4 ms·
I love how we're able to debate the origins and life story of a single photon from 2.4 billion light-years away
by anentropic 4y ago
I love how we're able to debate the origins and life story of a single photon from 2.4 billion light-years away
- yummybear 4y agoIt’s the ultimate counterargument to ”my actions don’t matter”.
- tambourine_man 4y agoIt’s a very energetic photon though
- geenew 4y agoIt says, near the top of the story, "There were so many photons per second that they couldn’t keep up". Not a single photon. Not easy (not possible?) to distinguish signal from noise with a single photon, afaik.
- anentropic 4y agoThey detected many photons, but I read this as meaning that they had focused their attention on one specific photon that was detected by their instruments: > Among those detections was a suspected high-energy photon at 18 teraelectron volts (TeV)—four times higher than anything seen from a gamma-ray burst before and more energetic than the highest energies achievable by the Large Hadron Collider.