Would I be disintegrated by a Strangelet?

[WIGGUM]

Not that I’m losing sleep worrying about it, but what would happen if I was hit by one of these?

RTMP Server Hosting

The article says:

The small size of strangelets means the blast is only big enough to have a very localised effect and humans are unlikely to be harmed.

I’m assuming they mean that it would be very unlikely for me to be strolling down the street and get nailed by a strangelet, but what would happen to me if one did?

I’m not very well versed in physics, so correct me if I’m wrong, but speed increases mass does it not? So even if these things are only the size of a grain of pollen, the fact that they would be screaming at my head at 900,000 mph would more than likely cause some serious damage to my skull.

[rsa]

That article is misleading. The reason that they could pass completely through the earth is because they wouldn’t interact with normal matter.

So you’re safe on that score.

[Whack-a-Mole]

It could not only disintegrate you but potentially the entire earth (and for all I know the solar system, the Milky Way and maybe the Universe).

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider may make soem of these oddities. While they consider the chance exceedingly low it is still conceivable that a Strange Quark will combine with an Up and Down quarks to form a Strangelet. If the Strangelet has more Strange Quarks than Up and Down quarks it will have a negative charge. If that happened a chain reaction could occur where the Strangelet would strip away the electrons of any atom it encountered and absorb the nucleus. Thie would continue till all matter it ran into became a Strangelet. At the very least you could say bye-bye to the earth.

On the up side this all has to start in about 0.00000000000000000000001 seconds before the Strange quarks decay into up or down quarks so the chances are considered slim to the point of approaching zero.

[Whack-a-Mole]

Here’s an article at Scientific American that discusses this issue more fully as well as the reasons to not be overly concerned.

[ZenBeam]

If the Strangelet has more Strange Quarks than Up and Down quarks it will have a negative charge. If that happened a chain reaction could occur where the Strangelet would strip away the electrons of any atom it encountered and absorb the nucleus. This would continue till all matter it ran into became a Strangelet.

Wouldn’t it only continue until the strangelet had a positive charge, then stop? That don’t say how it would keep going in the SA article.

[ZenBeam]

They don’t say…

[Whack-a-Mole]

*Originally posted by ZenBeam *
**Wouldn’t it only continue until the strangelet had a positive charge, then stop? [They] don’t say how it would keep going in the SA article. **

This article in Wired has the following (below) to say about it. I know it doesn’t help much on the particulars but maybe it’ll point you in the right direction for a Google search or something. You’ll need Chronos or the like around here for more detailed information.

Also, the SciAm article and the Wired article both mention that a Strangelet would gobble up the earth quite nicely so I am assuming that should such a creature ever be brought into existence on the earth it would be a Bad Thing.

A negatively charged strangelet would trigger a relentless process of electron-positron pair creation. The strangelet would strip away the electrons of any normal atom it came in contact with and absorb the exposed nucleus. The process would continue until all matter was converted into strangelets.

[Tuckerfan]

Hell, it sounds like universal armageddon. Space isn’t an absolute vacuum so once it finished with the Earth, the strangelet would drift around through the cosmos gobbling up other things. Right?

[Whack-a-Mole]

I guess I should have read the OP more carefully.

I don’t know why the scientists suppose a Strangelet hit the earth to cause those seismic events. I guess if it was a Strangelet we have to assume it is a positively charged one else we’d get the problem with the whole earth being wiped out as described in an earlier post.

As to what would happen if one of these struck a person I don’t really know. For a WAG I’d say probably not much. Something travelling 900,000 mph and the size of a pollen grain is likely to pass right through you leaving a teeny hole. I don’t know that the hole would even be big enough to bleed through. Maybe if the hole went through a major artery or an important part of your brain something bad might happen but I’m not even sure about that as the damage would be quite minimal. I wonder if you’d even notice.

[ZenBeam]

A negatively charged strangelet would trigger a relentless process of electron-positron pair creation. The strangelet would strip away the electrons of any normal atom it came in contact with and absorb the exposed nucleus. The process would continue until all matter was converted into strangelets.

For whoever can explain why anyone thought there’d be a potential problem with strangelet matter:What’s the source of energy for the electron-positron pair creation? Strange quarks are about 500 MeV, rather than the about 300 MeV of up and down quarks. If up and down quarks are being converted to strange quarks, where’s the energy for this coming from? Why won’t the strange quarks in the strangelet decay into up and down quarks?

[Dieter]

I was hit by a Strangelet once.

Oh, wait. That was strange lint.

Nevermind.

[Whack-a-Mole]

*Originally posted by Tuckerfan *
**Hell, it sounds like universal armageddon. Space isn’t an absolute vacuum so once it finished with the Earth, the strangelet would drift around through the cosmos gobbling up other things. Right? **

Sounds like it. From the SciAm article I linked above they mention the following:

…ion collisions exactly like those planned for RHIC occur all the time in interstellar space. Despite the scarcity of gold, there are about 1,000 high-energy impacts of gold ions every year in each cubic light-year of our galaxy. If these impacts could generate long-lived, negatively charged strangelets, some of the dangerous particles would eventually be pulled into nearby stars, causing them to explode. This process would trigger about a million supernovae in our galaxy every year…

Since we don’t see a million supernova in our galaxy every year scientists suppose that strangelets aren’t being formed by this type of collision so we’re probably safe here on earth but it does lend validity to the notion of a galaxy gobbling monster. It would make for a good sci-fi superweapon though huh? A Strangelet Starbreaker (or Galaxy Destroyer)!

ZenBeam wrote:
For whoever can explain why anyone thought there’d be a potential problem with strangelet matter:What’s the source of energy for the electron-positron pair creation?

Again, you’re going to have to wait for Chronos and company to chime in with a more definitive answer but as a WAG I would suppose the strangelet would have to get the energy from each atom it ate. How that would work I have no idea. I am also assuming that a strangelet is a stable form of matter in its own right. If a few strange quarks can join up with an up or down quark I am led to believe from the articles that they will happily stay this way. If they didn’t I don’t see how there’d be cause for concern since as you noted a strange quark will very rapidly degenerate into an up or down quark (so fast that it likely won’t have time to reach any other matter to gobble up…indeed that’s part of the reason scientists don’t think there’s much to worry about as all of this has to happen in a trillionth-of-a-trillionth of a second).

[Number]

Joel: Hey, what’s with the Crow-in-the-box?

Tom: Oh, we’re bringing his temperature down to absolute zero. Seems like it might be kinda fun.

Joel: Wait a minute, you can’t do that!

Tom: Why?

Joel: If you go to absolute zero, there’ll be no molecular motion! It’ll start a chain reaction and kill us all!

Tom: Yeah, that’s how it played out in our scenario, too. Hey, wait a minute…that’s kind of stupid, isn’t it?

[ZenBeam]

Well, I tracked down answers to some of the questions I posed:

If up and down quarks are being converted to strange quarks, where’s the energy for this coming from? Why won’t the strange quarks in the strangelet decay into up and down quarks?

From Interaction of strangelets with normal matter (which is part of a series of pages about strange matter)

One striking result from the models of strange matter is that the energy per baryon always decreases with A. This is in contrast to nuclei, where the increase in energy per baryon resulting from the coulomb force destabilizes nuclei of large A. It may seem that strangelets might interact with normal nuclear matter by absorbing it, since that would be energetically favorable. Although the charge per baryon of a strangelet is small, it is sufficient to produce a coulomb barrier high enough to prevent such reactions at low energies. Strangelets would be inert in contact with ordinary nuclear matter in the same way that nuclei lighter than iron do not spontaneously undergo nuclear reactions.

From part of the same set of pages, Strangelets: Mass Formula,

The basic idea that a new form of matter, so-called strange quark matter, might exist and be stable against strong decay (or possibly even absolutely stable) has been suggested in Refs. [2, 3, 7]. The discovery of strange quark matter, or the determination of significant upper limits for its production rate, is a major goal of the proposed experiment. The new'' matter consists of multi quark states containing u, d, and s quarks in a single bag.’’ In essence, the strangeness degree of freedom allows more quarks to occupy low lying levels than is possible with two flavors. This leads to the possibility that an assembly of baryon number, A, might be metastable or even stable when all of the quarks are in a single bag. This is in contrast to the case of ordinary nuclei where the quarks of a large A system are (mostly!) organized into 3 quark, color-neutral bags (the neutrons and protons) which interact with one another by meson exchange forces.

So instead of having triplets of quarks combined, like in atomic nucleii, the quarks themselves are all mixed together, allowing lower energy states. OK, that’s plausible.

I also asked

Wouldn’t it only continue until the strangelet had a positive charge, then stop?

The first site says

The situation is somewhat different for strangelets with an overall negative charge, […] A negatively charged strangelet would have no coulomb barrier against absorption of normal matter, and would in fact attract it. The resulting exothermic reaction would simply produce a larger strangelet. Since the energy per baryon always decreases with A, a negatively charged strangelet on earth would continue to digest all of the matter it came into contact with until the earth itself was entirely strange. The only limit on such a process would again be the rate of the weak interactions in equilibrating the strangeness.

But from this other page, Jes Madsen of the University of Aarhus, in Denmark agrees with me:

Madsen says that even if a small, negatively charged strangelet did form in the collider, it would be unable to grow large enough to do damage. As it grows to intermediate size by gobbling up positively charged protons, its net electrical state would change from negative to positive.

The site which says the strangelet keeps growing is silent about the strangelet’s charge becoming less negative, which means the description there is, at best, incomplete.

I didn’t find anything that talked about “relentless” electron-positron pair creation.

[ZenBeam]

Well, I tracked down answers to some of the questions I posed:

If up and down quarks are being converted to strange quarks, where’s the energy for this coming from? Why won’t the strange quarks in the strangelet decay into up and down quarks?

From Interaction of strangelets with normal matter (which is part of a series of pages about strange matter)

One striking result from the models of strange matter is that the energy per baryon always decreases with A. This is in contrast to nuclei, where the increase in energy per baryon resulting from the coulomb force destabilizes nuclei of large A. It may seem that strangelets might interact with normal nuclear matter by absorbing it, since that would be energetically favorable. Although the charge per baryon of a strangelet is small, it is sufficient to produce a coulomb barrier high enough to prevent such reactions at low energies. Strangelets would be inert in contact with ordinary nuclear matter in the same way that nuclei lighter than iron do not spontaneously undergo nuclear reactions.

From part of the same set of pages, Strangelets: Mass Formula,

The basic idea that a new form of matter, so-called strange quark matter, might exist and be stable against strong decay (or possibly even absolutely stable) has been suggested in Refs. [2, 3, 7]. The discovery of strange quark matter, or the determination of significant upper limits for its production rate, is a major goal of the proposed experiment. The new'' matter consists of multi quark states containing u, d, and s quarks in a single bag.’’ In essence, the strangeness degree of freedom allows more quarks to occupy low lying levels than is possible with two flavors. This leads to the possibility that an assembly of baryon number, A, might be metastable or even stable when all of the quarks are in a single bag. This is in contrast to the case of ordinary nuclei where the quarks of a large A system are (mostly!) organized into 3 quark, color-neutral bags (the neutrons and protons) which interact with one another by meson exchange forces.

So instead of having triplets of quarks combined, like in atomic nucleii, the quarks themselves are all mixed together, allowing lower energy states. OK, that’s plausible.

I also asked

Wouldn’t it only continue until the strangelet had a positive charge, then stop?

The first site says

The situation is somewhat different for strangelets with an overall negative charge, […] A negatively charged strangelet would have no coulomb barrier against absorption of normal matter, and would in fact attract it. The resulting exothermic reaction would simply produce a larger strangelet. Since the energy per baryon always decreases with A, a negatively charged strangelet on earth would continue to digest all of the matter it came into contact with until the earth itself was entirely strange. The only limit on such a process would again be the rate of the weak interactions in equilibrating the strangeness.

But from this other page, Jes Madsen of the University of Aarhus, in Denmark agrees with me:

Madsen says that even if a small, negatively charged strangelet did form in the collider, it would be unable to grow large enough to do damage. As it grows to intermediate size by gobbling up positively charged protons, its net electrical state would change from negative to positive.

The site which says the strangelet keeps growing is silent about the strangelet’s charge becoming less negative, which means the description there is, at best, incomplete.

I didn’t find anything that talked about “relentless” electron-positron pair creation.

[ZenBeam]

I swear I only pressed the “Submit Reply” button once. How strange…

[ZenBeam]

Sigh. Strangelets: Mass Formula

[levdrakon]

I first stumbled across this topic via this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2002%2F05%2F12%2Fwnugg12.xml

What I wonder is, why do they travel at 900,000 mph? Punching through planets, and I suppose the occasional star, has got to slow you down a bit. Couldn’t one of these buggers eventually stop?

They must be able to interact with normal matter if they can set off seismographs, right? If it can set off a seismograph, wouldn’t it be kinda disastrous to the human body?

[hazel-rah]

Better hope the spontaneous human combustion weirdos don’t get wind of this.

-fh