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.

Comments

Linux is for faggots

[Anonymous Coward]

Ice Cube would bust a cap in your ass for being a faggot.

Re:Huzzah!

[symbolset]

There's no need to get testy. You're working with some pretty fungible terms here. First of all, the sum of mass and energy in our universe is finite - but it is not constant - at least with some definitions of the term "universe". By isolating the question to matter you miss the question just by phrasing it this way.

Now consider our light cone. From our present position there are some masses that early on passed beyond the distance where the light from there could ever arrive here no matter how redshifted, and every day more masses fall over that line. Even travelling at the speed of light you could not go there, because the distance between is expanding faster than the speed of light. Those masses are lost to us. This is also true of some of the furthest points we can see, as they cast that light before they fell so far from us and went outside our light cone. From one point of view these masses and energies are outside our universe now - and there's some doubt that they still exist. Then there are all the energies radiated outward away from us since the formation of those masses. Those are also lost, and in the terms you're talking about energy is equivalent to mass.

Tracing a line.. I must suppose you're not talking about a straight line, since in the context of a line that spans the universe the "straight line" concept is meaningless. Space itself is not straight, and I'm starting to think even Time is at least bi-curious.

Still, there is an implied assumption in your post I'm curious about. Are you holding the impression that the universe is contiguous? Have you got a citation on that?