4 ms·
Extremely high-energy particle detected falling to Earth
- ginko 3y agoI assume any particle like that can only be detected by a single sensor in one location. How do you verify that this isn't some sort of noise artifact in your system?
- dotsam 3y agoIt creates a cascade of secondary particles that are detected over an array of sensors. In this case, the shower triggered 23 detectors, which are part of 507 stations arranged in a square grid. The stations are spaced by 1.2 km, giving a total effective area of 700km^2
- ginko 3y agoRight, guess I just don't know enough on what their experiment looks like.
- orbital-decay 3y agoWhile traveling through the atmosphere, they create particle showers over large areas, which can be reliably detected. There's even the citizen science project called CREDO [1] that relies on volunteers using their smartphone camera sensors as particle detectors. [1] https://credo.science/ https://credo.science/
- dotsam 3y agoThis article isn't great... > Some charged particles in the air shower travel faster than the speed of light Better article: https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/cosmic-ray-2023/ https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/cosmic-ray-2023/ Science paper for those with access: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.abo5095 https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/science.abo5095
- dzdt 3y agoIn reading the article that was the same sentence I copy-pasted to bring back here for discussion. Anyone have an idea what the reporter garbled into "faster than the speed of light?" I guess just "nearly the speed of light"?
- sdflhasjd 3y agoPossibly "faster than the speed of light in air"
- dzdt 3y agoOh that makes a lot of sense. That actually makes a nice image for the train-wreck of cascading particle collisions that happens. Air is dense enough its impossible to move that fast thru it. But the particle hits the air moving that fast. Result: fireworks that can be detected.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoRelated effect, Cherenkov radiation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
- dotsam 3y agoAs someone else has said, the article should say "faster than the speed of light in air". The Guardian article says: > Some charged particles in the air shower travel faster than the speed of light, producing a type of electromagnetic radiation that can be detected by specialised instruments. > One such instrument is the Telescope Array observatory in Utah, which found the Amaterasu particle. The Telescope Array actually has two different types of instrument for detecting the particles. Fluorescence Telescopes and Scintillation Detectors. According to the paper the "fluorescence detectors were not operating at the time (owing to bright moonlight)". Instead the particles were detected by the plastic scintillator surface detectors. I have found more information about the surface detectors here: http://www.telescopearray.org/index.php/about/surface-detection http://www.telescopearray.org/index.php/about/surface-detect...
- 5643777909 3y ago[dead]
- sph 3y agoSince no one knows what's the source, here's a dumb question: we are unable to detect dark matter, right? Is it possible that the Local Void isn't actually void, just contains a lot of dark matter? Add on question: can dark matter emit high-energy particles?
- CaptainSamJohn 3y agoThe void could also just be filled of negative-mass matter, pushing away ordinary (positive mass) matter
- simne 3y agoThis questions could not be answered by current science. Could only make guesses. For first, most current answer, we just know, something exists in Universe, which we could not see directly, but have mass and so emit some gravitation, which influence moving of other objects, which we could see. For second, even worse. We only know, we cannot SEE anything in void, but this just mean, something could be there, but we cannot detect it with our current technology, nothing more. When we cannot se anything, and we have not before encountered such phenomenon, we could only speculate on fantastic theories.
- mfi 3y ago> The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts [...] equivalent to the energy of a golf ball travelling at 95mph. Any particle physicist that could answer, what would happen if such a particle would make its way through the atmosphere and hit a person in the head?
- sph 3y agoPerhaps thats what would happen if you put your hand in the electron beam at the LHC, but a million times more energetic.
- mfi 3y agoAnd what would happen if you put your hand in the electron beam at the LHC?
- SeanAnderson 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski
- kanobi 3y agoThere is a real life example, unfortunately. In 1978 Soviet scientist Anatoli Bugorski was hit by a 76 GeV particle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoli_Bugorski Looks like he survived the incident and even completed his PhD in following years. He did lose hearing on one ear and was partially paralyzed though. Now the particle mentioned in the article was million time more energetic so...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dbingham 3y agoThat was a proton beam - lots of high energy particles.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoIt’s a dud photoid, we dodged the bullet this time. (“Three Body Problem” reference haha)
- dzdt 3y agoThat aspect of the Three Body Problem really irritated me. Maybe I just like my sci-fi harder than that. But saying the aliens could turn ordinary protons into magical supercomputers with near unlimited powers to manipulate matter... Gah! I hated it.
- loloquwowndueo 3y agoThat’s a sophon - apologies, photoids only show up in The Dark Forest. Also let’s not spoil it too much for others :)
- pavel_lishin 3y agoSame. They had so much technology that could have trivially solved most of their problems - especially the titular one! - and instead they decided to do a weird psyop on a few hundred people four light years away.
- javajosh 3y agoThe observations of the Amaterasu particle increased over the years, coming from an apparently empty region of space. A minor science mystery. Then one day, the feint glow of a body was seen, just outside the solar system. It's trajectory was odd, foreshortened and the light was blue-shifted and of a very strange spectrum. Almost like an engine pointing our way, decelerating. "Time to lay out the welcome mat," the astronomer said, with mingled excitement and fear.
- thinkingemote 3y agoThe paper was published yesterday. The particle was detected over 2 years ago. May 27 2021
- quietpain 3y agoI suggest we add its origin to the SETI list. One of my pet theories is that the Fermi paradox is due to cloaking of extraterrestrial civilisations. We’re not entitled to observing them, and as a result the mass and energy of the universe doesn’t add up. Hence black matter and black energy.
- EForEndeavour 3y agoWould this be the Dark Forest Hypothesis [1], with the added twist that the hidden civilizations are so advanced that they've "cloaked" themselves such that they only show up as what we currently interpret as dark matter? Aside: dark matter and dark energy are pretty distinct concepts by my reading [2]. Dark matter interacts only gravitationally and is currently the leading explanation for things like galaxy rotation curves (visible mass is far too low to support observed disk rotation speeds, so non-luminous, i.e., "dark" matter must exist to make up the difference) and gravitational lensing by galaxies (again, visible mass is too low to produce observed lensing). Dark energy is, well, something that accelerates the expansion of the universe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis [2] https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-dark-energy/ https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/what-is-da...
- choilive 3y agoShouldn't we be able to detect the civilizations that have been broadcasting EM radiation before they got quiet? Whether they went silent voluntarily or involuntarily - unless every single technologically advanced civilization had the foresight to develop cloaking before becoming spacefaring (which seems unlikely) we should be able to detect their signals within some window of time. Humans also have been broadcasting EM out into space for a bit now.. so either these hostile aliens are on their way right now, they are too far away to have detected us yet, or they don't exist.
- simne 3y agoHumanity just very short time have instruments to hear sky. Visual observations exists much longer, but they are limited to just our galaxy, Milky way (more distant sources are not bright enough to see them with naked eye). And even most obvious mask ideas (and development), which we see on our current sci-tech stages, very fast move spectrum to infrared, which is near impossible to observe via thin atmosphere. And even now, I hear about developments of laser cooling, which could emit extreme amounts of heat into some direction, where nobody will see it. For example, now Earth communications conversed to Ultra high frequencies and very high gain antennas (3G, 4G, 5G, emit only very narrow beam to receiver and are very short range), and to fiber-optic communications, which emit just infrared from heat. Also, Ultra high frequencies very quickly absorbed by moisture, so also effectively converted to heat infrared. So, right question should be, how much time industrial civilization emit observable to others emissions. And imagine, what could alien civilization learn about Earth from locations, where clouds are rare, as others they could not hear :)
- sertbdfgbnfgsd 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle