PAMELA Spacecraft Finds a Belt of Antimatter Around the Earth

Star Trek anyone?

The power of the sun. Being able to harness the power of such reactions would allow antimatter power generation concepts (i.e. reactors) to become reality.

One possible step towards a feasible leap across the cosmos at near to superluminal speeds; or a possible step towards planet destroying weaponry. Either way the sky's no longer the limit for the possibilities.

The ONLY problem I see, is that this study is limited to only one area, they ignored the rest. Why not make sure to include ALL areas PAMELA traveled to get a better idea of the composition rather than just focusing on the small spot around the south pole? Just seems a little daft to just ignore the rest of the path. I guess seeing the "big picture" isn't everyones cup of tea.

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

The best part of this article was your correct use of "couldn't care less" instead of "could care less".

Matter/Antimatter drive (actually called Antiproton Propulsion) no Dilithium Crystals needed! Then there is the "planet killer" which fires a pure antiproton beam ... an antiproton if you had not guessed it is a beam ... a powerful confined beam of antiprotons!!!

You say it doesn't matter -- I say antimatter! *Chuckles*

Would there happen to be enough anti-particles in this belt to be worth developing a way to capture them? That seems too good to be true... the applications would be amazing.

I think once space tourism takes off that members of congress be given free rides, smashing those slackers into the anti-matter belt would be a good practical use for this discovery.

Codezero, first off, they didn't say they only checked that area, it was just mentioned that there were 28 anti-protons found there. Also, as it sounds like they first wanted verification that they were there, checking the most likely place for them to end up is the smartest thing to do. Now that there is verification they may very well widen the scope.

@Daylon.. Oh, I'm sorry, I actually went and read the original report on this which is linked in this article, My bad for actually reading more than you and then reporting actual information about this study that wasn't listed here, I wasn't aware that if it wasn't written on POPSCI that it didn't happen.

Here, read this for yourself... taken from the original report which inspired this article.

"Now the PAMELA team has analysed the 850 days of data, looking only at the times when the spacecraft was in the South Atlantic Anomaly (about 1.7 per cent of this time)."

So they ignored 98.3% of the data. That doesn't seem too smart to me. I understand the idea of looking at where they THINK these should reside, but ignoring a HUGE percentage of the track isn't an intelligent idea, it's very possible that these antiprotons are more abundant everywhere else and that the pole is the "bald spot", but without checking the rest of the data, there is no way to determine that. But hey, maybe it's just me, I would have checked everywhere 1st before reporting the whopping 28 antiprotons they "found".

Playing Devil's Advocate since 1978

"The only constant in the universe is change"
-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC - 475 BC

With an artificial magnetic field (superconducting magnets), might it be possible to generate them in orbit. I have been thinking for a while that we need a way to collect the massive amount of energy generated by the sun in space, and transport it in some form to the earth. Perhaps anti-matter is the fuel we need.

Anti-matter was theoretically predicted by P.A.M. Dirac (Nobel prize, 1933). First anti-particale, positron, was discovered by C.D. Anderson (Nobel prize, 1936) and second anti-particle, anti-proton, was discovered by E.G. Segre and Owen Chmberlain (Nobl prize, 1959). Positron is like electron, except its charge which is positive and anti-proton is like proton, except its charge which is negative. On interacting with each other, matter and anti-matter are capable of annhilating each other - that is completely destroying each other. The energy realeased in the process can be calculated using Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc^2. As compared to distances between stars and planets, the anti-matter belt is near the Earth and hence it can be a dangerous belt.

@Dileep Sathe

Yea, those 28 anti-protons are gonna make space travel hell, we should just give up now.

But seriously, all sorts of people are talking about how we should harness this anti-matter, without noticing the fact that 28 anti-protons will produce very little energy. Yes, I know that it is a lot more energy dense, but not enough to make 28 particles useful in any way.