3 ms·
It doesn't interact like a baseball, it just has the energy of one. If it does hit an atom, it produces a shower of other particles, most of which will have si
by adhesive_wombat 5y ago
It doesn't interact like a baseball, it just has the energy of one.
If it does hit an atom, it produces a shower of other particles, most of which will have similarly huge energies and will probably go right through the rest of the detector and start their own showers in other matter. So you'll get a detector with a few atomic dislocations, and the rest of the energy would be distributed amongst a huge number of other interactions.
It's actually similar to x-ray "hardening", where soft x-rays are filtered out by a metal shield, leaving only harder radiation. This is carefully calibrated to allow the radiation to penetrate to a certain depth, leaving shallower tissue unharmed.
In a way, it could be better to be hit by an OMG particle than a less energetic particle, as the amount of energy that gets dumped into you is smaller: the vast, vast majority of it would be shotgunned deep into the ground under you, and only a very few molecules in you are actually affected.
- ipdashc 5y agoAha! I see.
- chasd00 5y agoCorrect me if I’m wrong but at a photon’s scale a human is mostly empty space.
- adhesive_wombat 5y agoEh, kind of. It depends on the photon. A human is not transparent to visible light: if they were, we'd all be see-through. But we are substantially transparent to gamma rays. The same goes for baryons like protons: proton beam therapy can reach deep into humans, but alpha radiation (which is 2 protons and 2 neutrons, so not much "bigger") will be stopped by the first layer of skin. From the an OMG particle's perspective, at that speed, due to Lorentz contraction factor of 300 billion, a human is only a few picometres across.
- MayeulC 5y agoCan the interaction also be approximated using the wavelength? E=hc/λ -> λ=hc/E -> λ=1.239/(1.4e15)=8.9e-16 μm Vanishingly small, about 900 yoctometers, or seven orders of magnitude smaller than a proton. No wonder we appear like empty space for the first few cascading reactions. Now, could dark matter just be photons with absurdly high energy?
- beecafe 5y agoNo, because dark matter concentrates around mass, which requires it to be able to be at rest to normal matter.