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Earth is too big to fit into an X-ray or MRI scanner, so a group of physicists in Spain found a fascinating new way to peer inside – they used the subatomic particles constantly streaming through the planet.
The team scanned the interior of Earth using neutrinos – and even used them to conduct an entirely new measurement of our planet's mbad.
Neutrinos are odd little things. They are among the most abundant particles in the Universe, and yet are hard to detect. They are similar to electrons, but they have no electrical charge and their mbad is almost zero, so they interact very little with normal matter as they stream through the Universe at near light-speed.
Billions of neutrinos are zipping through your body right now. You can see why they are called "ghost particles."
While historically our detection efforts have been poor, the IceCube Neutrino detector has gone down in Antarctica has opened up a brave new world of neutrino science.
Using a year's worth of IceCube data, Physicists at the Institute for Corpuscular Physics (IFIC) in Valencia, Spain, were even able to study Earth's guts.
It worked almost exactly like an X-ray. When you are being X-rayed, you are feeling your body. They mostly pbad through soft tissue like muscle and organs. However, denser material, like bone, absorbs the beams at a higher rate, so fewer X-rays hit the detector on the other side, producing an image of your skeleton.
Instead of X-rays, though, the team used atmospheric neutrinos, showers of which are created when energetic particles from space collide with Earth's atmosphere. These then zoom through Earth – they can be absorbed by the atomic nuclei of the material they pbad through.
The denser the material, the higher the absorption rate; which, in turn, is the research team of the planet.
"The use of atmospheric neutrinos," explained IFIC physicist Sergio Palomares-Ruiz.
"The amount of absorption of neutrino flux depends on the amount of neutrino energy, so we can study the variation of the absorption of different neutrinos, we can determine the distribution of density of the Earth. "
(Donini et al. / Nature Physics)
The different angles are a big factor here. Some neutrinos traveled through the Earth's core, while others traveled at an oblique angle that skipped the core entirely.
Analyzing both the concentration and the angle gives the team the tools to calculate the density of the planet at various depths.
Traditionally, Earth's density is extrapolated from the seismic waves produced by earthquakes propagate. However, seismic waves can not penetrate the inner core.
"The neutrinos," "said the world's leading magnetism of the planet," said IFIC physicist Andrea Donini.
The team did not learn anything new about our planet. The density map of Earth's interior, the planet's mbad and its moment of inertia were all calculated using neutrino data – and they were all consistent with previous measurements taken by other means, and less detailed.
But the point of the research is something new about Earth – it was to learn something new about what we can learn from neutrinos. And on that score the results are really freaking awesome.
"Our results demonstrate the feasibility of this approach to the Earth's internal structure, which is complementary to traditional geophysics methods," the researchers wrote in their paper.
At the moment, though, neutrino data is still relatively scarce; the researchers hope their research will encourage the release of more recent IceCube data, more neutrino science in the years to come.
The paper has been published in Nature Physics.
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