{"id":2684,"date":"2023-02-05T08:19:28","date_gmt":"2023-02-05T02:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=2684"},"modified":"2025-03-25T23:39:43","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T18:09:43","slug":"what-are-muons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/what-are-muons\/","title":{"rendered":"What are Muons?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Why in news?<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>To analyse 14 kilometres long rampart, researchers deployed a technique called <strong>muon tomography or muography<\/strong>, which uses muons to generate three-dimensional images of such large structures.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>What are Muons?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Muons are <strong>subatomic particles<\/strong> raining from space.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The muon was discovered as a constituent of <strong>cosmic-ray particle<\/strong> \u201cshowers\u201d in 1936 by the American physicists <strong>Carl D. Anderson<\/strong> and <strong>Seth Neddermeyer.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>They are created when the particles in <strong>Earth\u2019s atmosphere collide with cosmic rays<\/strong> \u2014 clusters of high-energy particles that move through space at just below the speed of light.<\/li>\n<li>It has <strong>two forms<\/strong>, the negatively charged muon and its positively charged antiparticle.<\/li>\n<li>These particles resemble electrons but are 207 times as massive. Therefore, they are sometimes called \u201cfat electrons\u201d.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Muons are so heavy, they can travel through hundreds of metres of rock or other matter before getting absorbed or decaying into electrons and neutrinos<\/li>\n<li>They are highly unstable and exist for just 2.2 microseconds.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>What is muon tomography?<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Although muon tomography was first used in the 1960s, it has only recently gained widespread use among researchers, particularly in archaeology.<\/li>\n<li>\u00a0It is conceptually <strong>similar to X-ray<\/strong> but capable of scanning much <strong>larger and wider structures<\/strong>, owing to the penetration power of muons.<\/li>\n<li>All that is required is to place a <strong>muon detector<\/strong> underneath, within, or near the object of interest.<\/li>\n<li>The detector then tracks the number of muons going through the object from different directions, to form a three-dimensional image.<\/li>\n<li>The image is then compared with a muon image of the \u201cfree sky.\u201d This indicates how many muons have been blocked. The final picture is essentially a shadow of the object, in the light of cosmic muons.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1) What is an electron?<\/h3>\n<p>An electron is a stable subatomic particle with a negative electrical charge.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/indianexpress.com\/article\/explained\/explained-sci-tech\/scientists-outer-space-particles-xian-city-fortress-muons-8423710\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>Scientists use outer space particles to examine the fortress wall of Xi\u2019an city: What are muons and how are they used to analyse large structures?<\/u><\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Muons are subatomic particles raining from space. It was discovered as a constituent of cosmic-ray particle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":2685,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2684","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}