Wednesday 17 August 2011

aurora, not a palindrome

A team of Italian, Swedish, Russian and German astrophysicists, shifting through volumes of data, have discovered that there is a faint, disperse ring of anti-matter particles around the Earth. These particles, whose existence to me raises many questions by its confirmation, like: were they trapped by the strong magnetic fields whose lines of influence extend many thousands of kilometers beyond the atmosphere, are some cosmological readings, anomalies really the ghostly scintillations of anti-matter and normal matter meeting (e.g., the dark matter and dark energy conundrum or the Doppler shift or a hatful of universal constants), or even should it be more risky to attempt to break free of the mundane sphere than it seems to be, are apparently suspended within the van Allen radiation belts, which by virtue of scale make an ideal trap to keep at least some of the anti-particles from interacting with their everyday nemesi.  How neat and exciting!  On the practical side, researchers are now hailing the magnetosphere as a potential source of fuel for the next generation of space craft, carefully harvesting this volatile Bizarro substance, although the boundary between space and sky has always been known as an explosive and rich source of potential energy with cosmic rays in constant volley, if we were only smart enough to tap into it.