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Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 7:24 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Reaper, I don't know that you can say pluto's size is specific to its involvment alone in the Kupier belt.
Pluto orbits along an irregular path falling inside Neptune's orbit from time to time. It's size, composition, and orbit suggests it is a Kuiper Belt object whose orbit was perturbed a few billion years back by Neptune's formation. That's the running theory at least. Wikipedia agrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Belt_Object

I hear if we get enough Anti-Matter together we can destroy the planet. Go CERN...;)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:27 am
by Jenk
Someone will destroy the planet long before we are able to harness, harvest, and put to use anti-matter (which isn't actually "anti-matter", it's just inversely charged particles.. protons are negative, electrons are positive [positron] etc. but I digress :P) unless we suddenly do a Star Trek and everyone on Earth suddenly turns into new age hippies :P

Personally, I believe someone will split Earth in half or something equally as proposterous by means of an experiment gone bad..

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 10:40 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
I place my bets on the CERN facility in Switzerland. One day they'll create a mini-blackhole after banging a few quarks together at the next-generation energies they now have and Earth will go pop inside a year sucked inside out. Only the theoretical physics will die happy. ;)

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 12:37 pm
by akimm
Concerning Anti matter, do we actually have a containment source? I thought that stuff was still impossible to garner very much at all, let alone sustain it, doesn't it decay and go BOOM, whenever exposed to any matter?

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 1:48 pm
by Jenk
An insanely powerful magnetic field is needed to contain it, and more importantly, stop everything else getting into it. A few years ago someone managed to accomplish a sustained field just long enough to measure it before they ran out of energy. That's about 0.01x(10^20) seconds (iirc), btw.

Posted: Tue Oct 24, 2006 9:53 pm
by akimm
What do you guys think about mesons, possible impilications for them, if you're not sure what that is, its basically (from what I understand) a quark and anti-quark.