back to article Boffins fail to detect Moon's strangeness

Scientists hoping to sniff out elusive "strange matter", apparently detected back in 1998 on a space shuttle mission, have failed to find corroborating evidence of strangeness from the lunar surface. According to New Scientist, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS-01) aboard Discovery sniffed a "strangelet" - a "nucleus like …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Paul Young
    Boffin

    My Comment needs no title

    NS elaborates: "Any strangelets present would curve less in the magnetic field than normal matter - but none was observed."

    Now. Did anyone observe them hiding in between the normal matter?

    As theoretical particles and known particles tend to mingle (they do, you all know it)

    the actual "normal Matter" may have hidden the strangelets.

    I'm off to join the "campaign to free hidden strangelets" (c)

  2. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Hold on...

    It was the Space Shuttle "Columbia". Not unless there was some space tragedy with the country Colombia.

  3. E 2

    The solution is

    Wrap the problem in a 100 meter thick layer of string theory, then apply variational methods to constrain the theory to the data. That done, obviously you will have an answer.

  4. Jason Hall

    head up bum

    Sandweiss insisted: "If AMS-01 had been a real event, we would have found it."

    Ahhh I understand... just because we didn't find it in a 15g sample... it doesn't exist?

    And these people are supposed to be clever?

  5. qwertyuiop
    FAIL

    Am I missing something?

    So... they looked in 15g of Moon dust and didn't find any strangelets. Surely all they have proved is that there were none in the sample they tested? Given that the Moon's mass is 7.3477 × 10^22 kg , 15g is hardly a representative sample!

  6. northern monkey

    @Paul Young

    These strangelets are large (from a high-energy physicist's point of view) and presumed to be stable, the mixing effects you're referring to happen at high-energy (small distance) scales so it's pretty safe to neglect mixing. Even at high energy I would think it might be OZI suppressed.

    I'm more amused that they're testing soil from some secret film studio in Nevada for stuff they expect to find on the Lunar surface :P

  7. Marvin the Martian
    Pint

    > "And these people are supposed to be clever?"

    No, just misrepresented.

    Read for example today's BBC news story that "we are all mutants" blathering on that we all have about a hundred novel mutations: old hat. The actual paper this press release/ news feature was based on: a new, better SNP mutation rate estimate.

    From the article you can just as well say: "you lose strangelets if you drag them through the earth's magnetic field, you say? So dragging 15gr through that field and then testing it for strangelets seems a bit pointless, no? And these people are supposed to be clever?"

    /beer as it's made out of pure distilled science.

  8. ElReg!comments!Pierre

    Of course they didn't find it

    How could you find 10x-overweight quarks on the moon when there is not a single McDonald's nearby?

  9. John Sanders
    Joke

    Science...

    I welcome our new strange particle overlords...

    But I must point out that I have seen many of those on tube stations during peak hours.

  10. Gavin Bloeman
    WTF?

    Hmmmm...

    Did anyone else understand this article, at all, apart from the words like 'moon'?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Big Brother

    hmmm...

    ...if a new moon sample were to be found to contain the illusive particles, might that show the current moon dust sample was actually just some texas dirt and hence would that be evidence of a fake moon landing conspiracy?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Coat

    @Gavin Bloeman

    Personally I was wondering what a Ferengi barman had to do with the moon.

  13. Wize
    Alien

    Someone has to do it...

    "That's no moon"

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    Deadly strangelets?

    I thought strangelets were supposed to turn everything they touched into more strangelets, thereby gradually causing the end of the universe as we know it? This was one of the objections to starting up the LHC as I recall ...

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like