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Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 14: Winter 1981 Supplement |
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There's more than gold in the kolar mines
When physicists installed nuclear-particle detectors deep in a mine in the Kolar Gold Fields in India, they hoped to measure particles created by highly penetrating neutrinos arriving from cosmic sources. They found instead immense showers of nuclear particles coming, not from above as expected, but from the sides and even below! These huge showers of 1,000 or more assorted particles are called "anomalous cascades." Neutrinos are the only known particles capable of penetrating the entire earth to create upwardly directed showers, but ordinary neutrinos do not seem to have enough energy to give birth to the anomalous cascades.
(Anonymous; "Particle Shower Sprays Upward," Science News, 118:246, 1980.)
Comment. Are there sources of unrecognized radiation deep within the earth?