- Jun 4, 2004
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PBS Spacetime had a show this week on this rather amazing cosmic ray.
in 1991 a detector picked up a single proton that was traveling at:
99.999,999,999,999,999,999,999,51% the speed of light
Normally cosmic ray energy is measured in electron-volts. For this guy it's easier to express in joules - 48J.
Doesn't sound like much until you realize this is the energy equivalent of a baseball thrown at 58mph in a single proton.
Cosmic rays at this energy are really rare and really weird. Lower energy cosmic rays come from "local" events like supernova. High energy cosmic rays come from far away events like quasars or gamma ray bursts billions of light years away.
Cosmic rays like the OMG Particle shouldn't exist. They should be slowed fairly quickly by running into the cosmic background radiation. If we detect one, that means it must be coming from somewhere local, galacticly speaking. However there's nothing we can see in the local galactic neighborhood that could accelerate protons to these energies.
There's definitely something interesting to study here.
in 1991 a detector picked up a single proton that was traveling at:
99.999,999,999,999,999,999,999,51% the speed of light
Normally cosmic ray energy is measured in electron-volts. For this guy it's easier to express in joules - 48J.
Doesn't sound like much until you realize this is the energy equivalent of a baseball thrown at 58mph in a single proton.
Cosmic rays at this energy are really rare and really weird. Lower energy cosmic rays come from "local" events like supernova. High energy cosmic rays come from far away events like quasars or gamma ray bursts billions of light years away.
Cosmic rays like the OMG Particle shouldn't exist. They should be slowed fairly quickly by running into the cosmic background radiation. If we detect one, that means it must be coming from somewhere local, galacticly speaking. However there's nothing we can see in the local galactic neighborhood that could accelerate protons to these energies.
There's definitely something interesting to study here.
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