"The puzzle ever since their discovery has been how do the particles get accelerated up to nearly the speed of light?"
Newly released research has identified the existence of a giant cosmic accelerator above the Earth--a natural space "synchrotron accelerator" has scales of hundreds of thousands of kilometers, dwarfing even the largest man-made similar accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which has a circumference of only 27 kilometres. By analyzing data from NASA's Van Allen probes, University of Alberta physicist Ian Mann, together with his colleagues at NASA and other institutes, have been able to measure and identify the "smoking gun" of a planetary scale process that accelerates particles to speeds close to the speed of light within the Van Allen radiation belt.
Mann says this particle acceleration—deriving energy from solar flares or eruptions and carried through space on a solar wind—exists in the region of space dominated by the Earth's magnetic field, where satellites fly, known as the magnetosphere. The discovery is a jumping-off point for understanding space storms and determining how to protect man-made systems—on Earth and in space—from potential damage from space storms and severe space weather.
reply to post by sulaw
hmm no laymens terms from me ,but it did spark a thought..
what if you could build a iron ring, supported along the equator ,right around the entire circumference of the earth,
a: could this be used as a power source ?
B: when it was fitted together and the circle was complete , what would happen if you removed all the supports simultaneously?
stilthinkingBoxedit on 16-12-2013 by funbox because: something about wolves , i forget what
it was always said..."no effect on the Apollo's" from the Van Allen belts.
Yes. It was done a number of times.
is it normal to go through a "natural" particle accelerator with a craft and feel nothing out of the ordinary..
That would depend on how long you were in there.
This will probably sound stupid...could I just walk into the CERN particle accelerator, close the door and engage the machine? what would happen to me if anything ?
Look again. What was actually said was "no harmful effects". You also need to consider the region of the belts which were traversed and for how long.
Q: The original question was: Assuming you could avoid any other of the effects of being in an active particle accelerator tube, How much damage would you expect by the particles smashing into you? How much would the amount of mass within the particles effect your chances of living/dying? And if you survived the impact, what kind of havoc would a mini black hole wreak inside you?
A: Physicist: If you took all of the matter that’s being flung around inside an active accelerator, and collected it into a pellet, it would be so small and light you’d never notice it. The danger is the energy.
If you stood in front of the beam you would end up with a very sharp, very thin line of ultra-irradiated dead tissue going through your body. It might possibly drill a hole through you. You may also be the first person in history to get pion (“pie on”) radiation poisoning (which does the same thing as regular radiation poisoning, but with pions!).
When it’s up and running, there’s enough energy in the LHC beam to flash boil a fair chunk of person (around 10-100 pounds, depending on the setting of the accelerator). However, even standing in the beam, most of that energy will pass right through you. The higher the kinetic energy of a particle, the smaller the fraction of its energy tends to be deposited. Instead, high energy particles tend to glance off of other particles. They deposit more overall than a low energy counterpart, but most of their energy is carried away in a (slightly) new direction.
A concerned reader pointed out that there is at least one known particle-beam-accident. A Russian nuclear scientist named Anatoli Bugorski, who at the time was working through his PhD at the U-70 synchrotron (which has approximately 1% of the LHC’s maximum power), was kind enough to accidentally put his head in the path of a proton beam.
He’s doing pretty well these days (considering). The damage took ensthe form of a thin strip of inte radiation damage, that killed all the tissue in a straight line through the left side of his head. Despite the fact that that line passed through a lot of brain, he still managed to finish his PhD.