or Jeep, using intense radiation known as synchrotron light which allows scientists to see through solid objects and to show structural details that cannot be seen by standard X-rays. 'It might give us the chance to look at the contents. The Egyptians used to stash things inside their statues. We also get very fragile inner sarcophagi or mummy wrappings,' says Jen Hiller, a scientist working on the beamline. In Grenoble a team has used synchrotron radiation to discover the first known fossilized brain, of a fish-like creature; details are to be published this month. In California it is being used to decipher the Archimedes palimpsest — a text by the Greek mathematician that was overwritten in medieval times."
I stash things in my statues all the time
she was the daughter of a wealthy florentine pogen read em and weep was her adjustable slogan
In other words the power level was over 9000.
I assume the "10 billion times brighter then the sun" is an apparent brightness measurement of the sun at the earth, and not of the suns actual luminosity. If it is actually that much brighter then the sun, then that's REALLY impressive...
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
Every once in a while, I'll hear someone say -
"Autopsies performed on the remains of mummies show that they had cocaine alkaloids in their system, which means that the ancient Egyptians traveled to South America"
I've always suspected that was complete hogwash. I would appreciate it if someone would shed some light on THAT mummy mystery.
FTFY.
Great. Now that we've been desensitized by hacked road signs warning about phony zombie attacks, no one is going to believe it when the signs say "IRRADIATED MUMMIES AHEAD! RUN!"
I'm certain they mean that the intensity of the beam is 10^10 larger than the intensity of solar radiation at Earth. (I assume they're referring to energy flux and not photon flux. The synchrotron I worked at produced roughly 10^19 photons/m^2/s; the photon flux at Earth from the sun is roughly 10^21. Synchrotron beams, however, consist of much higher-energy photons.)
While synchrotrons are certainly capable of producing very high-energy beams, if they're referring to intensity, it's sort of cheating -- you can use optics to compress the beam. (For example, compressing a 1 cm square beam to a 10 um square beam.)
I can just see the headline here next year: Cloning mummy DNA impossible because we doused it with too much radiation
I think it is possible to make something that actually puts out more light than the sun, but for a very short period of time. I see this phrase used when talking about femtosecond lasers and stuff.
I was at Diamond last weekend, and while idling around the foyer I was having a look at their big posters boasting about how bright their beam was. A closer look at the units indicated that it's even more abstract than "photons per unit area". The units they're talking about are (deep breath...) "Photons per second per square millimetre per millirad per 0.1% beam width". So they're not only counting area, but also divergence and how well-defined the beam is. All things the sun tends to be rather poor at, really, so it's not the fairest comparison ever.
Their Mummy was a crack ho?
I heard they would do anything for a 20-rock!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
Every once in a while I read something that I just can't believe, and I have to run to Wikipedia to do some background reading. Synchrotron radiation was one of those things for me ...
It makes my day job seem trivial.
I guess they didn't read the sign in the museum lobby...
Actually they do permit flash, but it's funny when they don't, and try to come up with "reasons".
Yeah, but this one goes to 11.
I make it a habit to break every statue I find past level 5.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Interesting. I've never seen that metric, only photons/s/mm^2, which is fairly standard for beam intensity.
You should try working at one of those things. It gives you an appreciation for, say, the LHC being so difficult to get running properly.
As an experimenter, I got to work 18-hour/day shifts for a week in a very loud environment where false alarms go off frequently and the equipment often simply stops working. The results were very cool, though.
Actually, the device is just a synchrotron, a ring that keeps charged particles moving in circles and shakes them from time to time to ensure that they emit a great amount of X rays. 99.9% of the time it will be used for things such as analyzing materials grown by research groups in their laboratories, or determining the structure of big proteins. I guess that, sure, you can stick archeological samples to get information on chemical composition/structure of the materials used, but unfortunately the problem of extracting historical knowledge out of it will be solved by archeologists and not materials scientists :(
It is a nice way of selling a really expensive device, though. I could only think of dinosaurs as bigger sellers.
By brightness, they mean the number of photons in an area and how collimated the photons are. Brightness in this usage has units of (# of photons per unit time per unit area per unit solid angle per energy bandwidth).
As an analogy, an optical laser has a small beam that is highly collimated, and so is much brighter than a light bulb (which emits in all directions) even if the total number of photons emitted and total power is smaller. A laser also emits a very narrow band of wavelengths (energy), which improves its brightness.
A synchrotron x-ray source is bright much the same way a laser is: the x-rays come out very highly collimated (often more collimated than typical optical lasers) and so can put a very large number of x-rays into a small spot. Most synchrotron x-ray sources give a fairly broad energy spectrum, but selecting a narrow bandwidth is common, and still results in extremely bright beams. Synchrotron x-rays are usually pulsed (at kHz frequencies), but quoted brightnesses are usually integrated over a second.
A synchrotron is there when you need 10^10 12keV (0.1 nm wavelength) x-rays per sec in a 10x10 micron spot.
Okay, this is a bit off-topic, but the standard synchrotron brightness units are Photons per second per square millimeter per .1% band width, measured at the spot in the endstation. Speaking of source brightness you would use square milliradians instead of millimeters. The .1% band width is a funny unit which refers to deltaE/E, so the brightness here is really a function of energy. In the visible, for yellow light like the sun, .1%bw is about .0022eV at 2.2eV=570nm. For the Fe K-edge, where they may have been working, the energy is 7112eV, which gives .1%bw=7.112eV, so at 7112eV you are counting all photons with energies between 7112eV and 7119eV or so. Synchrotrons typically have a peak brightness somewhere up in the X-Ray energies, which makes sense because they are designed to be X-Ray sources. For that reason it doesn't make much sense to compare the brightness of a synchrotron with that of the sun. They are really such different sources. When I see a comparison like that I usually just dismiss it and read on. They would have said something more useful if they had compared to dental X-Ray brightness. I tend to cut science reporters a little slack though. It is hard to give people an idea of what is really going on in science when there are so many details that you have to know for real understanding. Of course, when the science reporter's words are further interpreted for the Slashdot abstract by someone like Hugh Pickens, you have to give them even less weight.
-Dan
I wonder what size magnifying glass held up to the sun would create a similar beam.
Trivial? How does this sound: cut out 15 very tiny strips of kapton tape (10 min). Weigh each Piece of Tape to the nearest ten micrograms (5 min, each strip). Use little rubber thingies to smudge your mummy sample evenly and lightly onto your kapton tape strips (5 min, each strip). Reweigh each strip to the nearest ten micrograms (5 min, each strip). Curse every god imaginable because you're short on mummy sample and it's throwing off your absorption length...fold the strips over to try and correct (30 minutes). Repeat for the next mummy sample. Repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat.
This is x-ray synchrotron radiation studies. I promise you're having more fun. You do get to talk to real people, right?
I work next door to the Synchrotron facility of Grenoble, in another lab. That device is so popular that it runs 24/7, with experimenters coming from all over the world to use it for the widest range of uses: crystallography, analysis of paintings, palimpsests, archeology datation, detection of faults in materials... The uses are endless and the people who get a go at it sleep in the bowels of the machine for days or even weeks when they get a time slot.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Only on /. would someone feel the need to defend the Sun.
You wouldn't want to make it angry.