Origin of Cosmic Rays Confirmed 155
cats-paw writes in with news of research that seems to confirm and support current theories of how cosmic rays are created. The prevailing thinking has been that cosmic rays are generated in the regions where supernovas' shock waves interact with the interstellar medium. The new research used the variability in X-ray emissions from a supernova remnant to estimate the strength of the magnetic fields present in that environment. The results lend support to the possibility of protons and nucleii being accelerated in supernova remnants to energies of 1 PeV (10^15 eV) and beyond. Here is the abstract from Nature.
Re:When I punch 10^15 eV into Google... (Score:3, Interesting)
6x10^20 J. That, amazingly, equals the total enery production on earth in one year. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption [wikipedia.org]
Re:[OT] Nitpicking summary (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Summary incorrect... (Score:4, Interesting)
Additionally, the abstract says their research "provide[s] a strong argument" for a theory. I suppose these statements are way too hard-line for Real Science. Sheesh. These are people who know very well they're doing inference rather than deduction - including the submitter! - and you take them to task for jumping to conclusions.
You say:
The hypothesize/predict/experiment cycle isn't nearly as boolean as you make it out, even though we teach it that way in school.
If a result doesn't disprove a theory, it actually increases its probability among other possibilities. Bayesian statistics models this quite well, and scientists think about it that way but without such a rigorous foundation. For example, in all forces, we've measured the differential relationships among position, velocity and acceleration to ridiculous precision. Doesn't this increase the probability that we've got it right? In this area, if there's a conflict between predicted and expected outcomes, we regard the explanation that the theory is wrong as the less probable one - much less probable.
Part of the problem is classical statistics. Null hypotheses and tests against them are kludgy nonsense, everyone knows it, and everyone has their own way of doing it "properly". (Think about it this way: Pr(null hypothesis), where the null hypothesis has a continuous component - and this is done all the time - is ZERO.) Doing inference without priors is a misguided attempt at objectivity. These mindsets are well-preserved in scientific philosophy, and they've got to go. Nobody actually thinks about real inference the classical way. It'd be ridiculous to try it on any hypothesis of moderate complexity.
Oh My God Particle (Score:2, Interesting)
The poster child of uber-freaked out cosmic rays is a crazy bugger [wikipedia.org] detected in 1991 that had an energy of 3.2 x 10^20 eV. One scientist compared it to dropping a brick on your toe! Cosmic rays with this much energy are too enegetic to fit the supernova shock wave model nicely. They might come from gamma ray bursts or black holes on a feeding frenzy.
Re:[OT] Nitpicking summary (Score:1, Interesting)
For instance, a relatively low density plasma can support a weak electric field. Consistent with this, a low amplitude (positive) electric field can extend from the Sun's corona. This would result from the Sun being at a higher voltage level than is distant space beyond the heliopause. One can make a good case that the outward force on positive ions due to this electric field causes the observed acceleration of +ions in the solar wind.
It's interesting that astrophysicists would propose that supernovae are the only mechanism for accelerating cosmic rays when they have yet to establish a believable mechanism within their own models for how the solar wind continues to be accelerated even as it passes the planets. The notion that cosmic rays are in fact the solar winds of other larger stars, whose electric fields would dwarf our own Sun's electric field, is only dismissed because it is irrelevant to the popular models. But by not considering such possibilities within a fair framework of alternative cosmologies, the mainstream astrophysicists fail to take advantage of an opportunity to rigorously compare and contrast the various stellar models. What we get instead is a consideration of only a limited set of possibilities to begin with based upon a dramatic assumption that the current stellar theories are without fault. This constrained set of possibilities improves our understanding of the popular theories, but it would be false to assert that this selective consideration of possibilities is rigorous.
I'd love to hear why I might be wrong on this.
Olbers Anti-Paradox? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:[OT] Nitpicking summary (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe I'm wasting my time. It seems clear that "alternative cosmologies" means the electric universe theory, which doesn't make any useful, testable predictions.