Anti-Matter Belt Discovered Around Earth

hydrofix writes "A thin band of antiprotons enveloping the Earth has been spotted for the first time. The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters [arXiv] (Note: abstract free, full text paywalled), confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter. The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and cosmic rays. Aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft — an idea explored in a report for NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts."

Comments

antimatter

[girlintraining]

the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft

That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!

Re:antimatter

[WrongSizeGlass]

That's sooooo adorably naive! Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon. Space Race 2.0: Fuck The Manhattan Project, Shit Just Got Real!

Talk about naive. SkyNet will use it against us while we bicker between ourselves whether or not to put the anti-matter weapons on sharks or just in the hands of evil corporations.

Re:antimatter

[PopeRatzo]

Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon.

Wait, you think that if the anti-matter belt around Earth turned out to be a useful power source that it would be governments that compete for control of it?

Sister, you are hopelessly naive.

Re:antimatter

[Anonymous Coward]

I do believe shit just got Anti-Real.

Re:antimatter

[Twinbee]

Or we'll be in almost peace by then, as the internet unites nations more and more. The hate on average is going down a lot, thanks to many realizing that real people exist on the other side of the globe. And the internet is a big part of that. Perhaps not so naive.

Re:antimatter

[Nick Ives]

You think the internet reduces hate? Have you seen the comments on Youtube, or even here?

Re:antimatter

[X0563511]

If weaponized antimatter was such a big draw, it would be in use by now.

Why? Because we can already manufacture it. (storage is the problem, and you'd bet your ass the Government(s) would be putting resources into solving that)

Re:antimatter

[Twinbee]

I know, hard to believe it was worse before isn't it?

Seriously, generally speaking, it's a lot harder for people to feel indifferent going to war, when they see others' lives on facebook, the web in general, or even through email.

Re:antimatter

[Tablizer]

Everybody knows that if it turns out to be a useful power source, the governments of the world will compete with one another to turn it into a weapon.

That's how you get research for peaceful purposes also. The ugly secret of humans is that porn and war drive many new technologies, if not most. Rather than fight it, take advantage of it.

Re:antimatter

[Yvanhoe]

Also, several articles mention "billions" of anti proton around the Earth. That is still less than a joule. Bring a sugar cube into orbit, you'll have more fuel than if you captured all the anti-particles that orbit around the Earth.

Re:antimatter

[Scarletdown]

28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.

I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.

So this discovery truly does not matter. Or does it not anitmatter in this case?

Re:antimatter

[Philbert de Zwart]

Well, I will agree with you that atomic bombs require an enormous investment, but your reasoning fails on one account: in an atomic bomb, the potential energy is already there, provided by nature. Sure we had to refine it, but in the end it is supernovas that put all that energy in the Uranium (or what have you) for us. To create an antimatter bomb, we need to produce all that potential energy ourselves, in the form of antimatter. Not only do we need to put in the potential energy itself, but also excess energy to account for the inefficiency of the production process.

That is what makes antimatter too inefficient to be used as a weapon, let alone as a fuel source.

This changes if we could harvest it from space, as indeed it would be nature again who has stored that potential energy for us.

Re:antimatter

[im_thatoneguy]

I remember an excellent interview a long time ago by a researcher in antimatter who was asked about weapons. His reply was 2 fold insightful:

1) Who cares, we already have tactical nukes which can fit into a brief case, how much smaller do we really need to get?

2) It's very very difficult to mix anti-matter instantaneously with a large quantity of matter. You would most likely just get a sustained very hot burn not an explosion. It's the old Fuel/Air conundrum. Per gram gasoline has more explosive power than gun powder. But you have to mix it to get it to react.

Re:antimatter

[JamesP]

They didn't find antimatter, they found anti-protons. Matter is what happens when particles arrange themselves a certain way. A few stray protons doesn't constitute matter: neither do some stray anti-protons.

Furthermore, they've found a whopping 28 of them in two years' research. Even if they'd found 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which would require that each anti-proton also have a positron), the amount is utterly irrelevant in terms of power generation. 28 atoms of anti-hydrogen (which I point out again that this is not) wouldn't produce a reaction capable of running a AA-battery flashlight.

I believe that the BBC has fallen victim to sensationalism and/or ignorance. It's pretty much what I've come to expect from the world press.

Thank you for trying to piss in their party, but the sensationalist/ignorant here is you.

Had you properly read TFA (or the original explanation) you would have found that
- You obviously don't know WTF is Pamela
- Pamela spent around 2% of its time in the South Atlantic Anomaly
- It detected 28 protons because that's within its capabilities (protip - particle detectors don't know an atom from an anti-atom BECAUSE IT'S NEUTRAL)
- "Protons doesn't constitute matter" What, they don't have mass? Protons fit squarely in the definition of matter, unless you are being sensationalistic or forgot the definition of matter.

And by the way, try to buy 28 antiprotons from CERN and see how much they ask for it

Re:antimatter

[CrimsonAvenger]

If they didn't have the side effect of toxic radiation, they'd probably be dropping them everywhere instead of conventional munitions.

Umm, no.

The reason we don't use nukes everywhere is that there aren't really very many targets that require a 10 kt explosion to destroy.

Re:antimatter

[SomePgmr]

I absolutely agree. In even the worst case scenarios, hateful arguments get aired where others can respond with opposing viewpoints, and at least casual passers-by see both sides of any issue.

You may not change my mind when we disagree, but you might influence the opinions of some random 3rd party. If even by hammering home the notion that there can be rational parties on both sides of a disagreement and we all deserve a little respect.

Re:antimatter

[silentcoder]

>and at least casual passers-by see both sides of any issue.

I can't think of anything more truly naive than to imagine that any issue has only two sides. Humans, especially politicians, like to think and act as if they did - but the real world never works that way. This makes the whole "both sides" tactic a wonderful form of mass-manipulation.

By ignoring all shades of gray you can take somebody from a reasonable position and rapidly get them to agree to a highly unreasonable proposition by painting it as being on the same side of the line - but the real world doesn't have lines. It has a huge gray area that slowly shades from "where you were comfortable with" through "less and less okay" to "not okay at all".

You start out believing people should be allowed to write and read any newspaper they like, and end up supporting the right to put the recipe for nerf gas on a billboard. You start out believing a government should be beholden to it's people, and those people empowered to replace that government - and end up supporting the idea that a convicted fellon should be able to buy assault rifles with armor piercing bullets and finger-print resistant grips.

In reality - none of us are truly on the extremes - but we end up voting for them because we've been convinced that there is a black/white line and if we don't support one extreme we support the other.
Generally though - if we truly probe our thoughts we discover that we are never really in support of the extremes. Even Timothy McVeigh thought that the right to bear arms shouldn't include nuclear weapons. Yep - a man who killed people and planted a bomb because he believed so strongly that people should be allowed to have ANY weapons, could see a kind of weapon he thought ought to be restricted.

You can really draw the same principle through almost every debate in politics today. Instead of "two sides" - look at it as two extremes with a huge gray area in the middle, and then say that each specific example in that gray area should be studied on merit and those that aren't two extreme on either side should probably be okay.

Re:antimatter

[Muad'Dave]

While likely technically correct, common usage trumps technicality. Most people regard the 1970's to be 1970-1979, etc, NOT 1971-1980. The same sort of logic applies to centuries - 20th century was 1900-1999. In fact, why don't we just declare the 1st century to be anomalous, and go on from there?

Re:Navu SEAL:team killed in helicopter crash

[morgaen]

Turn off Fox News. They were obviously flying too close to the anti-matter belt.

Fuel? No.

[ljhiller]

In 2.5 years (of which they were in the south atlantic anomaly something like 5% of the time) they found 28 antiprotons.

Re:Fuel? No.

[rubycodez]

Those are not examples of thermodynamic law limiting something. There is a specific energy cost associated with producing an anti-proton; it is not possible to produce one without incurring that cost, else perpetual motion would be possible.

Re:Fuel? No.

[Twinbee]

But if antimatter is more compact, and we get to an efficiency point where antimatter gives off almost as much energy as it took to produce, then it's not such a bad deal.

Re:Fuel? No.

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

So, in ten years then?

Re:Fuel? No.

[brunes69]

You have to think of anti-matter more of a battery than an energy source. Once you have workable fusion (ie "unlimited", "cheap" power), the barriers to making anti-matter essentially go away. At that point you can make it and use it for space travel for what it is - a very compact energy source, which is exactly what you need for long journeys.

Re:Fuel? No.

[slashqwerty]

(assuming we can even travel that reach on a regular basis without it taking 6 years, like it took Galileo

Juno was launched two days ago and is expected to take five years to reach Jupiter.

New Horizons reached Jupiter in just over two years. If it had anti-matter fuel it probably could have stopped. If it had anti-matter fuel it would have completed the trip even faster.

Really, it doesn't matter if it takes one month or one decade as long as there are enough craft in transit at one time to maintain a steady supply.

Planning Office

[Uncle Robert]

Has anyone checked at the planning office to see if they are planning to put in a bypass?

Re:Planning Office

[Yvan256]

I did. The plans were on display, but I had to go down to the basement to find them. It was in a locked Microsoft Word document, saved on a 360 KB floppy disk, stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Ponies".

Anti-Matter

[cob666]

In other news. General Products press conferences states that visiting Earth could void the warranty on your GP hull.

no it's moving to non government space flight

[Joe_Dragon]

no it's moving to non government space flight.

Any way I will hate to see a cheap / corner cut china space ship fall apart mid way to mars. china 3 gorges dam may fail in real big way soon.

Not much more efficient than fusion

[tp1024]

Even if there were huge quantities of anti-matter (implying that the spacecraft would have been vaporized in a short bright flash of light) and we could store it somehow (ignoring the safety implications of the storage failing) and in any way efficiently convert the resulting hard gamma radiation into anything useful at all, pure anti-matter still only has about 1000 times the energy density of fission fuel and about 100 times that of fuel for nuclear fusion. (Compare that to a factor of about 10 million between chemical and nuclear fuel.)

No, not even anti-matter will be able to do miracles.

So it's DOCTOR Bruno now!

[93 Escort Wagon]

Good job, dude! I was wondering what you'd been up to since your work in Dr. Tongue's 3D House of Stewardesses!

Not paywalled

[History's Coming To]

Unless the summary is talking about the journal instead of the arXiv article it's not paywalled, I don't think I've ever seen anything on arXiv that is. It's kind of the point. Anyway, if you can't be bothered looking for the PDF link (top right) this will take you straight to the paper.

Re:Not paywalled

[blueg3]

There's no such thing as a paywall on arXiv -- you submit full preprints to it, and paywalling isn't an option. That is the point. :-)

GOTO page 54

[roger_pasky]

Nice NASA IAC document. You can avoid Sheldon-level buzz wording going directly to page 54 where average Howard Wolowitz engineers can understand a great summary.

Re:Reality Check

[Caraig]

The only problem though is getting them to collide. While the OP is dramatically off the mark in a lot of areas, they are relatively correct in the need for acellerated streams being needed to cause particle collisions.

A microscopic chunk of antimatter in Earth's atmosphere, however, is something else entirely. It WILL get smacked with molecular collisions. (It is not likely to 'explode' so much as 'boil' though) For this reason, I do not recommend that OP inhale a balloon full of antihydrogen. Hydrogen is toxic and does obscene things to certain gases found in the lungs; antihydrogen can't be any better. The trick, of course, is getting a microscopic chunk of antimatter. Penning traps have only been able to capture individual small amounts for only a short time, on the order of seconds, maybe minutes. Definitely not enough to use for chemical experiments with antimatter a possibility.

But beyond that, can you imagine positron shells trying to interact with electron shells? What a covalent bond between 2 antihydrogen and 1 oxygen might be like? I can't; it probably can't happen, but I'm pretty sure that it would not be good if it could; Uncle Heisenberg is crying himself to sleep in Neils Bohr's arms thinking about it. OP's lungs would get a nice dose of gamma radiation, and he would most certainly NOT turn into the Hulk. I would imagine he wouldn't die from cancer, however; his lungs would be charred into coal from the heat generated by the thermal effects of dumping that much gammas into the residual gasses in his lungs and the cellular walls. (Oh, hey, OP, by the way: All that antihydrogen would NOT be expelled in the next breath, unless you can somehow turn your lungs inside out. This is partly why inhaled corrosives are so nasty: They linger. Coughing won't get them out entirely. The most you can hope for is that they dilute quickly in normal atmosphere and don't do something even worse like bond with molecular gates in the cells of your alveoli.)

Also... WTF? What does this have to do with AGW?

antiparticles!?

[angiasaa]

If there were enough antiprotons out there to be useful as a fuel-source, any probes sent through would have come out the other side shredded to the chips. Or am I still theorizing shit?

Finally!

[elguavas]

...something to hold up my antimatter pants.

Fuel,well maybe...

[fliner03]

hmm, 28 particles in three years, maybe not. That pretty much misrepresents the full article.

From section 4:
"The factor of proportionality between the antiproton flux and the number of detected antiproton
candidates, corrected for selection efficiencies and acquisition time, is by definition the gathering
power of the apparatus.

The apparatus gathering power was calculated to be significantly
reduced with respect to the geometric factor (http://pamela.roma2.infn.it/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=28&Itemid=256

The actual PAMELA instrument is fairly small(roughly 1.3 m x .5m) and has esentially no intake manifold.

From section 5:
During about 850 days of data acquisition (from 2006 July to 2008 December), 28 trapped
antiprotons were identified within the kinetic energy range 60–750 MeV. Events with geomagnetic
McIlwain coordinates (McIlwain 1961) in the range 1.1 L 1.3 and B 0.216 G were selected,
corresponding to the SAA. The fractional livetime spent by PAMELA in this region amounts to
the 1.7% ( 4.6 109 s).

My understanding is that that 850 days is time live for the instrument and 1.7% is percent of time in the SAA at geomagnetic ranges of interest. Right? So, 4.6X10^9 seconds works out to about 145 years. 1.7% of 850 days is 14.25 days. Quite a discreapency. Can someone else shed light?

So, you have an instrument with a very small physical intake and no collection system. Limited time at the target site as well. Given these factors, I would have to imagine that a larger more complex system could collect meaningful volumes. Might want to give that Buzzard ram scoop idea a second look.

The paper from Draper:
I like their estimations of collection rates. There should have been better treatment of power requirements vs. yeilds of the system. And, they at least could have given a nod to the Sci-Fi popularization of the same idea.

Now, lets wait too see some realistic propulsion system concepts.

Mod Parent up

[rossdee]

Yeah, I was telling everyone that at the end of 1999 when they had that big celebration, Nobody listened then either.

Output

[JimThink]

With "worldwide output in the nanogram range", I'd do the rocket motor research here before investing in Van Allen belt farming. The papaer estimates, at best, 15 nanograms in the entire region!?!? Even with 100% efficient harvesting, and the most rosy estimate of content, we are talking 15 nanograms.

While it may be a "concept", practicality is so far away we may want to work on ESP or try deep mining for dilithium crystals first.

"Based on this and the subtraction of the solar proton contribution, the antiproton content of the Earth’s magnetosphere from this effect is estimated to be between 0.15 and 15 nanograms. This is replenished every few years."

Would Jupiter have more?

[Tekfactory]

Jupiter's Magnetic field is supposed to be much bigger and more intense than Earth's, would it have more?

Could we use it and Saturn as some kind of anti-matter fuel depot?