Deep Impact probe with comet 9P/Tempel 1 is scheduled Sunday evening
(July 3) at 11:00 PM PST (or 2 AM EST on July 4).

Friends of mine suggest I wear sunglasses, as conspiracy websites are
claiming 9P/Tempel 1 is made of antimatter, and 16,000 megatons can be
quite bright. Though maybe not when that far away.

COMMENT:

Well, 433 Eros certainly wasn't made of antimatter, since we managed to
land something on that. What, do the conspiracy people think these
things come in different flavors? Or --- duh-- have different layers?

I am reminded that the deep impact probe isn't the coolest thing we can
do with an asteroid or comet. These things OUGHT to be sweeps for Dark
Matter that we can collect. I think we need a drilling mission to the
center of some small asteroid. I figure asteroids should sweep up Dark
Matter in our neighborhood (and why shouldn't there be some in our
solar system?) by gravitationa; influence, and it should collect
naturally at the centers, since we know it's non-baryonic and has no
interactions with normal matter, except by gravity.

Dark Matter should be fun to mess with, if we can get some. Anything on
Earth is unreachable at the Earth's center. This month's Scientific
American suggests that Dark Matter is the lightest stable
"superpartner" particle in supersymmetry theory. That would be
something like spin-1
"sneutrinos" or something else equally odd. It certainly won't be
anything normal.

Hmmm. If the "lightest superpartner" turns out to be the spin-1
counterpart of electrons, or "selectrons," will they be also carry a
negative charge? It seems to me they must. Will we then just see some
kind of very odd static electricity down there in the middle of comets?

It seems to me there's no way that Dark Matter is selectrons balanced
out totally in charge with squark sprotons, because sprotons are likely
to be way too heavy. So if it's selectrons, they're there alone with
nothing to balance them out (the s-antimater would have gone the way of
the stuff in our universe, and for the same reason). But big negative
charges on all the galaxies should show up worse than gravity, as a
repulsive force. Hey--- maybe "dark energy" is just repulsion from some
selectrons!! But there can't be many of them (certainly not enough to
account for Dark Matter or the repulsion would be far more than we see
for Dark energy), so sneutrinos is what we're (mostly) left with.

SBH

"Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com" wrote in message
ups.com...
Deep Impact probe with comet 9P/Tempel 1 is scheduled Sunday evening
(July 3) at 11:00 PM PST (or 2 AM EST on July 4).

Friends of mine suggest I wear sunglasses, as conspiracy websites are
claiming 9P/Tempel 1 is made of antimatter, and 16,000 megatons can be
quite bright. Though maybe not when that far away.

Its ok. I think its a safe bet that it isn't made of antimatter.....

"Sbharris[atsign]ix.netcom.com" wrote:

Deep Impact probe with comet 9P/Tempel 1 is scheduled Sunday evening
(July 3) at 11:00 PM PST (or 2 AM EST on July 4).

Friends of mine suggest I wear sunglasses, as conspiracy websites are
claiming 9P/Tempel 1 is made of antimatter, and 16,000 megatons can be
quite bright.
[snip]

Idiot. No 511 keV annihalation radiation from the solar wind.
Hopeless, clueless, ****ing imbecile.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf

They were kidding, Al.

In any case, it's not the absense of positrons in primary high energy
galactic cosmic rays (GCR) and associated anihillation radiation that
convinces us there's no antimatter out there (at least in our own
galaxy). Because in fact such rays contain not only positrons but
anti-protons as well, and these come from outside the atmosphere, as
shown in balloon and space collection studies. Unfortunately these can
be, an probably are, produced by proton-proton collisions in the
interstellar medium.

It's the absense of anti-nuclei *heavier than hydrogen* in GCR that is
the real clue.

Just thought you might like to know.

And if you were calling *me* an idiot, that's not safe. Not if you want
to continue posting here, because I will make you pay for it.

SBH