5 ms·

Oh-My-God particle

165 points by markmassie 12y ago

Moral_ 12y ago
The article kinda lackluster in regards to information. Is there any more information on where this type of particle originated(s) from? It says from space, but supernova, black hole, stars, aliens?
- Steuard 12y ago
  We have absolutely no idea. Really.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- yaur 12y ago
  Better link would be to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray which gives some speculation as to what causes them.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- windsurfer 12y ago
  Considering it's practically the speed of light, one needs only to figure out the direction the particle was travelling in and point a telescope in the opposite direction. You will be able to see whatever it was that created it within 3 microseconds of the particle's creation. EDIT: calculation error
  - logicallee 12y ago
    On the other hand, if it was created in an ephemeral event you have an absolute maximum of 300 nanoseconds to point your telescope at it :) (taking your number on faith)
    - windsurfer 12y ago
      Oops, I did it wrong. I skipped a zero. They state that the particle differs from light by 1 cm every 220,000 years. Considering the age of the universe is about 14 billion years, that works out to 63636 cm. It takes light 2210 nanoseconds to cover that distance. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=light+over+%2814+billion+%2F220000%29+cm https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=light+over+%2814+billi...
  - bcbrown 12y ago
    From the phys.org link in a sibling comment: "It’s difficult to determine their exact source as the magnetic fields of the galaxy and the solar system alter their trajectories so that they end up having a uniform distribution in the sky – as though they come from everywhere."
- aaron695 12y ago
  This wasn't a bad round up I thought. http://phys.org/news/2011-06-oh-my-god-particles.html http://phys.org/news/2011-06-oh-my-god-particles.html "They propose that extragalactic cosmic rays are spun up in supermassive black hole accretion disks, which are the basis of active galactic nuclei. Furthermore, they estimate that nearly all extragalactic cosmic rays that reach Earth come from Centaurus A. So, no huge mystery – indeed a rich area for further research. Particles from an active supermassive black hole accretion disk in another galaxy are being delivered to our doorstep."
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Nobody knows, it's a big mystery. It's mysterious partly because it shouldn't exist. If you do the math a very high energy proton should have a reasonable upper energy limit. Because protons are charged and at high enough speeds the cosmic microwave background actually slows them down (because it becomes significantly blue shifted). So that means either this particle came from our own galaxy over a short distance or something else is going on that we haven't accounted for. There are candidates for what would give rise to such a particle, but observations are sparse so we haven't had much chance to test any theories.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
csdrane 12y ago
What would happen to someone if it hit their skin?
- zeroexzeroone 12y ago
  They would become Starman.
  - zeroexzeroone 12y ago
    this site is so full of pussies who dont get a joke
- ctdonath 12y ago
  "kinetic energy equal to that of ... a 5-ounce (142 g) baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour (60 mph)" Probably wouldn't notice a thing. You're mostly empty space (on a subatomic level), odds are it wouldn't hit anything, and would just release no more energy than getting hit by a baseball if it did. Sure it's a stunning amount of energy for such a small object, but not much on a human scale. Compare getting hit with a bullet: penetration is damaging only because of what it tears up in the process, when the energy involved (demonstrated by getting shot while wearing a bulletproof vest) is little more than a solid kick. A "hole" of subatomic width doesn't do much damage.
  - vacri 12y ago
    Total energy is not the only factor in determining damage. The rapid movement of a bullet through flesh does extra damage due to the shockwave it creates. Similarly, if you drop a hard drive on carpet it's probably okay, but if you drop it on concrete, you're likely to have damaged it and even deformed the case, even though in both cases the total energy to stop the drive is the same.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    The energy content is significant, but it would have to be both transferred and absorbed. As you note, odds of it interacting with some bit of you are relatively low. I disagree with your baseball comparison, as the result of the collision would be a cascade of secondary particles. Each of which would likely have only a small chance of interacting with yet another bit of you before exiting your body. The net result would be something like firing a cannonball (or bullet) at a series of bead curtains. Most of the time, the bullet would miss. Occasionally it might strike one or more beads. Those then would also mostly miss the other beads within the curtain, though some might strike and cause secondary effects. Most of the energy would simply transit the curtain system as a whole. Or maybe even at sheets of laced (punched-out) tissue paper. The target simply doesn't have the capability to absorb the energy of the particle. A more accurate answer would require some subatomic particle modeling, past my pay grade.
barkingcat 12y ago
These are emanations from vulcan warpships travelling through our solar system.
- krapp 12y ago
  Don't be silly. It's probably Romulan ships with a faulty waveguide around the artificial singularity core. Vulcan warp signatures look entirely different, and mostly radiate into subspace.
Taniwha 12y ago
The fact that the earth has seen these bombarding us regularly for millions of years does rather imply that the whole "OMG the LHC will make a black hole" panic was unfounded
- serf 12y ago
  while I agree with the general sentiment that the idea that the LHC will create a blackhole is silly, surely there is a difference between creating such a particle and simply being in the trajectory of a particle that has already been created.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    The idea that it would create a black hole isn't silly, it could well do. The silly bit is the thought that it would be dangerous if it did, given particle collisions at higher energies than the LHC happen regularly in the atmosphere and there is nothing particularly special about the LHC ones, bar the fact they are in a massive detector.
- brazzy 12y ago
  I don't think that follows. The LHC is many, MANY orders of magnitude too weak to produce this kind of thing, but it can produce beams of many protons or, alternatively lead nuclei. Thus, it could conceivably create entirely different effects.
  - mattheww 12y ago
    Actually, it does follow. If there are particles of the energy described in the original link, there are many more particles of lower energies also hitting the Earth's atmosphere, including energies accessible at the LHC. And none of these resulted in the Earth's destruction. The same logic applies to the argument that any black-holes or otherwise dangerous particles would simply zip by the Earth (stated in a sibling comment to yours). Particles of slightly lower momenta come in higher numbers, so these would produce the dangerous particle, but not retain enough momentum to escape. Since the Earth has not been destroyed, there are no particles produced at low enough energies for us to destroy ourselves.
elwell 12y ago
What happens when two Oh-My-God particles collide?
- elorant 12y ago
  If you could record the collision it could give you a glimpse into the string theory. Wouldn’t that be something!
kimonos 12y ago
Cool name!
batbomb 12y ago
I worked on the child and grandchild of this experiment, HiRes and Telescope Array as an undergraduate and a bit as a postgraduate at the University of Utah. Currently I work with the Fermi Gamma-Ray space telescope as a "science janitor". The reason it's called the Oh-My-God particle is because it kind of smashed through the GZK limit ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen%E2%80%93Zatsepin%E2%80%93Kuzmin_limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen%E2%80%93Zatsepin%E2%80%... ) There's a few particles near this energy hitting the earth every day, the flux is just very, very low. This is why the follow up experiments to HiRes and AGASA, the Auger and Telescope Array experiments, are very, very large. Most research has started to gravitate towards the lower energy cosmic rays, near 10^17 eV. I can talk more about this but I got to go for now. Experiments involved in UHECR research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope_Array_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope_Array_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Resolution_Fly%27s_Eye_Cosmic_Ray_Detector http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Resolution_Fly%27s_Eye_Cos... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Auger_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Auger_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akeno_Giant_Air_Shower_Array http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akeno_Giant_Air_Shower_Array Fun facts about Dugway, home of Fly's Eye and HiRes: Some jets at Dugway once bombed a prototype detector. One of the HiRes detectors was just past some German Village buildings, which was a mock-up of a German village in the Utah desert used for weapons research in WWII.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  > I can talk more about this but I got to go for now. please do...
stox 12y ago
My favorite particle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oops-Leon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oops-Leon
hcarvalhoalves 12y ago
Okay, so what kind of cosmic phenomena causes a particle with mass to accelerate to such a ridiculous speed? That seems like the more interesting point not touched by the article.
abandonliberty 12y ago
so what happens when this particle collides? Can you access the 60mph baseball energy and take out a bird? Just extremely unlikely.

165 points by markmassie 12y ago

The article kinda lackluster in regards to information. Is there any more information on where this type of particle originated(s) from? It says from space, but supernova, black hole, stars, aliens?

Steuard 12y ago
We have absolutely no idea. Really.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
yaur 12y ago
Better link would be to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray which gives some speculation as to what causes them.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
windsurfer 12y ago
Considering it's practically the speed of light, one needs only to figure out the direction the particle was travelling in and point a telescope in the opposite direction. You will be able to see whatever it was that created it within 3 microseconds of the particle's creation. EDIT: calculation error
- logicallee 12y ago
  On the other hand, if it was created in an ephemeral event you have an absolute maximum of 300 nanoseconds to point your telescope at it :) (taking your number on faith)
  - windsurfer 12y ago
    Oops, I did it wrong. I skipped a zero. They state that the particle differs from light by 1 cm every 220,000 years. Considering the age of the universe is about 14 billion years, that works out to 63636 cm. It takes light 2210 nanoseconds to cover that distance. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=light+over+%2814+billion+%2F220000%29+cm https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=light+over+%2814+billi...
- bcbrown 12y ago
  From the phys.org link in a sibling comment: "It’s difficult to determine their exact source as the magnetic fields of the galaxy and the solar system alter their trajectories so that they end up having a uniform distribution in the sky – as though they come from everywhere."
aaron695 12y ago
This wasn't a bad round up I thought. http://phys.org/news/2011-06-oh-my-god-particles.html http://phys.org/news/2011-06-oh-my-god-particles.html "They propose that extragalactic cosmic rays are spun up in supermassive black hole accretion disks, which are the basis of active galactic nuclei. Furthermore, they estimate that nearly all extragalactic cosmic rays that reach Earth come from Centaurus A. So, no huge mystery – indeed a rich area for further research. Particles from an active supermassive black hole accretion disk in another galaxy are being delivered to our doorstep."
InclinedPlane 12y ago
Nobody knows, it's a big mystery. It's mysterious partly because it shouldn't exist. If you do the math a very high energy proton should have a reasonable upper energy limit. Because protons are charged and at high enough speeds the cosmic microwave background actually slows them down (because it becomes significantly blue shifted). So that means either this particle came from our own galaxy over a short distance or something else is going on that we haven't accounted for. There are candidates for what would give rise to such a particle, but observations are sparse so we haven't had much chance to test any theories.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

csdrane 12y ago

What would happen to someone if it hit their skin?

zeroexzeroone 12y ago
They would become Starman.
- zeroexzeroone 12y ago
  this site is so full of pussies who dont get a joke
ctdonath 12y ago
"kinetic energy equal to that of ... a 5-ounce (142 g) baseball traveling at about 100 kilometers per hour (60 mph)" Probably wouldn't notice a thing. You're mostly empty space (on a subatomic level), odds are it wouldn't hit anything, and would just release no more energy than getting hit by a baseball if it did. Sure it's a stunning amount of energy for such a small object, but not much on a human scale. Compare getting hit with a bullet: penetration is damaging only because of what it tears up in the process, when the energy involved (demonstrated by getting shot while wearing a bulletproof vest) is little more than a solid kick. A "hole" of subatomic width doesn't do much damage.
- vacri 12y ago
  Total energy is not the only factor in determining damage. The rapid movement of a bullet through flesh does extra damage due to the shockwave it creates. Similarly, if you drop a hard drive on carpet it's probably okay, but if you drop it on concrete, you're likely to have damaged it and even deformed the case, even though in both cases the total energy to stop the drive is the same.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  The energy content is significant, but it would have to be both transferred and absorbed. As you note, odds of it interacting with some bit of you are relatively low. I disagree with your baseball comparison, as the result of the collision would be a cascade of secondary particles. Each of which would likely have only a small chance of interacting with yet another bit of you before exiting your body. The net result would be something like firing a cannonball (or bullet) at a series of bead curtains. Most of the time, the bullet would miss. Occasionally it might strike one or more beads. Those then would also mostly miss the other beads within the curtain, though some might strike and cause secondary effects. Most of the energy would simply transit the curtain system as a whole. Or maybe even at sheets of laced (punched-out) tissue paper. The target simply doesn't have the capability to absorb the energy of the particle. A more accurate answer would require some subatomic particle modeling, past my pay grade.

barkingcat 12y ago

These are emanations from vulcan warpships travelling through our solar system.

krapp 12y ago
Don't be silly. It's probably Romulan ships with a faulty waveguide around the artificial singularity core. Vulcan warp signatures look entirely different, and mostly radiate into subspace.

Taniwha 12y ago

The fact that the earth has seen these bombarding us regularly for millions of years does rather imply that the whole "OMG the LHC will make a black hole" panic was unfounded

serf 12y ago
while I agree with the general sentiment that the idea that the LHC will create a blackhole is silly, surely there is a difference between creating such a particle and simply being in the trajectory of a particle that has already been created.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  The idea that it would create a black hole isn't silly, it could well do. The silly bit is the thought that it would be dangerous if it did, given particle collisions at higher energies than the LHC happen regularly in the atmosphere and there is nothing particularly special about the LHC ones, bar the fact they are in a massive detector.
brazzy 12y ago
I don't think that follows. The LHC is many, MANY orders of magnitude too weak to produce this kind of thing, but it can produce beams of many protons or, alternatively lead nuclei. Thus, it could conceivably create entirely different effects.
- mattheww 12y ago
  Actually, it does follow. If there are particles of the energy described in the original link, there are many more particles of lower energies also hitting the Earth's atmosphere, including energies accessible at the LHC. And none of these resulted in the Earth's destruction. The same logic applies to the argument that any black-holes or otherwise dangerous particles would simply zip by the Earth (stated in a sibling comment to yours). Particles of slightly lower momenta come in higher numbers, so these would produce the dangerous particle, but not retain enough momentum to escape. Since the Earth has not been destroyed, there are no particles produced at low enough energies for us to destroy ourselves.

elwell 12y ago

What happens when two Oh-My-God particles collide?

elorant 12y ago
If you could record the collision it could give you a glimpse into the string theory. Wouldn’t that be something!

kimonos 12y ago

Cool name!

batbomb 12y ago

I worked on the child and grandchild of this experiment, HiRes and Telescope Array as an undergraduate and a bit as a postgraduate at the University of Utah. Currently I work with the Fermi Gamma-Ray space telescope as a "science janitor". The reason it's called the Oh-My-God particle is because it kind of smashed through the GZK limit ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen%E2%80%93Zatsepin%E2%80%93Kuzmin_limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greisen%E2%80%93Zatsepin%E2%80%... ) There's a few particles near this energy hitting the earth every day, the flux is just very, very low. This is why the follow up experiments to HiRes and AGASA, the Auger and Telescope Array experiments, are very, very large. Most research has started to gravitate towards the lower energy cosmic rays, near 10^17 eV. I can talk more about this but I got to go for now. Experiments involved in UHECR research: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope_Array_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescope_Array_Project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Resolution_Fly%27s_Eye_Cosmic_Ray_Detector http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Resolution_Fly%27s_Eye_Cos... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Auger_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Auger_Observatory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akeno_Giant_Air_Shower_Array http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akeno_Giant_Air_Shower_Array Fun facts about Dugway, home of Fly's Eye and HiRes: Some jets at Dugway once bombed a prototype detector. One of the HiRes detectors was just past some German Village buildings, which was a mock-up of a German village in the Utah desert used for weapons research in WWII.

niels_olson 12y ago
> I can talk more about this but I got to go for now. please do...

stox 12y ago

My favorite particle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oops-Leon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oops-Leon

hcarvalhoalves 12y ago

Okay, so what kind of cosmic phenomena causes a particle with mass to accelerate to such a ridiculous speed? That seems like the more interesting point not touched by the article.

abandonliberty 12y ago

so what happens when this particle collides? Can you access the 60mph baseball energy and take out a bird? Just extremely unlikely.