4 ms·
> The Amaterasu particle has an energy exceeding 240 exa-electron volts [...] equivalent to the energy of a golf ball travelling at 95mph. Any particle physici
by 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...
- pif 3y agoNot really! One extremely-high energy particle is way, way less dangerous than a bunch of billions of less energetic particle... repeated every 25 nanoseconds!
- pif 3y agoAs an example, and admittedly in a completely separated energy range: neutrons emitted by uranium have to be slowed down in order to keep the reaction going at the desired speed. If you don't slow them down, they'll just traverse other uranium nuclei and the reaction will only proceed with its natural speed (half-life of billion of years). That's why you need a minimum mass of uranium for a nuclear explosion: you need neutrons to traverse a certain thickness of material before it gets slow enough to excite other nuclei
- namibj 3y agoPrompt criticality uses only fast neutrons.
- pif 3y agoMuch likely, nothing at all! The more energy a particle gets, the smaller the probability of interacting with anything. And if it does interact in your head... nothing at all! At such an energy, it is so tiny that at most one electron or one nucleon (i.e. proton or neutron) will get the thrill of its life and find itself leaving precipitously your body in order to smash, a few nanoseconds later, into the planet behind you. You won't notice, and the Earth won't either.
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoI'm not a particle physicist, but as I understand it, it wouldn't be very exciting to be hit by this because even if it interacted with you, the shower of particles produced would be so energetic that they'd nearly all come right out of the other side of you and go deep into the Earth before hitting anything else. One atom gets smashed, and one molecule gets excitingly altered but that's all in a day's work for biology. It's a bit like how the depth where the energy is deposited of radiotherapy gets deeper with increasing energy. Past a certain energy (hundreds of MeV), most of the energy ends up being delivered somewhere behind you. This particle is hundreds of billions times more energetic than that radiation.
- Helmut10001 3y agoI think there's a high chance that no atom in the human would get hit. Just thinking of the photo of the sun that was taken through whole earth. There are thousands of particles from outer space each day passing our bodies without interaction.