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_{Denyse O'Leary

May 22, 2015

News, Physics}

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“The Big Bang blip.” Whatever its state of ripeness, that banana is made of particles of matter, just like you: its intrinsic matteryness is why you can see, feel and taste it. What you don’t see is what a banana does 15 times a day or so. Blip! It produces a particle of something else, something that vanishes almost instantaneously in a flash of light.

That something else is antimatter.

Actually, antimatter is explained in another article in New Scientist you can read for free. Also at NASA Here, we don’t know what happened to the banana.

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Comments

Pb = Lead banana?Mung_{May 22, 2015
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Pb-208 most likelyRobert Sheldon_{May 22, 2015
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Bananas are rich in potassium, designated by the symbol K, for "kalium" as they say in europe. One of the isotopes of potassium, 40K, is radioactive. This makes bananas the most radioactive food you can eat, that is, excluding a meal of lemon slices served on Fiestaware. In fact, in an effort to rehumanize radioactivity, several people have proposed to measure it not in "curies" named for Marie, but in "bananas", just so you understand how little danger is being discussed. After all, wouldn't it be a lot less frightening if you heard that food grown in Fukushima province was deemed "safe" if it had less than 0.5 bananas of radiation? But when K40 decays, it does so three different ways (a bit unusual) but the most common is to give off an electron and an anti-neutrino. Now it has a much less likely decay into an anti-electron and a neutrino. The "anti-" prefix means that if it collides with a normal version, they both vanish in a puff of gamma rays. However, and this is a big however, neutrinos don't interact with anybody, much less with another neutrino, so that "anti-" on the neutrino is just for looks, it might as well have been a normal neutrino. All that to say that K40 decay contributes to normal matter, and only very rarely subtracts from normal matter (by emitting that suicidal anti-electron). If the Big Bang likewise had a bias for normal matter, then we don't expect to see a galaxy of anti-matter for every galaxy of normal matter. Which just goes to show that some biasses are vitally good. And no, the anti-electron will not make the banana explode. That was done with a few quadrillion Pb-103 atoms travelling 2500 feet/sec.Robert Sheldon_{May 22, 2015
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