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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.
Scientists have called this part of the sky "The Sun".
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
It would be great if they'd actually found the center of the universe, in contradiction to all previous theories, since that would allow a hole in relativity that you might be able to squeeze FTL through. At least as far as i understand it some methods of FTL would be non-paradoxical if there was actually a universal reference frame instead of everything being, well, relative.
Unfortunately i'm sure there's a much more mundane explanation for the phenomenon which they will eventually discover.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
God went that-a-way
Oh, I know what is going on. With all the earthquakes, floods, oil well leaks and explosions, global warming. Those aren't any ordinary cosmic rays, they are Mongo Rays! Lord Ming has it in for us. Where is Flash and Dr. Zarkov when we need them?
Look around you.
Look... around you.
Look... around you. ...
How DO scientists sift through this data? They insert the assembled facts into a wave function graphing device.
Note that down in your copybook.
The device is powered by 2 icktoms of intelligent calcium and a green anole.
(addressing anole, paper lab jacket is visibly taped to the lizard's back) Hello, Professor!
When the functions display a wave on the screen of the osomoscope, the scientists interpret the signal. How do the scientists interpret it?
We may never know. Scientists have very intelligent brains, and it can be quite a challenge to even guess what they want for lunch. ... ...back next time when we learn about wood.
"We shall grapple with the ineffable, and see if we may not eff it after all." - Douglas Adams
We call this the "Microwave oven theory". Some areas get cooked to carbon, others are left frozen solid.
"Who modded this informative? Whoever it is must've been smokin' some of that martian pot!"
Doesn't even contain a link to the project in question.
> 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.
Look Around You.
Look. Around. You.
Have you guessed what we're looking for, yet? Yes, that's right - it's computer programming.
[ MAN SITTING AT TYPEWRITER ]
This man is writing a computer programme. A computer programme is like a script that tells a computer what to do. Like people, computers understand different languages - some examples of computer languages are:
* C
* PASCAL
* BASIC
* C double-plus
* C triple-plus
* C detuned bassoon
* Norwegian
Your school computer is probably a BBC Microcomputerisation Engine and, therefore, understands a dialect of BASIC known as 'HyperFrench.'
Make a note of this in your copybook... now.
The Earth's magnetic field is well mapped. The physicists will already have taken it into consideration.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
It makes me sad that you had to explain that here.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
Except that the detector is for detecting neutrinos. They have no charge. Not only that but they are not expected to interact with the earth's magnetic fields according to the current theory. If only there were some sort of "article" that might have this kind of information in a form that is easy to "read" with a convenient "hyper-link" to lead us to it.
Sheesh... if only we had some sort of "moderators" who might understand this. "interesting" my ass.
I'm happy that it was phrased in the form of a question. Too often, the reaction to a bit of science that somebody doesn't wish to believe is simply rejection of it, perhaps combined with unsourced assertions (or assertions to un-peer-reviewed sources).
You don't have to know everything in science. There's too much to know. Ignorance is fine, as long as you're (a) aware of it, (b) curious, and (c) not going to fight against those who do know it.
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?
Is that not several days?
While it's true that IceCube is designed to be a neutrino telescope, the observations here involve more common and easier to detect cosmic rays (e.g. gamma rays), coming from the southern half of the sky.
See, when IceCube is looking for neutrinos, they look for signals coming from beneath the northern part of the sky. They are essentially using the entire planet earth as a filter for cosmic rays since they can't pass through that much solid material, while neutrinos can with ease. Neutrinos don't interact electromagnetically at all, so to them "solid" matter is mostly empty space. Which includes the detector itself, which is why it's so important to filter out sources of noise.
They can tell what direction something is coming from (see the map), so if it came from the sky, it's probably not a neutrino but some other cosmic ray. And it looks like they were looking at all the data they would be subtracting out from their data sets when looking for neutrinos, and found something interesting about the distribution.
But as the article itself says, our magnetic field could in fact be the cause of this observed feature, since the rays in question are electromagnetic in nature. But I like the supernova theory, because it involves gigantic explosions. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
The Earth's magnetic field shields it from solar "cosmic" rays and probably some secondary galactic ones. The primaries, however, are so energetic that they are merely deflected a bit. What does stop a lot of primaries is the field embedded in the solar wind. Since the heliosphere is asymmetric and poorly mapped this may very well account for the observed asymmetry. I concede that the Earth's field may have more than negligible effect, but I still think that the researchers will have accounted for it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The sun and the moon together cover less than 1/100,000th of the sky.
Really? so you are saying the universe is flat, and the earth is off in a corner where nothing but the sun and moon are around it?
Is the sky flat where you live?
"and no matter which direction we go, we are going to hit some "celestial" body."
Nope, space is pretty much just space. Galaxies commonly collide with each other but the stars within those collisions very rarely smash into each other. It's not that there is any shortage of celestial bodies it's just that space is really, really, big.
There's also the fact that ALL of the celestial bodies are contained within the microwave background, so why is it that we can see the microwave background if every direction is obscured with a celestial body?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Google tells me it's a BBC comedy spoof of educational films called... Look Around You
Why can't we let people believe whatever they like? It's not like a little religion has ever hurt anyone.
As far as I can tell from reading the article, this proves that cosmic rays distribution does not follow a truly random pattern as they hit earth. Given that these rays originate from stars/nova/events and these events are not randomly distributed in the universe, why is this a surprise? I can only guess someone has theorised that if the universe is infinitely big, then the cosmic ray distribution should tend towards perfect (infinite) randomness. Can anyone shed light on the theory that this finding is diproving? links? This could also prove that the earth is travelling fast through rays, so it impacts more in the direction it moves, presumably the scientists have allowed for this too....
Waiting for the other shoe to...