Why look for antimatter in the Antarctic?

--------- #1303 - Why Look for Antimatter in the Antarctic?

- The Earth is spinning. In Santa Rosa were are moving on the surface of Earth directly east at 700 miles per hour. If we were standing on the equator we would be moving east at 1038 miles per hour. We do not feel it because everything else is moving with us at the same speed. Constant velocity is natural motion. It takes no force to maintain it. It does take a force to speed it up or slow it down. Force = mass * acceleration. But what about the South Pole. If you were standing there your belt buckle would take 24 hours to make one complete revolution. Your belt buckle would be traveling 0.00005 miles per hour.

- Someone came up with the idea that would be a great place to launch a balloon. The temperature is constant, very cold. During the summer there is continuous daylight so there is no temperature variation between night and day. The winds are nearly constant and continuous rotating counterclockwise at an altitude of 20 miles. Stratospheric balloons can reach these altitudes and circle the South Pole in 3 weeks returning to their same spot to release a payload.

- When the balloon passes overhead 3 weeks later a radio controlled explosion severs the balloon from its payload and a giant parachute returns the payload to Earth. In the case of the balloon carrying the superconducting spectrometer experiment the payload is 6,000 pounds. The balloon itself weighs 5,300 pounds. It too is retrieved after it plummets to Earth.

- What does putting a superconducting spectrometer 20 miles above the Antarctic hope to accomplish? The experiment is designed to help solve the mystery, “ Why is there more matter than antimatter in the Universe? The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of each. If the two come together they immediately annihilate each other in a flash of Gamma Rays. The Universe we know is all matter. What happened to the anti-matter?”

- The high altitude detectors are designed to measure the high energy particles hitting our planet coming from outer space. Could some of these particles be anti-matter particles? If so, maybe there are stars out there that are totally made of anti-matter. Maybe entire galaxies could be made entirely of anti-matter. There is no way we could detect the difference until matter and anti-matter came together.

- The superconducting spectrometer carried a huge superconducting magnet. When cosmic rays entered the magnetic field some 120,000 feet altitude the particles path would be bent or curved depending on the charge, weight, and velocity of each particle. Negative charges would curve one way as they entered the magnetic field. Positive charges would curve the opposite way. Anti-protons are 1,836 times heavier than electrons so they would not curve as much. But, how much the paths curve also depends on the velocity of the particles. Therefore a second detector surrounding the super magnetic made of plastic scintillators which detect Cherenkov light measure the velocity as the particles zip through. These scintillators can measure velocity to one tenth of a billionth of a second. That is the time it takes light in a vacuum to travel the distance of 3 centimeters.)

- To catch those really massive particles like atomic nuclei that are traveling 90% the speed of light there is a third detector that is made of silica gel. Again Cherenkov light is created when a particle travels faster than the speed of light in a medium other than a vacuum. Light travels fastest in a vacuum and slower in all other medium. When a particle enters a medium and is traveling faster than the speed of light in that medium the particle emit’s a blue light called Cherenkov light.

- All three detectors collect data on all the particles that enter. The data is recovered and returned to the science libraries for analysis and study to determine if and how many anti-matter particles are hitting the Earth. During the 3 week flight the detectors will record over 5,000,000,000 events. Each event must be studied to determine which was an electron, a positron ( anti-electron), a muon ( a high energy electron), a proton, an anti-proton, or an atomic nucleus. If the atomic nucleus is anti-helium it would change the entire scope of physics in the study of cosmology.

- The balloons that carry the 4,000 to 6,000 pound payloads use 37,000,000 cubic feet of helium gas. The balloon fabric itself weighs 5,300 pounds. As the balloon is inflated it stands 1,000 feet tall. It is launched in a 10 knot wind and climbs 500 feet a minute. Its diameter expands to 400 feet across after 3 hours as it climbs to 120,000 feet into the stratosphere. The temperature there is -49F. When viewed from a commercial airplane it appears as big as a full moon yet it is twice as high above the airplane as the airplane is above the ground.

- 3 weeks later the balloon returns with 5,000,000,000 streams of data. There is much to study, an announcement will be made shortly, stay tuned. The anti-matter experiment is not the only experiment to use the high altitude balloons above the Antarctic. Check the NASA web site to learn about the others and to see videos of the balloon launches.

- The Antarctic Balloon experiments have mapped the Cosmic Microwave Background temperature of 2.725 Kelvin with cold spots being 0.0002 Kelvin colder and hotspots being 0.0002 Kelvin hotter. The hot spots have since evolved into the stars and galaxies we have today. Science has learned from this data that the Universe is geometrically flat. This means that 2 photons parallel to each other and traveling in a straight line will remain parallel. If the geometry were spherical the parallel paths would eventually cross, if the geometry were concave, or saddle shaped, the parallel paths would diverge and continually separate from each other. They have learned that 85% of the Universe’s mass is not detectable in the electromagnetic spectrum. They know the CMB is polarized. New space satellites will be studying this polarization. They have discovered new massive galaxy clusters. All from balloons. How about that?
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707-536-3272, Saturday, October 1, 2011