You probably didn’t wake up this morning wondering what happens
to the antiprotons that must be created by the collision of
cosmic rays with the upper atmosphere. But if you are one of the
few who loses sleep over the fact that these antiprotons should
be somewhere out there but have yet to be directly detected, we
are happy to report that you can rest easy: Astrophysicists have
finally found them trapped in an antiproton belt around the
Earth. For those of you who couldn't care less about antiprotons
or what an antiproton is, this is less a story about antiprotons
or earth-shattering discovery and more a story about good
science bearing fruit. See, when cosmic rays from the sun and
elsewhere in the cosmos bombard nuclei in the upper atmosphere,
the resulting particle collisions are akin to those that occur
in particle accelerators here on the ground. And like those
laboratory collisions, these smash-ups birth daughter
particles.Astronomers have long thought these collisions must
produce antiprotons just as t