PAMELA Spacecraft Finds a Belt of ANTIMATTER Around the Earth

Okay, first I will admit I am not that versed in science, but I am still fascinated with the discoveries and theories and I would love to run this one through the ATS mill for some feedback. Isn't this pretty revolutionary? My understanding(or lack of) was that anti matter was still theoretical.

You probably didn’t wake up this morning wondering what happens to the antiprotons that must be created by the collision of cosmic rays with the upper atmosphere. But if you are one of the few who loses sleep over the fact that these antiprotons should be somewhere out there but have yet to be directly detected, we are happy to report that you can rest easy: Astrophysicists have finally found them trapped in an antiproton belt around the Earth.

So what does this mean exactly? What type of innovations may come from this? Will it shatter any existing paradigms?

Enter PAMELA, a low Earth orbiting spacecraft launched in 2006 to seek out antiprotons in cosmic rays. Each day PAMELA makes a pass through the South Atlantic Anomaly, the part of the Van Allen Belts that come closest to the Earth and a sort of tide pool for energetic particles. If the antiprotons are collecting anywhere, they ought to be here.
And now, after analyzing 850 days of data, it turns out they are. PAMELA tracked down exactly 28 of them, which is actually way more than one might expect to find blowing in the solar wind. In other words, antiprotons are being captured and stored there. Solid scientific theory (and high-tech orbiting hardware) wins again.

www.popsci.com...
So only 28 and they increase in numbers closer to the earth. Meaning?

From a related article:

The Earth is constantly bombarded by high energy particles called cosmic rays. These are generated by the Sun and by other sources further afield. (The source of the highest energy cosmic rays is still a mystery).

The particles are generally protons, electrons and helium nuclei and when they collide with nuclei in the Earth's upper atmosphere they can produce showers of daughter particles. These showers can be so extensive that they can easily be observed from the ground.

Astronomers long ago realised that these collisions must produce antiprotons, just as they do in particle accelerators on Earth. But this raises an interesting question: what happens to the antiprotons after they are created?

Clearly, many of these antiparticles must be annihilated when they meet particles of ordinary matter. But some astronomers always suspected that the remaining antiprotons must become trapped by the Earth's magnetic field, forming an antiproton radiation belt.

www.technologyreview.com...
More here:

The existence of a significant flux of antiprotons confined to Earth's magnetosphere has been considered in several theoretical works. These antiparticles are produced in nuclear interactions of energetic cosmic rays with the terrestrial atmosphere and accumulate in the geomagnetic field at altitudes of several hundred kilometers. A contribution from the decay of albedo antineutrons has been hypothesized in analogy to proton production by neutron decay, which constitutes the main source of trapped protons at energies above some tens of MeV. This Letter reports the discovery of an antiproton radiation belt around the Earth. The trapped antiproton energy spectrum in the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) region has been measured by the PAMELA experiment for the kinetic energy range 60--750 MeV. A measurement of the atmospheric sub-cutoff antiproton spectrum outside the radiation belts is also reported. PAMELA data show that the magnetospheric antiproton flux in the SAA exceeds the cosmic-ray antiproton flux by three orders of magnitude at the present solar minimum, and exceeds the sub-cutoff antiproton flux outside radiation belts by four orders of magnitude, constituting the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth.

arxiv.org...
Thoughts and postulations? Pardon my lack of input, but I still want to learn.

Peace,
spec

Lies, anti matter can only be detected in hadron colliders at this point in time. Anti-matter was only recently discovered to actually exist just a few months ago. Anyone can upload a graph and say "this line means its anti-matter" doesnt mean its true.

A thought that popped into my head while reading the article, could this possibly explain the hole in the magnetosphere that they are reporting? After all, anti matter when mixed with matter anihalates each other so could it be possible that this antimatter belt is interacting with the magnetosphere in some way not understood yet? I mean, we still don't really understand magnetics, gravity, let alone antimatter so why is it not possible?

I'd say thats what the military is doing with their X-37 shuttle thing or whatever the numerical name for their secret shuttle..They might be out there trying to collect antimatter for new propulsion engines...I dont know how they could trap the antimatter in space but I know scientists just made it public that they found a way to store antimatter with magnets or something like that....or its just something really cool and new that we shoulda new for a long time..

I'd say thats what the military is doing with their X-37 shuttle thing or whatever the numerical name for their secret shuttle..They might be out there trying to collect antimatter for new propulsion engines...I dont know how they could trap the antimatter in space but I know scientists just made it public that they found a way to store antimatter with magnets or something like that....or its just something really cool and new that we shoulda new for a long time..

reply to post by lonewolf19792000


but with the observations made at the hadron collider, imo would give them credence to speculate on the corroborated data they have observed through PAMELA no?

I too am fascinated by new scientific observations and theories - many say we "discovered" a "new" particle coming from the sun just a year or so ago. I am looking forward to our ATS physics and science experts to weigh in on this, and thank you for your post. S&F

reply to post by lonewolf19792000

Lies, anti matter can only be detected in hadron colliders at this point in time. Anti-matter was only recently discovered to actually exist just a few months ago. Anyone can upload a graph and say "this line means its anti-matter" doesnt mean its true.

But why would Pop Sci put it up? Wouldn't the scientific community condemn this? Just curious, thanks for the reply.

reply to post by Techata

Good points Techata, and I wonder too which is cause and which is effect.
Thanks for the comment.

reply to post by NewsWorthy

Could be, and if this is such a valuable discovery, would there not be efforts to stake claims and rights to it? It's a shame something like this may not be shared and collectively worked on, but if it has value it seems someone will try to obtain exclusiveness. Or I could be dead wrong because no one can claim particles, can they?
Thanks for the reply..

Originally posted by lonewolf19792000
Lies, anti matter can only be detected in hadron colliders at this point in time. Anti-matter was only recently discovered to actually exist just a few months ago. Anyone can upload a graph and say "this line means its anti-matter" doesnt mean its true.

So all those PET scanners out there in the world are all fakes.
Right.

Positron emission tomography

reply to post by lonewolf19792000

Antimatter has been observed and created for some time.
Perhaps you are referring to the recent work in collecting and holding antimatter.
articles.cnn.com...:WORLD

reply to post by speculativeoptimist


We've known antimatter exists for a while now. It was first predicted by the Dirac equation, in 1928, and antimatter was first observationally confirmed 4 years later, in 1932.
We produce antimatter all the time in particle colliders, but there are no better particle colliders in this universe than the ones produced by nature. In this case, collisions involving highly energetic cosmic radiation in the atmosphere were predicted to form some amount of antimatter. According to the article, this antimatter has now been observed...in a belt around the Earth.

The discovery changes nothing... it shatters no paradigms, it rewrites no textbooks. It's just the answer to the question "Where is the antimatter we should be seeing in the upper atmosphere?" That's all.

reply to post by speculativeoptimist


To me natural cause and devastating effect, for us. Could be a totally natural process in which a planet flourishes through the first few billion years, and like any other organism has an end time. Could be what happened to mars, being that it is a lot further out from the sun, hence, cooled a heck of a lot quicker which caused magnetosphere to degenerate or age if you will to the point of dissipation. i have said this in another post, we are but mere seconds at the end of the day, on a universal clock. We in now way can say with absolute certainty that we really understand how these cosmic relations work.

Oh, great... an "anti-matter belt." I'm just glad that certain people only read their own thread.
Line 2.

I wonder if this is related to the strange pixies and sprites they have photographed in the upper atmosphere? Extremely powerful discharges of energy into space... perhaps this is the source of that energy?

Antimatter is created by thunderstorms. See www.space.com...

Not much antimatter, but created by a perfectly natural process.

If we could find a renewable natural source of antimater it would among other things allow humanity to become a space fairing race. Could also provide earth with energy if satelites could be equiped with the ability to capture store and use the antimater to create energy.

reply to post by pierogie

Fascinating pierogie, thanks for the link

Scientists picked up on the never-before-seen phenomenon by peering at thunderstorms with NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The antimatter particles were likely created by what scientists call a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst of gamma rays produced inside thunderstorms and known to be associated with lightning, researchers said.

"These signals are the first direct evidence that thunderstorms make antimatter particle beams," study lead author Michael Briggs, of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said in a statement. Briggs presented his team's results here today (Jan. 10) at the 217th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

TGF, cool stuff I was unaware of, and if it is accurate, it may suggest some of the cause in the belt is terrestrial.

Peace,
spec

Its just protection...
Be well