{"id":198856,"date":"2024-11-06T13:24:12","date_gmt":"2024-11-06T19:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/see-spacecraft-views-sun-blasts-massive-x4-5-class-solar-flare"},"modified":"2024-11-06T13:24:12","modified_gmt":"2024-11-06T19:24:12","slug":"see-spacecraft-views-sun-blasts-massive-x4-5-class-solar-flare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2024\/11\/see-spacecraft-views-sun-blasts-massive-x4-5-class-solar-flare","title":{"rendered":"See Spacecraft Views: Sun Blasts Massive X4.5-Class Solar Flare"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/see-spacecraft-views-sun-blasts-massive-x4-5-class-solar-flare.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers have been performing these experiments for nearly 30 years but they always encounter the same problem: the bottle technique yields an average neutron survival time of 880 s, while the beam method produces a lifetime of 888 s. Importantly, this eight-second difference is larger than the uncertainties of the measurements, meaning that known sources of error cannot explain it.<\/p>\n<p><b>A mix of different neutron states?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>A team led by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.itp.tuwien.ac.at\/Staff\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Benjamin Koch and Felix Hummel of TU Wien\u2019s Institute of Theoretical Physics<\/a> is now suggesting that the discrepancy could be caused by nuclear decay producing free neutrons in a mix of different states. Some neutrons might be in the ground state, for example, while others could be in a higher-energy excited state. This would alter the neutrons\u2019 lifetimes, they say, because elements in the so-called transition matrix that describes how neutrons decay into protons would be different for neutrons in excited states and neutrons in ground states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers have been performing these experiments for nearly 30 years but they always encounter the same problem: the bottle technique yields an average neutron survival time of 880 s, while the beam method produces a lifetime of 888 s. Importantly, this eight-second difference is larger than the uncertainties of the measurements, meaning that known sources [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[873,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nuclear-energy","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198856\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}