A Renewable Source of Antimatter Found

TUE AUG 09, 2011 AT 01:47 PM PDT
A Renewable Source of Antimatter Found
bySomething the Dog SaidforSciTech

So, you want a nice easy source of antimatter? Not a problem it seems. In an article that will be published in the August 20th edition of Astrophysical Journal Letters http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.4882v1.pdf a team from Europe is going to announce that they have found a significant number of antiprotons trapped in the Earths magnetic field.

There has been a theory that predicts that high energy particles, commonly called Cosmic Rays, hit the upper atmosphere and hammer apart atoms there. Depending on the energy they can cause what is called Paired Production. This is where the impact energy of the Comic Ray particle is high enough to cause a nucleus to split into two protons, one with a positive charge and one with a negative charge. The negatively charged proton is antimatter.

Most of the time these particles fall into each other right away and destroy each other in a brief flash. But in the magnetosphere the field lines tend to separate the particles and they don’t immediately annihilate in a mass energy conversion.

This theory was tested, and apparently proved right by the PAMELA experiment. PAMELA stands for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics. It was launched in 2006 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

It gathered data for 850 days and now that data has been scrupulously analyzed. The most abundant area of antiprotons is in the South Atlantic Anomaly. That is at once the spot where the Van Allen Radiation belts come closest to the Earth and the weakest place in our magnetic field.

the rest:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/09/1005078/-A-Renewable-Source-of-Antimatter-Found-?via=siderec
PDF:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.4882v1.pdf

:woohoo:

"All told, we are talking about maybe a few nanograms of antiprotons in the entire space between the two Van Allen belts! You could collect it all -- draining the region between the Van Allen belts of antiprotons -- and it would contain about as much total energy as your car battery."

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2011/08/why_the_earth_wears_an_antimat.php?utm_source=networkbanner&utm_medium=link

Typical of today's journalism.

Details!!!


I Need Details!!!!!

Not going to happen. How do I know this?

Because all the atom-smashing that goes on in the LHC happens in the high ionosphere all the time, and has happened for billions of years. If there was the remote possibility of particle colliding causing Earth to be eaten by a black hole, it would have happened already.