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.
Huzzah! (Score:4, Interesting)
Unfortunately i'm sure there's a much more mundane explanation for the phenomenon which they will eventually discover.
Re:Huzzah! (Score:5, Interesting)
This universal reference exists and is known by scientists, google for cosmic microwave dipole [google.com].
Our galaxy is moving at 627 km/s in relation to the microwave background radiation of the universe, which is the nearest direct effect of the Big Bang that we can observe.
Re:Here's a thought (Score:1, Interesting)
Okay...so Armageddon is this-a-way?
This proves the stars are not evenly distributed? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is it the Earths magnetic field? (Score:1, Interesting)
... that should, of course, be "the _less_ solar activity, the more cosmic rays"
This is one of the good-fit hypothesises with regards to so-called "global warming". Less active sun = more cosmic rays = more clouds = less heat.
The warming would then come from the combined effects of the solar cycles in the latter part of the 20th century which were the strongest in recorded history. The difference from currently debunked solar theories is that it's not the TSI (visible solar output) that effects the climate, but the strength of the cosmic ray deflection.
Re:Huzzah! (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine the same problem in a universe with three dimensions that's curved in a fourth dimension and you will understand a bit of what general relativity is all about.
More like a pseudo-understanding. It's a bad analogy. The fourth dimension is not spatial. It's temporal [wikipedia.org]. It was mathematically convenient to place time on the graph simultaneously. It also happens to reflect what special relativity indicates is the reality: that space and time are not independent. However time is not really the fourth dimension in the way that people usually think of it, in the way that a tesseract [wikipedia.org] is a four dimensional object, an object that can only be correctly measured using 4 spatial dimensions or axes. This is a very common misconception that unfortunately science fiction has not helped. It is more like a convenient graph of 4 different parameters And again it reflects the reality that our naive idea of independent time is an illusion. The bowling ball and marbles on a rubber mat (to represent a solar system) analogy is also flawed because it tends to make us treat time as a spatial axis. While a great deal of special relativity can be understood intuitively, Minkowski space can only really be understood mathematically. All of the analogies are really hopeless. Our brains are simply not currently wired to understand time as a fourth axis, no matter how elegant and beautiful it makes the equations.