And now for this evening's space weather report. We've got a hotspot of satellite-wrecking 'killer electrons' in the outer Van Allen belt... Scientists have discovered a dangerous hotspot in Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts that spews so-called “killer electrons” that can knacker satellites and spacecraft. Our home world is surrounded by two donut-shaped Van Allen radiation belts teeming with electrically charged particles. The inner belt stretches from 400 to 6, …
I remember reading about the old aviators (they were at the time of the quote) mantra
If you crash, are you injured
No
don't worry about it
Yes
Is it serious?
No -> you'll recover don't worry about it
Yes
Survivable?
Yes -> That OK, stop worrying
No -> you don't need to concern yourself
The earliest version I have seen is 1st world war (so primitive medicine) - fits with the (mainly) men who flew at the time!
I doubt it.
You would have to transfer the energy from these electrons to the craft, while at the same time keeping them away from any computer systems and sensors. Which would mean heavy shielding, plus a rather big sail that can sufficiently decelerate those particles a bit and 'collect' their energy that way.
Looks to me as adding lots of mass to a craft for probably not that much gain.
"I doubt it."
I fear you're lacking in ambition. Everything that has energy can be used as a power source, and these have enormous energy. What we currently lack is the ability to harness that energy. When I was growing up it was a "fact" that slowing an F1 car wasted energy and required brake blocks and heat. Now we have KERS in every day EVs being driven on the streets. NEVER underestimate how quickly humans can innovate, things will always move faster than you expect.
If you take mass to be a measure of size in this case, then actually yes. When you accelerate stuff to relativistic speeds, the energy you put in begins increasing the target object's mass more than it's speed. If these things are moving at near light speed, they will be more massive than at (near) rest.
Whether that affects the radius of the things is for more intelligent people than me to answer :)
"Whether that affects the radius of the things is for more intelligent people than me to answer "
From my logical - but not particularly knowledgeable - viewpoint:
If the mass increases then presumably so does the gravitational force exerted within it. In which case would it be expected to shrink by compression?
Just to be clear, this is one of those heavily simplified statements that is very much only "sort of true". It might be better to say that you keep increasing the momentum of the object, but that at relativistic velocities you don't get to increase the velocity by a comparable amount: p=mv only holds at v<<c.
The full E=mc^2 formula is, where m is the rest-mass,
E^2 = m^2 c^4 + p^2 c^2
'Killer electrons'
Maybe I'm just a miserable old sod but physicists using a phrase like that, are they so desperate for tabloid coverage?
Highly energetic would do.
On second thoughts, are there wanted posters with descriptions out for these Killer Electrons and how much is the reward?
You're too late, they've already been charged.
That deserves beer!
I saw a press release El Reg may have been proud of a while back which described a particle as having "the energy of a baseball travelling at X" a while back, and that was only a few GeV. I've also seen electron microscope pics of CPUs with very small craters in them having stopped a wandering cosmic 'ray'.
I'm also curious as to what might be causing these 'killer electrons', and if earlier theories regarding the fate of the G'Gugvuntt and Vl'hurg battle fleets was wrong. Perhaps only the invasion fleet was destroyed, and the carriers are still trapped in the Van Allen belt, attempting to bombard the Earth with their particle beams.
Whatever happened to 'presumed innocent until proven guilty'?
Unless there is a victim and an action against them there is no case. The wronged party here, appears to be the maligned electrons, going about their business and being subjected to slander or libel.
Thought crime does not carry jail time, otherwise I would be having my meals and accommodation provided from every time I open excel in windows 10...
Any wrongdoing on the part of the particles, until such time as it actually occurs, exists only as potential.
"Thought crime does not carry jail time, [...]"
Some laws in various "democratic" countries are getting close to that condition. Japan actually had a "thought Crime" law in the early 20thC . Apparently a new law in Japan in 2017 was also being criticised for that effect.
valve/tube based car-radios in Hawaii for example
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-50th-anniversary-of-starfish-prime-the-nuke-that-shook-the-world
and careful with that xmas wrapping paper & sticky tape, but that's around 15KeV not 2 MeV
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15016-humble-sticky-tape-emits-powerful-x-rays/
The impact of high energy particals (aka "Free Radicals" :) has been known for some time, and they're certainly not confined to Spaaaaaaaace.
Back in the day we had a statistically significant run of Cisco 7200 series routers crashing apparently at random.
After a month or several running around with TAC, where we isolated the problem to a memory error (as opposed to say a code bug, which of course wouldn't be a problem...).
TAC sent us an IBM white paper written (IIRC) before desktop computing was a "thing" talking about solar radiation causing flipped bits in RAM leading to crashes.
The proposition was we were experiencing a period of high solar activity and our network was being crashed by solar radiation (via _Terrorist_ High energy/Free Radicals) and the gear was functioning as designed.
Cue questions about why the rather expensive kit didn't use parity checks/ECC RAM to weather the storm without failure & responses about fault tolerant design requiring MORE expensive kit in n+1 fault tolerant configuration.
An object lesson in turning a design flaw into a sales pitch ;-)
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