AMS particle detector at international space station
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The 11-year survey of the particles and antiparticle around our sun is unlocking the history of our solar system and grow new mystery on particles itself.
“It’s like when you walk in a dark room and a lot of new things,” says Samuel Ting Massachusetts at the Institute of Technology.
The space is filled with energy particles that travel in explosions that explode cosmic rays. A cosmic ray when the Alpha magnetic spectrometer (AMS) enters the detector International Space Station (ISS), magnetic fields separate their particles Electric chargeAnd then detectors measure mass and energy. This distinction is essential because it helps identify differences in the behavior of a particle antiparticleIt is the same except with the opposite charge, Ting says.
In collaboration with AMS, and his colleagues studied more than 11 years of data and surprisingly, as we thought we did not know about the behavior of particles. For example, the survey revealed trends of the number of particles over time and interacted with different types of particles. There are more than 600 theoretical models that could be able to explain each of these trends, but no one explains the findings at the same time, Ting says.
And the results of the survey may have more than one single particle. Researchers have caught cosmic rays with different detectors for more than a century because their changing properties may have records of the History of the Solar System, says Jamie Rankin Princeton University. But we never understood how solar cycles affect the rays, he said.
That’s 11 years of length Solar cycleTherefore, collecting data collection of data in this period includes all the variations that are repeated in the magnetic field of the sun, which change the behavior of cosmic rays. The exact survey can become the key that unlocks the way “solar system archeology” use cosmic rays.
But cosmic rays themselves come still mysterious, he says Gavin Rowell Adelaide University in Australia. “Particle AMS measures are basically coming outside the solar system,” he noted. The amount of details in the new analysis, how they behave in the cosmic nuclears within the cosmic rays, can help researchers in the definitive theory of cosmic rays.
And there are other unanswered cosmic questions. “We don’t see any antimatter in our world, so that my mother can observe antiprotes, that’s a great mystery,” says Low Ian Northwest University in Illinois. The origin of these Antiparticles May be connected to mysterious obscure Or else go beyond the best understanding of the cosmos today, he says.
Ting and his colleagues are working on renovation AMS detector To be able to detect more particles – and coordinate with them astronauts Who will help install it.
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