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posted by janrinok on Friday February 16 2018, @08:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the catchy-name dept.

Dark matter, neutrinos and tachyons in the same abstract? Oh yes:

According to conventional wisdom the 5-hour early Mont Blanc burst probably was not associated with SN 1987A, but if it was genuine, some exotic physics explanation had to be responsible. Here we consider one truly exotic explanation, namely faster-than-light neutrinos having sourcemν2=−0.38keV2. It is shown that the Mont Blanc burst is consistent with the distinctive signature of that explanation i.e., an 8 MeV antineutrino line from SN 1987A. It is further shown that a model of core collapse supernovae involving dark matter particles of mass 8 MeV would in fact yield an 8 MeV antineutrino line

Journal paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0927650517303341
arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.00488v8


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Saturday February 17 2018, @04:38AM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday February 17 2018, @04:38AM (#639212)

    Classic particle physics detection.

    Nobody ever seen a mass XYZ particle, but you see weird things in graphs of stuff (quantity, mostly) vs energy.

    If you make a wall out of concrete and shoot an anti-tank round thru it you'll get a waste particle size graph thats mostly smooth-ish statistically.

    if you make a wall out of standard bricks and shoot an anti-tank round thru it you'll get a waste particle size graph with some ground up junk but also crazy spike at standard brick size.

    Nobody ever saw a brick, certainly not in a wall, but all the theory points to the wall being made of standard bricks in the latter.

    Likewise this game is theory predicts a crazy bump in the energy graph at 8.12345678 MeV if tachyons exist and look at that weird bump in the energy graph at 8.12345678 MeV... Nobody never saw nothing but it sure is one heck of a correlation.

    Personally tachyons are so weird that I don't think they exist but there's some numerology of a currently unknown system that happens to match the predicted value of the unlikely particle. Imagine developing a rather elaborate theory of "thunder is greek gods playing bowling with the stars" complete with a pretty realistic theory of acoustics (see the lightning, count by fives to get miles distant until thunder) and yes the "gods gone bowling" is all ridiculous but that doesn't mean the perfectly accurate acoustics stuff is wrong, it was just misapplied.

    If we're allowed to throw out crazy but cool ideas, it was some kind of binary star system gone wild where star 1 went bang behind star 2 (what are the odds?) and a couple light hours later the explosion from star 1 reached and set off star 2 and we're all thinking there was only one when we only see star 2, but certainly there was a star 1 and star 2.

    If you want hollywood script material, SN1987A was a SETI experiment gone wrong along the lines of getting a telegram from space "smack two heavy spheres of uranium metal together for a good time" as a method of keeping overly gullible young civilizations from screwing up the galactic empire. So they got the instructions to build a really nice dyson sphere or fusion reactor out of a SETI reception but its actually instructions to motivate gullible civilizations to blow up their star.

    OR another idea I've often proposed is intergalactic trolling as a form of SETI. We can generate cheap bright signals of weirdness so lets F with an entire galaxy of normies. We as humans could do it today by dumping weird isotopes into the sun, if I recall correctly. We could waste trillions of green-space-alien astronomer phd student research hours over millions of years, fairly cheaply, merely by tossing radioactive trash into the sun to get rid of it. If /pol/ or /b/ ever gets hold of a dyson sphere or even a small fraction of a dyson sphere, this kinda stuff is gonna happen, ya know.

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