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'Telescope' buried a mile under the Antarctic ice to find source of cosmic rays
Telegraph.co.uk ^
| 18 Oct 2010
| Richard Gray, Science Correspondent
Posted on 10/18/2010 6:44:01 AM PDT by LucyT
A "telescope" buried deep under Antarctic ice has detected the first signals that scientists hope will allow them to identify the source of mysterious particles that bombard Earth from outer space.
For the past ten years scientists have been planning and building an ambitious experiment to explain the mystery of what produces the cosmic rays and elusive particles known as neutrinos, which constantly pepper our planet.
more at Telegraph.co.UK
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
TOPICS: Astronomy; Science
KEYWORDS: antarctic; antarctica; astronomy; catastrophism; climate; cosmicrays; electronneutrino; fourthneutrino; muonneutrino; neutrino; neutrinodetector; neutrinos; science; sterileneutrino; stringtheory; tauneutrino; telescope; xplanets
They have buried thousands of sensors more than a mile below the surface of Antarctica's ice cap to record fleeting flashes of blue light that are given off when these high energy particles and rays collide with atoms in the ice.
1
posted on
10/18/2010 6:44:06 AM PDT
by
LucyT
To: LucyT
But If they buried it how are they supposed to see...?
2
posted on
10/18/2010 6:51:24 AM PDT
by
njslim
To: SunkenCiv; KevinDavis; Fred Nerks; Slings and Arrows; null and void; melancholy
'Telescope' buried a mile under the Antarctic ice to find source of cosmic rays, Ping.
3
posted on
10/18/2010 7:00:31 AM PDT
by
LucyT
To: njslim
A neutrino has a good chance of getting through light-years of solid lead. The “telescope” (actually a neutrino detector) is buried to shield it from other particles.
4
posted on
10/18/2010 7:13:43 AM PDT
by
Slings and Arrows
(You can't have IngSoc without an Emmanuel Goldstein.)
To: LucyT
5
posted on
10/18/2010 7:33:38 AM PDT
by
DManA
To: LucyT
I was at a conference last week with a member of the quality assurance team for this project. He is leaving for the project in a couple of weeks and shared with the group about the conditions at the site and how the sensors were placed in the ice by using a hot water drill. All I can say is I’m glad it is him going and not me — don’t like the cold!
6
posted on
10/18/2010 8:02:20 AM PDT
by
T-Bird45
(It feels like the seventies, and it shouldn't.)
To: LucyT
Cool, I suppose.
How is this going to get me a car that provides 300 MPG, or cure cancer, or (fill in your favorite) - if this was all private money it would be different.
Sorry no science hater, just want something to show for all the dough. Like the Space Station (cue angels singing) - what usable science has come from the many, many billions shot into space?
7
posted on
10/18/2010 9:03:28 AM PDT
by
ASOC
(What are you doing now that Mexico has become OUR Chechnya?)
To: LucyT
Cool, I suppose.
How is this going to get me a car that provides 300 MPG, or cure cancer, or (fill in your favorite) - if this was all private money it would be different.
Sorry no science hater, just want something to show for all the dough. Like the Space Station (cue angels singing) - what usable science has come from the many, many billions shot into space?
8
posted on
10/18/2010 9:03:37 AM PDT
by
ASOC
(What are you doing now that Mexico has become OUR Chechnya?)
To: LucyT; 75thOVI; aimhigh; Alice in Wonderland; AndrewC; aragorn; aristotleman; Avoiding_Sulla; ...
Thanks LucyT, it's a three-list ping topic, nice!
9
posted on
10/18/2010 3:09:53 PM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
To: AdmSmith; bvw; callisto; ckilmer; dandelion; ganeshpuri89; gobucks; KevinDavis; Las Vegas Dave; ...
10
posted on
10/18/2010 3:10:51 PM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
To: KevinDavis; annie laurie; garbageseeker; Knitting A Conundrum; Viking2002; Ernest_at_the_Beach; ...
Thanks LucyT, it's a three-list ping topic.
11
posted on
10/18/2010 3:12:06 PM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
To: Slings and Arrows
The “telescope” (actually a neutrino detector) is buried to shield it from other particles. Your comment is one of the reasons this site is great...
12
posted on
10/18/2010 3:14:41 PM PDT
by
GOPJ
( - - - - - - Your universe: http://primaxstudio.com/stuff/scale_of_universe/)
To: SunkenCiv; LucyT
Well ok; lemme see if I’ve got this right... Aside from the gratuitious reference to climate(which is one of the keywords necessary to assure pulling down some grant bucks), these guys are setting up multi-million dollar toys under the ice to determine where neutrinos etc are coming from. Why? So we can shoot back???
13
posted on
10/18/2010 7:21:42 PM PDT
by
ForGod'sSake
(You have just two choices: SUBMIT or RESIST with everything you've got!)
To: ForGod'sSake
Interesting, it’s actually about the IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Neutrinos are *not* cosmic rays, the writer of the piece doesn’t seem to know that. This is the third or fourth major neutrino detector experiment, the first one was in an old mine tunnel in one of the Dakotas. It didn’t pick up the predicted neutrino stream from the Sun. Next, decades later, the Japanese built one in a tank of amazingly purified water, and that led to results that didn’t nullify the Standard Model, because like the sleight-of-hand masters they are, the results were doctored to make them seem to fit. Somewhere in there was another detection experiment, I think it was it Italy (?). Dunno. And now this one. The problem for these detectors is, the background level of neutrinos — the amount that would be expected from all distant sources — has been all that’s been picked up, whereas the neutrino stream from the Sun should be swamping the detectors, and it isn’t.
14
posted on
10/18/2010 8:30:38 PM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
-
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Astronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2003 August 3 Ice Fishing for Cosmic Neutrinos Credit: Robert Morse (U. Wisconsin) The Amanda II Collaboration Explanation: Scientists are melting holes in the bottom of the world. In fact, several holes have been melted near the South Pole, and they are now being used as astronomical observatories. Astronomers with the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA) lower into each vertical lake a string knotted with basketball-sized...
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A super-powered neutrino generator could in theory be used to instantly destroy nuclear weapons anywhere on the planet, according to a team of Japanese scientists. If it was ever built, a state could use the device to obliterate the nuclear arsenal of its enemy by firing a beam of neutrinos straight through the Earth. But the generator would need to be more than a hundred times more powerful than any existing particle accelerator and over 1000 kilometres wide. "It is really quite futuristic," Alfons Weber, a neutrino scientist at Oxford University, UK, told New Scientist. "But the maths and physics...
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European physicists have sent a neutrino on a 730-kilometre trip under the Earth's crust and taken a snapshot of the instant it slammed into lab detectors... In 2006, CERN started beaming neutrinos from its accelerator complex near Geneva, and have so far detected several hundred impacts in San Grasso. But the scientists have now taken the venture a step forward by starting to fill the San Grasso detector with small film plates which measure with high accuracy the cascade of particles that are produced when a neutrino impacts. These plates, called bricks, are each made of a sandwich of lead...
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Using a delicate instrument located under a mountain in central Italy, two University of Massachusetts Amherst physicists are measuring some of the faintest and rarest particles ever detected, geo-neutrinos, with the greatest precision yet achieved. The data reveal, for the first time, a well defined signal, above background noise, of the extremely rare geo-neutrino particle from deep within Earth. The small number of anti-neutrinos detected, however, only a couple each month, helps to settle a long-standing question among geophysicists and geologists about whether our planet harbors a huge, natural nuclear reactor at its core. Geo-neutrinos are anti-neutrinos produced in the...
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Research scientists announced on Monday they had identified the missing piece of a major puzzle involving the make-up of the universe by observing a neutrino particle change from one type to another. Science The CERN physics research center near Geneva, relaying the announcement from the Gran Sasso laboratory in central Italy, said the breakthrough was a major boost for its own LHC particle collider programme to unveil key secrets of the cosmos. According to physicists at Gran Sasso, after three years of monitoring multiple billions of muon neutrinos beamed to them through the earth from CERN 730 kms (456 miles)...
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The 120 lead ingots, each weighing about 33 kilograms, come from a larger load recovered 20 years ago from a Roman shipwreck, the remains of a vessel that sank between 80 B.C. and 50 B.C. off the coast of Sardinia. As a testimony to the extent of ancient Rome's manufacturing and trading capacities, the ingots are of great value to archaeologists, who have been preserving and studying them at the National Archaeological Museum in Cagliari, southern Sardinia. What makes the ingots equally valuable to physicists is the fact that over the past 2,000 years their lead has almost completely lost...
15
posted on
10/18/2010 8:32:50 PM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
To: SunkenCiv
The problem for these detectors is, the background level of neutrinos — the amount that would be expected from all distant sources — has been all that’s been picked up, whereas the neutrino stream from the Sun should be swamping the detectors, and it isn’t.AHA!!!
~snip~snip~
From these experiments, and the Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande neutrino detectors in Japan, the consensus has developed in the scientific community that the reason for the observed deficit of solar neutrinos is that the neutrinos “oscillate”. In other words, the electron-flavor neutrinos that are produced in beta-decay processes in nuclear reactions in the solar interior can be transformed into the other two known neutrino flavors, those of the muon-neutrino and the tau-neutrino. These neutrinos are not produced in the sun’s nuclear reactions. In this scenario, the measured solar neutrino flux is artificially low since these other neutrino flavors are not readily observed by most neutrino detectors, and certainly not at all by the radiochemical neutrino detectors. Note that for this process to occur requires that at least one of the neutrino types must have non-zero rest mass. Since the current Standard Electroweak Model carries the assumption of massless neutrinos, proof of the existence of neutrino mass would be a major new discovery, leading to major changes in the theory – what has been dubbed “New Physics”.
Whoa, I wonder if "New Physics" is anything like "New Math"? And what's your favorite neutrino flavor??? Me, I'm partial to chocolate but I didn't see it on the list. So, apparently these expensive toys are picking up solar neutrinos but not nearly what they expected, that is to say, the results were "unexpected". Imagine that. They coulda been Dim journalists. So, they're discovering
something. And I suppose at some point there may actually be some useful results derived from all this target practice? Like maybe they'll discover white dwarfs or red giants or quasars(supernovae?) produce many times more
proper neutrinos than yer garden variety yellowish star? They'd have something then -- wouldn't they???
I dunno Civ, it just seems to me that's some awfully expensive playtime that may ultimately produce nothing of any practical value. But you and I both know I could be wrong about that, eh?
16
posted on
10/18/2010 9:21:07 PM PDT
by
ForGod'sSake
(You have just two choices: SUBMIT or RESIST with everything you've got!)
To: GOPJ
Hey, us Tinfoil Hat Brigaders have to know our cosmic rays!
17
posted on
10/18/2010 9:52:42 PM PDT
by
Slings and Arrows
(You can't have IngSoc without an Emmanuel Goldstein.)
To: ForGod'sSake
yup. Here's a 2004 topic from Patrick Henry (physicist I think, banned now):
Here's a relevant reprise:
Ernest Lawrence, a pure experimentalist... said, "Don't you worry about it -- the theorists will find a way to make them all the same." -- Alvarez by Luis Alvarez (page 184)
I must reiterate my feeling that experimentalists always welcome the suggestions of the theorists. But the present situation is ridiculous... In my considered opinion the peer review system, in which proposals rather than proposers are reviewed, is the greatest disaster to be visited upon the scientific community in this century. No group of peers would have approved my building the 72-inch bubble chamber. Even Ernest Lawrence told me that he thought I was making a big mistake. He supported me because my track record was good. I believe U.S. science could recover from the stultifying effects of decades of misguided peer reviewing if we returned to the tried-and-true method of evaluating experimenters rather than experimental proposals. Many people will say that my ideas are elitist, and I certainly agree. The alternative is the egalitarianism that we now practice and that I've seen nearly kill basic science in the USSR and in the People's Republic of China. -- ibid (pp 200-201)
18
posted on
10/19/2010 11:13:36 AM PDT
by
SunkenCiv
(The 2nd Amendment follows right behind the 1st because some people are hard of hearing.)
To: SunkenCiv
Great old thread you linked. To be sure, many of the
old scientists are gone from FR; a shame really but IMHO they mostly brought it on themselves. While believers seem willing to cede some turf to the "scientific method", athiests are unwilling to cede ANYTHING to believers. Irresistable force meeting immovable object is always good for some fireworks but JR found the fireworks were becoming way too raucous AND rancorous apparently.
Seem to recall reading that opinion by Alvarez before. I think with rare exceptions he had it exactly bass-awkards. The Cult of Personality ain't no way to run a railroad either. Anyhow, wasn't Alvarez a bit full of himself???
19
posted on
10/19/2010 1:05:41 PM PDT
by
ForGod'sSake
(You have just two choices: SUBMIT or RESIST with everything you've got!)
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