Gunpla is amazing!
Antimatter scares me.
Wow, that's awesome! It always amazes me what's out there to be discovered, sometimes right under our noses.
Gunpla is amazing!
If this ends up working out it may be the biggest discovery in the history of space exploration.
Only issue I have with the article is the lack of an actual tonnage estimate. Granted that may be difficult to make but at least an approximation of how much we're talking about would be helpful. Like how many centuries at current technology levels would it take us to manufacture what's currently there?
if its a thin belt encircling the entire planet? Thats shitloads more than every lab on earth has created yet.
Creating a milligram of antimatter takes years and fucktons of money because you have to basically set up a collider specifically to capture antimatter, and it creates a few antimatter particles per use of a collider.
even if this belt is a few particles thick, the sheer size of it makes it an absilutely obscene quantity of antimatter. This absolutely changes the game when it comes to energy generation. especially since if I'm reading the article right..Its SELF REPLENISHING
edited 7th Aug '11 2:01:30 PM by Midgetsnowman
See ALL the stars!
486-powered rotating frosted cherry Pop-Tart
Am I the only one who heard the opening fanfare of the Star Trek theme when I read the lead-in? :D
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NOT THE BEES
I'd be interested in whether the rate of replenishment is appreciable. I mean, fossil fuels are self-replenishing too over prohibitively long periods of time, but...
Still, a cool find.
I have balls.
This is a nice article. All in all, its another reason not to just abandon space technology.
They never travel alone.
Happy New Year!
Kick ass!
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Decemberist
So it's been proved. -clasps hands-
The sin of silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
Very cool find.
Who watches the watchmen?
Anti matter...discover...use for fuel.
Quick! someone give me a space suit! 
edited 7th Aug '11 5:25:50 PM by Baff
I will always cherish the chance of a new beggining.
Interesting, this means any other large magnetic field in space has probably also accumulated antimatter, I suspect the greatest would be in the solar system's heliosphere. Still, two questions immediately came to mind for me:
- Would available methods of scooping and trapping it be cheaper than manufacturing?
- Are there useful amounts?
Micromastophile
Space fuel?
Nah, methinks this will be a bomb first.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Provided modern nuclear technology.
It would be redundant to develop such a bomb unless we entered a cold war setting once again.
edited 7th Aug '11 6:12:51 PM by Baff
I will always cherish the chance of a new beggining.
Long Live the King
When has redundancy ever stopped people from inventing new ways of killing each other?
edited 7th Aug '11 6:20:27 PM by Swish
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
QFT
Who watches the watchmen?
One Winged Egret
Ignoring bombs, I still don't think "space fuel" is going to be the primary use of this. Isn't it natural that we'd use it for terrestrial energy generation first? It's like finding a new source of oil in space. Except we don't have the infrastructure to use it yet.
Permanently Banned
If someone wants to build an antimatter bomb, they're going to need a way to contain the particles first. Admittedly it could be easier to construct than a nuke once you have a containment field and a controlled release mechanism.
Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]
I think this means that space colonization has, at last, become a real possibility.
Raven Wilder
I think the idea is that, as a spaceship is passing through the anti-matter belt, it snags some to fuel itself up for the rest of the trip. Going up into space just to bring some back to Earth might not be cost effective. The article says it's all in anti-proton form; even for a fuel source as potent as anti-matter, that's still a little dinky.
edited 7th Aug '11 6:32:18 PM by RavenWilder
"It takes an idiot to do cool things, that's why it's cool" - Haruhara Haruko
Night Clerk of the Apacalypse.
I tell you what this means. It means there is a big ass belt of anti-matter out in space around the earth.
Who watches the watchmen?
How could we even use it as fuel?
Well put, sir.
edited 7th Aug '11 6:52:43 PM by thatguythere47
Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?
Hell yeah.
The find, described in Astrophysical Journal Letters, confirms theoretical work that predicted the Earth's magnetic field could trap antimatter.
The team says a small number of antiprotons lie between the Van Allen belts of trapped "normal" matter.
The researchers say there may be enough to implement a scheme using antimatter to fuel future spacecraft.
The antiprotons were spotted by the Pamela satellite (an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) - launched in 2006 to study the nature of high-energy particles from the Sun and from beyond our Solar System - so-called cosmic rays.
These cosmic ray particles can slam into molecules that make up the Earth's atmosphere, creating showers of particles.
Many of the cosmic ray particles or these "daughter" particles they create are caught in the Van Allen belts, doughnut-shaped regions where the Earth's magnetic field traps them.
Among Pamela's goals was to specifically look for small numbers of antimatter particles among the far more abundant normal matter particles such as protons and the nuclei of helium atoms.
'Abundant source'
The new analysis, described in an online preprint, shows that when Pamela passes through a region called the South Atlantic Anomaly, it sees thousands of times more antiprotons than are expected to come from normal particle decays, or from elsewhere in the cosmos.The team says that this is evidence that bands of antiprotons, analogous to the Van Allen belts, hold the antiprotons in place - at least until they encounter the normal matter of the atmosphere, when they "annihiliate" in a flash of light.
The band is "the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth", said Alessandro Bruno of the University of Bari, a co-author of the work.
"Trapped antiprotons can be lost in the interactions with atmospheric constituents, especially at low altitudes where the annihilation becomes the main loss mechanism," he told BBC News.
"Above altitudes of several hundred kilometres, the loss rate is significantly lower, allowing a large supply of antiprotons to be produced."
Dr Bruno said that, aside from confirming theoretical work that had long predicted the existence of these antimatter bands, the particles could also prove to be a novel fuel source for future spacecraft - an idea explored in a report for Nasa's Institute for Advanced Concepts.
edited 7th Aug '11 1:12:49 PM by Pentadragon