Antarctic Experiment Finds Puzzling Distribution of Cosmic Rays 119
pitchpipe writes "A puzzling pattern in the cosmic rays bombarding Earth from space has been discovered by an experiment buried deep under the ice of Antarctica. ... It turns out these particles are not arriving uniformly from all directions. The new study detected an overabundance of cosmic rays coming from one part of the sky, and a lack of cosmic rays coming from another." The map of this uneven distribution comes from the IceCube neutrino observatory last mentioned several days ago.
Re:Huzzah! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Interplanetary Magnietic Field Lines? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Earth's magnetic field is well mapped. The physicists will already have taken it into consideration.
Re:Is it the Earths magnetic field? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Correlation with Magnetic Poles? (Score:2, Insightful)
Except that the detector is for detecting neutrinos. They have no charge. Not only that but they are not expected to interact with the earth's magnetic fields according to the current theory. If only there were some sort of "article" that might have this kind of information in a form that is easy to "read" with a convenient "hyper-link" to lead us to it.
Sheesh... if only we had some sort of "moderators" who might understand this. "interesting" my ass.
Re:Is it the Earths magnetic field? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm happy that it was phrased in the form of a question. Too often, the reaction to a bit of science that somebody doesn't wish to believe is simply rejection of it, perhaps combined with unsourced assertions (or assertions to un-peer-reviewed sources).
You don't have to know everything in science. There's too much to know. Ignorance is fine, as long as you're (a) aware of it, (b) curious, and (c) not going to fight against those who do know it.
Re:Is it the Earths magnetic field? (Score:4, Insightful)
The sun and the moon together cover less than 1/100,000th of the sky.
Really? so you are saying the universe is flat, and the earth is off in a corner where nothing but the sun and moon are around it?
Is the sky flat where you live?
"and no matter which direction we go, we are going to hit some "celestial" body."
Nope, space is pretty much just space. Galaxies commonly collide with each other but the stars within those collisions very rarely smash into each other. It's not that there is any shortage of celestial bodies it's just that space is really, really, big.
There's also the fact that ALL of the celestial bodies are contained within the microwave background, so why is it that we can see the microwave background if every direction is obscured with a celestial body?
Re:Huzzah! (Score:1, Insightful)
i'm sick of people saying there's no center.
if you freeze time, every single piece of matter in the universe will be fixed in a single position. every single piece of matter can be 'reached' from every other piece of matter, though you'd have to travel for billions of years to get to some (remember time has stopped, so inflation has ceased). thus, every piece of matter could be given an xyz coordinate relative to the first piece of matter you decide to start measuring from.
you plot every xyz coordinate of every piece of matter in the universe. you will end up with a shape, no matter how odd it looks (donut, blob, square, pyramid, who cares). that shape has a center, which is the average of all xyz coordinates.
deal with it.
Re:Huzzah! (Score:1, Insightful)
jesus christ. either there is finite matter in the universe or there isn't. either at a single slice of time every piece of matter is in a fixed location or it isn't.
got a problem with that? there's a finite number of atoms in the universe, and they occupy a given point in space at a single planck interval of time? are either of those too hard for you to accept?
you can trace a line between every atom in the universe and every other atom in the universe. the length of those lines is irrelevant.
if you think the average of a set of numbers can be outside the minimum and maximum of that set, you're an idiot.