I came across a cool article in the MIT technology review. Apparently the Earth has an Antiproton Radiation Belt. This Anitproton belt has been created by cosmic ray collisions with nuclei in Earth's upper atmosphere. From the article:
Astronomers long ago realised that these collisions must produce
antiprotons, just as they do in particle accelerators on Earth. But this
raises an interesting question: what happens to the antiprotons after
they are created?
Clearly, many of these antiparticles must be annihilated when they
meet particles of ordinary matter. But some astronomers always suspected
that the remaining antiprotons must become trapped by the Earth's
magnetic field, forming an antiproton radiation belt.
Now astrophysicists say they've finally discovered this long-fabled belt of antiprotons.
In 2006, these guys launched a spacecraft called PAMELA into low
Earth orbit, specifically to look for antiprotons in cosmic rays.
But, like most spacecraft in low Earth orbit, PAMELA must pass daily
through the South Atlantic Anomaly, a region where the Van Allen
Radiation Belts come closest to the Earth's surface. It's here that
energetic particles tend to become trapped. So if any antiprotons are
caught up in the mix, that's where PAMELA ought to find them.
Now the PAMELA team has analysed the 850 days of data, looking only
at the times when the spacecraft was in the South Atlantic Anomaly
(about 1.7 per cent of this time).
Lo and behold, these guys found 28 antiprotons. That's about three
orders of magnitude more than you'd expect to find in the solar wind,
proving that the particles really are trapped and stored in this belt.
This constitutes "the most abundant source of antiprotons near the Earth", say the PAMELA team.
Article Continues here:
Where the Antiprotons Roam
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