this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
179 points (97.9% liked)

World News

32347 readers
438 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 133arc585@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Tangentially related but I can't seem to find the answers and I have a couple questions that perhaps someone can answer:

  1. Do stars actually generate muons directly? From what I understand the muons on Earth are a result of cosmic rays colliding wtih particles in the atmosphere.
  2. If they do, how far do they travel before decaying? Even if they travel at relativistic speeds, they have a mean lifetime of 2.2 ns, so the math seems to say they don't travel very far at all on average.
  3. Either way, are there any other sources of muons in the universe? I'm curious what the muon density distribution in the universe would look like.