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Antarctic Experiment Finds Puzzling Distribution of Cosmic Rays
pitchpipe writes "A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica. ... It turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another." The map of this uneven distribution comes from the IceCube neutrino observatory last mentioned several days ago.
> I mean, it is what protects us from vasts amounts of cosmic rays...
No it isn't. The Earth's magnetic field has negligible effect on cosmic rays: they are far to energetic for it to influence them significantly. What protects us from cosmic rays is the atmosphere.
> ...maybe those differences account for a vast majority of this patterns?
The physicists will have already taken the small (but known) effect of the magnetic field into account.
> And the various celestial bodies that surround us (constantly deflecting
> this rays) account for the rest?
Celestial bodies do not surround us. The sun and the moon together cover less than 1/100,000th of the sky.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
R'lyeh is in the south pacific. Pnakoticos is in the Australian desert. Irem is in Saudia Arabia. Unfortunately, the Pentagonally Symmetrical Elder Things named their last surface city 'Can'ned'spham', which is why the Shoggoths ate them.
Who is John Cabal?
No it isn't. The Earth's magnetic field has negligible effect on cosmic rays: they are far to energetic for it to influence them significantly. What protects us from cosmic rays is the atmosphere.
This is incorrect. The International Space Station has a significantly lower cosmic radiation environment due to the Earth's magnetic field. However, the cosmic rays that are energetic enough to be detected under a few hundred meters of ice can easily punch through the Earth's magnetic field.
Celestial bodies do not surround us. The sun and the moon together cover less than 1/100,000th of the sky.
Indeed. The heliosphere might, due to its vast size (and its shock interaction with the galactic medium is apparently a known source of cosmic rays), be an intermediate filter with enough pull to distort the path of incoming cosmic rays.
This would be true only if the universe had an euclidean geometry.
This is hard to visualize in three dimensions, so let's start with a two-dimensional case. Imagine a perfectly flat horizontal surface. Any triangle you draw in that surface will have three internal angles that add up to 180 degrees. If you draw any finite number of points there you could take the average of the xy coordinates and define a "center" for that set of points.
Now imagine a curved surface, let's say the surface of the earth. Define a triangle like this: point A is at zero latitude, zero longitude. Point B is at zero latitude, 90 degrees West longitude. Point C is at the North Pole. This triangle has three angles of ninety degrees, adding up to 270 degrees.
How would you define a "center" for a set of points randomly distributed over the surface of the earth? You could do it only if those points were sufficiently close together so the surface between them could be approximated by a flat surface. You can talk about the center of a continent, but the center of the whole surface of the earth is undefined.
Imagine the same problem in a universe with three dimensions that's curved in a fourth dimension and you will understand a bit of what general relativity is all about.