Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
New findings published this week in Physical Review Letters suggest that carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen cosmic rays travel through the galaxy toward Earth in a similar way, but, surprisingly, that iron arrives at Earth differently. Learning more about how cosmic rays move through the galaxy helps address a fundamental, lingering question in astrophysics: How is matter generated and distributed across the universe?
"So what does this finding mean?" asks John Krizmanic, a senior scientist with UMBC's Center for Space Science and Technology (CSST). "These are indicators of something interesting happening. And what that something interesting is we're going to have to see."
Cosmic rays are atomic nuclei—atoms stripped of their electrons—that are constantly whizzing through space at nearly the speed of light. They enter Earth's atmosphere at extremely high energies. Information about these cosmic rays can give scientists clues about where they came from in the galaxy and what kind of event generated them.
[...] Iron is a particularly useful element to analyze, explains Cannady, a postdoc with CSST and a former Ph.D. student with Cherry at LSU. On their way to Earth, cosmic rays can break down into secondary particles, and it can be hard to distinguish between original particles ejected from a source (like a supernova) and secondary particles. That complicates deductions about where the particles originally came from.
"As things interact on their way to us, then you'll get essentially conversions from one element to another," Cannady says. "Iron is unique, in that being one of the heaviest things that can be synthesized in regular stellar evolution, we're pretty certain that it is pretty much all primary cosmic rays. It's the only pure primary cosmic ray, where with others you'll have some secondary components feeding into that as well."
[...] "We didn't expect that the nuclei—the carbon, oxygen, protons, iron—would really start showing some of these detailed differences that are clearly pointing at things we don't know," Cherry says.
The latest finding creates more questions than it answers, emphasizing that there is still more to learn about how matter is generated and moves around the galaxy. "That's a fundamental question: How do you make matter?" Krizmanic says. But, he adds, "That's the whole point of why we went in this business, to try to understand more about how the universe works."
Journal Reference:
O. Adriani et al. Measurement of the Iron Spectrum in Cosmic Rays from 10 GeV/n to 2.0 TeV/n with the Calorimetric Electron Telescope on the International Space Station [open], Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.241101)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20 2021, @07:48PM (3 children)
Kindergarten: iron is heavier, so it falls faster. Sheesh.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20 2021, @07:56PM (2 children)
Modern physics: iron contains more dark matter, so it falls faster.
(Score: 2, Funny) by TheMightyChickadee on Sunday June 20 2021, @08:32PM (1 child)
Iron
stealsshares electrons with oxygen, so it is written in Rust, so it falls faster.(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20 2021, @09:20PM
Ah, but Rust is much less error prone, so they say, so why would it fall at all?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Sunday June 20 2021, @10:38PM (1 child)
Materialization is a huge taboo in laplacian physics for last two or three centuries at least, why sudden paradigm change in mainstream thinking?
Well, if I wanted to materialize something, I'd look into some old or very old books first and start with ether...
https://archive.org/details/anattempttoward00mendgoog [archive.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splendor_Solis [wikipedia.org]
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 20 2021, @11:23PM
Get some energy and divide it up like this: m = E / C^2
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday June 21 2021, @12:36AM (2 children)
What about quantum? And, what about dark matter? And, the real killer, what about quantum dark matter? Or, quantum dark anti-matter? I suppose at that point, you've crossed over into metaphysics, and you're dining with the angels. Or, dancing with the angels, on the head of a pin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @01:27AM (1 child)
All the sarcasm, and yet... what is reality?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 22 2021, @03:22PM
If I recall correctly, Stephen Hawking thought that the transformations into "imaginary time" created a universe that made more sense than our own. He hypothesized that, perhaps, THAT version of time and space was the "real" version and what we experience is actually "imaginary time" (the transformation was apparently symmetrical, so which one was "imaginary" was subjective).
Also, before people go off on how crazy this is, the "imaginary" time transformation has to do with complex numbers (I think the transformation is just complex conjugation) so this isn't some "we'll just call it dark matter" situation. "Imaginary time" is a well defined idea to make computation simpler, like Fourier transforms.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday June 21 2021, @01:36AM
My theory was so smooth, now it’s all wrinkled! Time to get the iron out!
sorry...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 21 2021, @01:44AM
Things that we "accept" like background noise are the signal of the future. From the future. They're communicating with us.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday June 21 2021, @10:44AM (1 child)
And is it I-ron or I-yrn?
I know people swearing it is I-yrn but say "I-ron Man"
I grew up with I-ron....
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday June 21 2021, @03:41PM
'r's sometimes do jump from one side of a vowel to the other side. Just the way some languages evolve.