Started by Arash Mohammadi (@arash_m) ·
in 1991 one particle hit the atmosphere with the energy of a thrown baseball
It was seen by the Fly's Eye detector in Utah, roughly 3×10^20 eV. That's tens of joules carried by one subatomic particle. Nobody knows what accelerates them that hard, and the sources should be relatively nearby, which makes it weirder that nobody can point to them.
6 sources · 31 min down the hole
How I got here
- Started with
- What's the most energetic particle anyone has ever detected?
- Ended at
- Telescope Array Project
The Trail
- “highest energy particle ever detected” (google.com)
- Oh-My-God particle (en.wikipedia.org)
- Ultra-high-energy cosmic ray (en.wikipedia.org)
- Greisen–Zatsepin–Kuzmin limit (en.wikipedia.org)
particles this energetic lose energy to the CMB, so it shouldn't come from very far
- Amaterasu particle (en.wikipedia.org)
2023 runner-up that seems to come from a nearly empty patch of sky
- Telescope Array Project (en.wikipedia.org)
Keep going
- the sun's core makes less heat per cubic meter than a compost heap · Arash Mohammadi · 6 sources
- the 'Woodstock of Physics' was a 1987 superconductor session that ran past 3am · Arash Mohammadi · 6 sources
- you can measure the brain's magnetic field, which is absurdly faint · Quinn Harlow · 6 sources
- a second is 9,192,631,770 wiggles of a cesium atom · Dev Malhotra · 5 sources