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NASA collecting anti-matter with giant ballon
Doofus writes " It almost sounds like a science-fiction movie: NASA launched a 60-story-high balloon to the upper fringes of Earth's atmosphere to collect precious particles of some of the rarest
stuff in the Universe -- antimatter -- and, just possibly, evidence that entire anti-galaxies exist.
The
press release is online. " Check out more coverage as well.
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As there is no intelligent life here :b
Wouldn't that be: open space where unintelligent life is agreeing on whether or not matter doesn't exist?
How dissapointing.
.lla uoy yortsed lliw dna kniht uoy neht resolc era eW
"On one side of the spectrum, you have positive matter. Positive matter makes up everything you know to exist." Yes, but positive and negative matter do not enter into this discussion. This is about positive matter with different charge states. BTW, negative matter is useful for the Albecurrie(sp?) Warp Drive.
Sorry, but there isn't anything new here other than the press release. I am a member of another group that flew the same size balloon on Memorial Day weekend 1999 to look for the same thing -- anti-protons, but at a higher energy (5-50 GeV, instead of the 0.5 to 2.0 GeV that BESS is looking for). For more info, see http://pooh.physics.lsa.umich.edu/www/heat/heat_fu ll.html
now, suppose this: If one of these so-called "Anti-Galaxies" collided with a real galaxy, what would happen, and what would be left?
Richard Feynman proposed that anti-matter was not regular matter with opposite charge, but rather regular matter with the "normal" charge that was travel backwards through time. It comes down to whether you put the minus sign on one side of the equation or the other. This can be described via "Feynman Diagrams". http://www-e815.fnal.gov/~bugel/finema n.html provides an over view and mentions the backward time thing at the end of the page.
(Proud contributor to the teach-a-/.-admin-to-spell foundation)
(Proud contributor to the teach-AN-admin-grammar foundation)
retard
"Yes, Doctor Scott, a laser capable of emitting a beam of pure antimatter!"
Another good book I just started reading-- The Elegant Universe. Superstings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Brian Greene.
Somebody's been watching too much Star Trek. Does everyone who watches Star Trek HAVE to pretend that they're a physicist?
Is the use of the term Anti-Matter just another blunder in our naming convention? Kind of like: liquid crystal or liquid smoke? Also, if we assume that they collect a small amount of Anti- Matter than don t we also assume that there is an equal amount of matter and anti-matter? And if this is the case how can they call anti-matter rare? John A. Kemler
Notice the little "/."? That's pronounced "Slashdot." Think about it.
Unless you go around saying "An Slashdot admin," in which case you'd be "an" fucking idiot.
okay, I'll be the first to admit that I'm clueless when it comes to physics or cosmotology.. My question is.. When anti-matter and matter meet, they cancel each other out, correct? If this is so, how can their be BOTH matter in the galaxy, wouldn't they both cancel each other out? I find it hard to explain exactly what I mean. Perhaps a nice little ASCII picture would help. x=matter o=anti-matter xxxxoooo xxxxoooo xxxxoooo xxxxoooo assume the x's are galaxyA, and the o's are galaxy B. Why wouldn't the x's and o's that touch collide into each other and cancel each other out? And when they do, wouldn't the other 'row' or x's/o's do the same? Is there some type of "barrier" that prevents them from doing just this? Or, another explanation would be that their too far from each other.. if that's the case.. what's in between? If they did collide, wouldn't that produce a chain reaction... ugh.. my head hurts.
The article says that the balloon has a superconducting magnet. This implies that they might be trying to trap the matter via a magnetic field. By trapping it with this field, you get no matter-antimatter contact, and therefore no anihilation.
"Still loving titties..." *duh*
I dont know much about astro-physics, but isn't one of the possible mechanisms for the deep-space gamma ray bursts we detect is matter/anti-matter interactions on a large scale? Now THAT would make a great disaster movie! "Bruce Willis, a giant anti-matter galaxy is heading for ours! We have approximately 5 billion years to stop it from colliding with us!"
Does energy is released when anti-matter contacts matter ? I wonder what would happen if 1 kg of matter crashed onto 1 kg of anti-matter ? Giga-power-full nuclear blast ? What particules would be emitted ?
I like titties more than anti-matter. It's simpler yet more fun. Do you know a unsigned 32bit integer is not big enough to count all of them on planet Earth ? That's fascinating.
On one side of the body, there is one tittie and on the other side there's the corresponding tittie. That's an interessting analogy
Big question: How can NASA collect the antimatter without contacting the balloon (which is made of matter), and cause the subsequent explosions upon contacting the balloon?
This person's comment got moderated down?
So I guess anyone who disagrees with science, the one TRUE religion at Slashdot, is wrong. Anyone who questions the all-knowing Scientists, truly gods among men who know ALL, must be a heretic.
After all, science is the only TRUTH, let's burn anyone who questions it! Our superior logic and reason will wipe out those who refuse to bend over for every wacko physicist that comes along!
This was a good comment, and this is a CLEAR and BLATANT example of moderation abuse. It's neither a troll, flamebait, OR off-topic, it's simply expressing an idea, a BELIEF, that some idiot moderator happened to not agree with.
This is a bloody DISGRACE. I always supported the idea of moderation on Slashdot, and I've moderated before, but this moderation abuse is just SEVERE and unforgiveable. This isn't a matter of marking down a message that had no place in the forum, this is a matter of supressing an unpopular idea -- that science might NOT be right about everything.
Welcome to Fascdot, ladies and gentlemen, and remember: our way or the highway!
Would those be ahpla particles?:)
Would anti-beta particles be ateb particles?
:) :)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
It would be very hard to explain in standard cosmology. The universe was very homogenous--e.g., well mixed -- in its early existance (and we know this pretty confidently because we can take a look at the cosmic microwave background, which is a constant background with fluctuations of only a hundredth of a percent.)
It's hard to reconcile the existance of large chunks of antimatter now with a very well-mixed universe earlier; the antimatter would have annhillated.
(Proud contributor to the teach-AN-admin-grammar foundation)
He didn't say "teach-a-admin", he said "teach-a-slashdot-admin" (exept he used "/." instead of "slashdot".)
The moral? Look before you flame. Or, preferably, don't flame at all.
>According to the laws of physics, there should be an equal amount of anti-matter as there is matter.
Are you sure about this? The last I heard, it was possible that there were some slight asymmetries in the laws of physics which could favour one type of matter over the other. IIRC, it was only a 1-part-per-billion type of effect that would be necessary to make our entire universe be "regular" matter.
As the article said, _if_ this experiment finds anti-helium, it could overturn some of these theories which predict only one variety of matter.
>Also, speaking in theory, shouldn't there be neutral matter?
"Anti"-matter does not just mean electric charge; it is really "-1" of a particle. By this reasoning, a "neutral electron" would be a region of space which contained no electrons or antielectrons. Not a very useful concept. Some scientists have speculated about "exotic" matter with a negative mass, and some theories for wormholes require this sort of matter, but it's never been observed.
i agree...but does that also mean that there could exist anti-people? would there be people in this alternate galaxy that negate us? would their ideals be opposites of ours? then adolf hitler and charles manson and bill gates *grin* would all be saints and mother teresa some sort of demon...
or could the fact that the earth exists here negate itself in an alternate galaxy and not exist there?
Global warming is good for you!
superman and bizzaro...thats exactly what i was thinking...
perhaps this "anti" universe is in fact hell..............*gulp*
Global warming is good for you!
If there are, indeed, entire galaxies composed of anti-matter, than its not exact a "rare" substance, now is it? Its just a little difficult to come by round these parts. :)
Similarly, the vast majority of matter (and/or anti-matter) in the universe is in a plasma state. Being terrestrial, however, we don't bump into plasma very often.
Scientists have been working on this sort of thing for a while. Its still very interesting. I'm not sure if/how the existence of anti-matter galaxies would effect the Big Bang theory. I am but a humble Engineer. Do we have any Physicists in the room?
--Lenny
Stick with Titties. Trust me.
**>>BELCH
So there could concievably be another planet that has intelligent life debating on whether or not matter exists?
:-)
I though the whole deal with anti-matter was that if it came into contact with matter, the two would annihilate each other and release Mc^2 energy? Doesn't sound like such a good idea to go trying to collect something like that, what would you put it in?
Saving random seed...
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On one side of the spectrum, you have positive matter. Positive matter makes up everything you know to exist. (Keep in mind that positive matter can have a negative charge.)
Now, it's been theorized that for every positive type of matter, there must be an exact opposite for each type. Helium to Anti-helium (which has yet to be proven), protons to anti-protons, etc.
Antimatter would be easier to study, but unfortunately, when Matter and Antimatter collide, they annihilate each other producing massive amounts of energy. So if you try to put your pet anti-proton in a mayonaise jar, it won't work.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
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So if I put on my antimatter underwear I could go back in time? Or would it just make gamma stuff and keep me from reproducing?
Hrmmm...I dont wanna be the first to try it.
Also, if theres another me made out of antimatter, he already knows how im going to die, because time gos backwards.. so couldnt I just call him and ask him how the rest of my life is going to work out... and maybe tonights lotto numbers...
*sigh* someone give me a job in a think tank, I cant handle this real world stuff...
symetrix. We are building a religion, a limited edition.
This sounds a little misleading - the press release makes it sound like there's antimatter just out there waiting to be collected - while only anti-protons have actually been found. The mission is to LOOK FOR anti-helium (and why is H skipped?) - so far it's like building an alien landing pad in your corn field - it don't mean they actually exist.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If a "shirt button" amount of anti-matter can launch the space shuttle, then I sure hope this 60 story, 39 million cubic foot balloon doesn't crash...
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"They misunderestimated me." --George W Bush, Nov. 6, 2000
... how you nake "news" out of randomscientific experiment. - Maybe you just put a link to xxx.lanl.gov instead?
Duh.
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
forgot http:// .. in the link?
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Whats wrong with the damn thing - it eats brackets...
forgot http://
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
If you pick up the book Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Gleik's Chaos, Making a New Science (I forget which), you'll see the exact same thing mentioned.
There's actually a rumor floating around that this is being done in conjunction with Italy's version of NASA. The word is that there is an oversupply (hypersupply perhaps) of food in Italy (kinda like the reason we pay some farmers to avoid certain crops). This rush of food into the boot country has created such an uproar in Italy that they have got their space program involved. They're sending a second 30-story high balloon right behind NASA's in search of anti-pasta. They're actually hoping they can prove the existence of anti-ravioli and anti-meatballs.
Did you ever just get into one of those moods...
Apparently, you don't know your Star Trek technobabble. :)
A warp core has a matter injector on one end (deuterium isotope) and an anti-matter injector on the other end (anti-hydrogen, same isotope). In the middle is the reaction chamber where the two streams meet. The dilithium crystal is at the point of the reaction, where a stream of plasma is sent out along conduits. It's not the power source, but rather something that directs the reaction.
Spell Check: balloOn.
Photos of bits of the past hiding in the present: afiler.com
The problem lies in negative energy, which flows backward in time as opposed to our positive energy and our negative but positive anti-matter which flows forward in time
I've never heard of negative energy mentioned anywhere in standard physics texts or articles. There really is no evidence for its existence and I don't think anyone in the community really believes of it except for a few theories that say it may be possible.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Sure there is; it's called ispell, and it works independently or inside emacs + other editors. For "ballon", it suggests:
(0) gallon (1) ball-on (2) ball on (3) ballot (4) balloon
(Proud contributor to the teach-a-/.-admin-to-spell foundation)
Would it be possible that for a anti-world, the anti-matter would be their matter and that we will be anti-matter?
Could this be possible? Are we really in the good (matter) universe?
Just some thoughts; And my bad english doesn't help me explain it...
;-)
You can't "collect" antimatter - at least, not cosmic ray antimatter. It's moving too fast.
The way they determine if it is antimatter is they use a superconducting magnet to curve the particle's path. By measuring the path (via a variety of methods, I don't know what BESS uses) you can determine whether the particle is positive or negative. Then, you also use other techniques such as time of flight analysis, and Cerenkov light produced to determine the mass and energy of the particle.
This has actually been going on since the 1960s. This is simply the newest flight of BESS. The important mission for detecting antimatter in cosmic rays is actually AMS, which is to be placed on the Space Station in a few years. Since in space you don't need to worry about atmospheric background, AMS will (hopefully) be able to see antimatter at a lower level than anything else.
Also: Antihelium that would be detected by this *would* have a charge. The possibility of finding an antihelium atom *not* ionized is *zero*. Not close to zero, just plain zero. (Okay, maybe it's like 10^-100 or something like that. But it's zero.) What they're looking for are anti-alpha particles.
1) Are quasars, with their extremely high outputs of energy, locales of matter/anti-matter interaction?
2) Is this object an anti-matter *star*? If so, it would be fairly rare, since (presumably) most anti-matter objects would have long since been destroyed. And, indeed, it is rare -- no other objects with this spectrum have been found. If it is, moreover, it appears to have an extremely high red-shift factor, indicating great distance/age.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
I wonder what those people who whine about the nuclear-powered Cassini space craft would say if they understood the implications of collecting antimatter: when antimatter comes into contact with matter it annihilates, creating two gamma rays (gamma rays != good).
Luckily for the human race, we currently only have to ability to create and maintain minute amounts of the stuff. Someday, however, I'm sure we'll have anti-anti-matter protestors. Won't that be fun?
would antimatter provide some kind of scientific relation to another dimension?
just another strange thought...
Do your best, hope for the best, suspect the worst.
The article description is a little misleading. Anti-matter isn't really that rare at all, in fact its around all the time as quantum effects cause particle / anti-particle pairs to be created and then destroyed all over the place.
This is in fact how black holes radiate energy, because the anti-particle half of that randomly occuring pairing is sucked in and the particle half goes free.
Well, maybe its only interesting to me.
The anti-matter collecting balloon was unable to launch. They couldn't find any dilithium crystals to power it.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
It's right here on my antishelf in my anticloset in my antibedroom!
antiDonkPunch
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Contrarty to popular belif there are other anti-things too. We have the anti-Dog, who humps his own leg. And we have the anti-Al-Gore who invented the iMAC(although he denies it). We have the anti-Lee-Harvey-Ozwald, who actually DID kill JFK. We have the Anti-Cmdr-Taco, a green thumbed garden lover from wyoming. And of coarse we have the anti-Pitr, who speaks with an english accent and uses Front page to make webpages for Microsoft.
duh.... you use dilithium crystals :)
"We switched the USS Enterprise's usual dilithium crystals with Folgers Crystals. Lets watch....."
Wow, that is like deep and freaky man, but like, dude, I got something even more out there.
Like, imagine this dude who lives in the mirror right. What he would call right, would be what I call left, and what he would call left, would be what I call right.
Deep shit...
Does anybody know if they also try to collect antimatter on their other missions? If matter and anti-matter cannot co-exist (charged protons don't count, anti-helium would not carry a charge) one would think they would have a better chance of finding decent antimatter in deeper space not crowded with matter. Something like putting a cowcatcher on the front of one of their rockets should bring up more interesting stuff than a huge balloon...(so to speak)
Well, I think Bizarro ByTor is probably a Communist politition in the United Soviet States of America while I sit here in Flint Michigan testing Linux software. Muhahahahaha
Wait, how do we know we aren't theh bizarro uses?
I can only say that anti-matter in the classic sense will have an extremely hard time existing along with us. The problem lies in negative energy, which flows backward in time as opposed to our positive energy and our negative but positive anti-matter which flows forward in time. Negative energy (which is always showing up and disappearing (particularly in vacuums) due to its ever changing relationship with its position in time and our universe's position in time) will react with the anti-matter of our universe and in doing so they in effect cancel each other out. We're lucky that we're not made of anti-matter as we'd not exist due to this simple fact. The prospect of finding molecules of anti-matter is extremely slim, as the larger amount of anti-matter you have, the more chance you have of negative energy reacting with your anti-matter, which will immediately destroy any complex structure composed of anti-matter. This completely rules out finding galaxies made of anti-matter. One would think that by now all anti-matter in our universe would be gone, but this of course is wrong. The 'collision' which we've used to create anti-matter is extremely common throughout the universe and therefore, we have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of anti-matter, yet no 'complex' structures comprised of anti-matter.
I am amused and the notion of "collecting" anti-matter. When a positron (that's the electron's anti-matter counterpart) and an electron come in contact, they annhilate one another, producing two 511 KeV photons. So my question is, how do you "collect" antimatter, in our universe, without antimatter and matter annhilating each other before you get a chance to study it?
>>(Proud contributor to the teach-a-/.-admin-to-spell foundation)
> (Proud contributor to the teach-AN-admin-grammar foundation)
>retard
(Proud contributer to the teach a slashdot admin to spell foundation)
therefore: (Proud contributer to the teach a-/.-admin-to-spell foundation)
retard
Unless your a complete gimp...
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Warp speed Mr Sulu! SCI-FI is gradually becoming reality. Wouldn't be surprised if they found a way to convert the anti-matter into a power source. We might be launching anti-matter collectors on a regular basis...
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
According to the laws of physics, there should be an equal amount of anti-matter as there is matter.
There should be anti-galaxies, anti-stars and anti-civilazations (hehehe). Also, when anti-matter and matter collide, they 'cancle out' each other, or they dissapear.
However, I was watching a TV show and it showed that if we could harness the power of anti-matter, it would take about a chunk of anti-matter the size of a shirt pocket button to launch the space shuttle (hmm...no wonder NASA wants to find this stuff).
Also, speaking in theory, shouldn't there be neutral matter? There are protons (positive), electrons (negitive) and neutrons (neutral), anti-electrons (positive), anti-protons (negitive) and anti-neutrons (neutral), why not neutral-matter?
(BTW, I don't know if anybody else noticed this, but, the edge of the atmosphere is a lot higher then 20 miles high)
That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
JM
Big Brother is watching, vote Libertarian!!
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
I always knew Bizzaro World existed.
I wonder what the Bizarro Me is doing at this moment? Probably tanning on a tropical island, drinking margaritas and surounded by beautiful women. While I sit at my desk with coffee and my 54 year old secretary outside my office, in exotic Kalamazoo Michigan.
That Bastard!
The whole concept of antimatter is kinda abstract to me..
"I love titties"
hey when did we (as a race) find anti-matter? and is it anything like the Doctor Who antimatter? that would be quite entertaining.
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"it tastes like burning."
- Ralph (the simpsons.)
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dr. the_messiah "... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way t
If this theorotical anti-universe is true, would this mean there is an identicle me walking around in anti-matter land?