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----------------------------- 1926 - Cosmic Rays to Planetesimals.
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- Cosmic Rays are a misnomer that has stuck every since the mystery was first discovered. There are many more misnomers that I will try to explain in this review. Cosmic Rays are really hydrogen and helium nuclei. Hydrogen nuclei are really just protons. And, Cosmic Rays are just high speed protons. High speed helium nuclei are called Alpha particles.
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- Cosmic Rays originate in the Sun and the other stars. They come to us from outer space, ( as well as some ground radioactivity.) They are charged particles that never travel in a straight line because they are always diverted by magnetic fields. Many of these charged particles enter our atmosphere and travel along magnetic lines into the North Pole. You can see them hitting atmospheric atoms causing the shivering Northern Lights.
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- Cosmic Rays (protons) are going through your body all the time. You just don’t notice it. Your body is mostly empty space. Not just your head. Atoms in general are mostly empty space. The atomic nucleus is very, very small, the size of a proton. And, electrons are almost 2,000 times smaller. All the rest is empty space. Well, space is never empty but that is different Review.
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- However, Cosmic Rays on occasion do slam into your body’s nuclei. This smashup could cause cancer. Or, it could cause a mutation. Some mutations are bad, some are good. The good ones survive and evolve. The bad ones don’t do well in our environment. Some of our Olympic athletes are a result of these mutations.
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- In fact, over the past 4,000,000,000 years, these mutations could be responsible for all the diversity of life on Earth. Maybe on other planets as well. From mice to elephants, from germs to trees, from monkeys to man. Most men refuse to believe this evolution. However, most women do.
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- Cosmic Rays are the smallest debris hitting us from outer space, not counting Muons and electrons, and a bunch more sub-atomic particles, but , that is a different Review. When you start dealing with even larger particles hitting us we call them meteorites. You can witness this bombardment by going outside on a dark night. Away from all the lights (that ain’t easy) And staring at the night sky until your eyes chemically adjust to the darkness and you begin to see the streaks of light whizzing across the night sky.
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- If the streaks are traveling slow, say 18,000 miles per hour, and they are 200 miles away , then it is a satellite, or the space station. If the streaks are traveling fast, say 26,000 miles per hour and they are closer, say 20 to 30 miles away, then they are meteors. If they hit the ground they are meteorites.
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- Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere. Some hit the surface of the Earth. Usually meteorites are found to be made of iron or hard rock. They are the core of the meteor that has had it s crust , or surface burnt off, or evaporated. Only a few meteorites have been recorded to have hit a person, a car, or a house. Most hit the oceans which cover 76% the surface of the Earth. As you will learn, that is how the oceans got here.
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- If you want to see meteorite impacts check out the Moon. Use binoculars and you can see the Moon is completely pockmarked in meteor impacts. Even the smooth parts which are called Mares, or Oceans, are the result of larger impacts creating lava flows that resurface parts of the Moon.
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- The Moon is even lopsided due to an even larger impact. The crust on the near side is thicker than the crust on the far side. This is due to the impact shockwave that went through the Moon and piled up more crust on our side.
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- The Moon itself is the result of an impact of a planetesimal with the Earth. 4,300,000,000 years ago the impact splashed the Earth’s surface into orbit. Our Moon is not a captured asteroid , it s part of the Earth that got separated.
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- See Reviews #1923 and #1924 that discuss how the Earth has been pounded by asteroids and supernovae debris.
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- Did life evolve due to Cosmic Rays? Life does not have to have any meaning to exist. The atoms in our bodies , arranged neatly by RNA and DNA, simply arrived from the explosions of massive stars. There is no reason such order could not have arisen in billions of other places across billions of other galaxies. Religion is a reason!
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- We are thinking creatures and we can reflect on our origin in the stars as being the greatest gift of all. We should not need more meaning than that.
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- We know that at least 100 billion galaxies exist. We know that at least 400 billion stars area in our own galaxy. The “Observable Universe” must have 10,000 billion , billion stars and that many planets and that many moons. All of them being bombarded by those Cosmic Rays and planetesimals.
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- Astronomers are anxiously searching the planets and moons in our Solar System for microbes. Signs of the beginnings of life. Likely targets include Europa, Enceladus, Titan, Triton, or even Mars. Astronomers have found liquid water on several moons and dwarf planets in our Solar System. There is water and oxygen out there, outside our island Earth, so, might there be life as we know it out there as well?
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- Pieces of this world in outer space are entering our world and bodies every day. We first discovered the Cosmic Ray particles in 1910. They were detected in electroscopes. At the time the detections were thought to be radiation coming up out of the earth itself. Obviously, radioactive elements could cause this detection result Theodore Wolf was a scientist motivated to test this idea. He took his electroscope reading at the bottom and at the top of the Eiffel Tower, in Paris. That is just 300 meters, but, he found that more radiation was detected at the top. Was the ionization coming from the ground or from the sky?
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- Victor Hess took these measurements into hot-air balloons in 1911 and he got the same results. At 17,000 feet the readings were twice as high as on the ground. Radiation was definitely penetrating from the atmosphere above.
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- Hess even completed another elevation test at night to prove that the radiation was not coming from the Sun. In 1912 he even did the measurements during a near-total solar eclipse. In 1913 he proclaimed that radiation was coming from deep space.
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- It was Robert Millikan who proclaimed the radiation from deep space was “ Cosmic Rays”. He was thinking they were a form of invisible light, like Gamma Rays. But, his theory was proven wrong when detection was shown to be stronger at the magnetic poles. The radiation was some form of “ charged particle”, not photons, not a form of light.
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- When in 1930 the detections were proven to be even stronger when streaming from the west. The particles were deemed to be a positive charge. The conclusion was then that Cosmic Rays were really positively charged protons, or hydrogen nuclei. They have been bombarding the Earth for billions of years. They may have been the reason for the evolution of the diversity of life. Stay tuned, an announcement will be made shortly.
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- Note (1): Other Reviews: #1747 - Adding up the power of Cosmic Rays leads to 10^29 megawatts, or billion times the power of the Sun’s output.
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- This review footnotes 11 other Reviews about Cosmic Rays. For example:
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- #1496 - About 10 Cosmic Rays pass through your thumbnail every minute.
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- #541 - An average body absorbs enough Cosmic Ray energy to equate to 2 chest X-rays each year.
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----- 707-536-3272 ---------------- Tuesday, January 31, 2017 -----
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