CAMBRIDGE, MA – Physicists discovered a massive “ball” of antimatter heading for earth. It could destroy our planet.
Some of the nation’s top physicists and astronomers at MIT met with President Obama last night to debrief him on the runaway antimatter that is threatening our planet.
Cosmic rays smash into Earth’s atmosphere all the time, and sometimes these smaller particles may be antimatter. But in recent weeks, physicists have noticed an usually large amount of antimatter surrounding earth and they all believe it’s all about to… explode!
The cosmic ray detector, PAMELA, which is part of a program carried out by the WIZard collaboration and Russian partners, found a whopping 98 antiprotons during a 50 day period.
That might not sound like much, but it’s ten times more than would be found from a random sample of the solar wind.
PAMELA, which is an acronym for Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics, was released in 2006 attached to a satellite to seek out such particles. It has never recorded such a high level of antimatter before. Several MIT physicists left Cambridge to build antimatter bunkers.
Here’s a quick scientific explanation: charged particles called cosmic rays constantly rain in from space, creating a spray of new particles – including antiparticles – when they collide with particles in the atmosphere. Many of these become trapped inside the Van Allen radiation belts, two donut-shaped zones around the planet where charged particles spiral around the Earth’s magnetic field lines.
Heavier particles take wider paths when they spiral around the planet’s magnetic lines, and weaker magnetic field lines also lead to wider spirals. So relatively heavy antiprotons travelling around the weak field lines in the outer radiation belt were expected to take loops so big they would quickly get pulled into the lower atmosphere, where they would annihilate with normal matter.
The bottom line: the runaway antimatter recently discovered is a real threat to the existence of our planet. “When antimatter meets matter – there is annihilation,” says world renowned cosmologist, Dr. Susan Begley. “And with this much antimatter, total annihilation is expected.”
“The Big Bang was essentially antimatter meeting matter,” said Dr. Begley. “And this could be a second Big Bang, which of course would mean all life forms, all planets, will be annihilated in a massive fireball that will create a new universe.”
On a positive note, many astronomers say when the thermonuclear runaway antimatter hits Earth, it could be the most beautiful explosion in the history of the universe.
“It will be utterly fantastic,” said Dr. John Malley of The California Institute of Technology. “Too bad we’ll all be dead and won’t get to experience the beautify of it all.” He added, “”It’s gonna knock our socks off.”
Antimatter researchers have coined a term, the Zeff, as a measure of how quickly a matter-based target annihilates when it is hit by a positron. A single electron, by definition, has a Zeff of 1, so you might expect that the Zeff of an atom or molecule would be closely related to the number of electrons it contains.
The antimatter heading for earth is Zeff 57.
Get ready for… the annihilation!