Science Focus
original post »
People make a big deal about the energies reached by the Large Hadron Collider, to the extent that they filed suit to block its operation over fears it would destroy the Universe. But as the physicists running the accelerator noted in their response, when it comes to high energies, nature got there first. While the LHC will eventually reach energies of 14 Tera-electronVolts, a cosmic ray called the Oh-My-God particle struck Earth with an energy of 300 Exa-electronVolts—over 10,000,000 times more energetic.
Such insanely energetic particles, while uncommon, aren't exactly rare. Over the last five years, an observatory in Utah built to study cosmic rays has identified 72 particles that struck the Earth with energies above 50 Exa-electronVolts. By roughly mapping their origin, the observatory found that many seem to originate in a cosmic hotspot located in the northern hemisphere sky. But the source (sources?) that raises particles to these energies remains unidentified.
Any particle physicist hoping to accelerate something to these energies better be incredibly patient. "To accelerate particles up to the ultrahigh-energy region," the authors of the paper describing the hotspot write, "particles must be confined to the accelerator site for more than a million years by a magnetic field and/or a large-scale confinement volume." Once released, however, they have a finite lifetime. Over time, they will interact with the cosmic microwave background in a way that will gradually slow them down.
Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments
#science
» see original post http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/science/~3/ZEECRWa9pR4/
See Zazzle gifts tagged with 'science'
No comments:
Post a Comment