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Earth slammed by ultra-powerful 'goddess particle' cosmic ray, and we have no idea where it came from
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Maybe the facts that the beam is so energetic and that it comes from a seemingly empty spot are closely related. Law of squares. If the remains of the beam that arrive here are still the strongest ever measured, guess what power that beam had a gazillion lightyears away, and what such a powerful beam might have done to anything existing there.
It wasn't a beam, it was a single particle slamming into the atmosphere. When it comes to particles like this, it's yes/no on whether they arrive. They don't lose energy as they travel.
As for the source, it would have been energetic to say the least. Less sterilising planets and more eating large stars like smarties.
Amusingly the actual energy was around 4 joules. An obscene energy for a particle, but tiny on human standards. (About 1 second of phone battery usage)
Yea, "beam" was a misnomer from my side. I basically meant "whatever part from that source hit us". It could just be an absolute singular event, accellerated by a cosmic cataclysm or doing a swing-by maneuver around an event horizon. I simply assumed an omnidirectional source.
They don't? As my physics teacher once said: "Gravity does not sleep." Any particle with mass interacts with the rest of the Universe (within limits, OK), so it can be assumed that it actually lost energy on the way. Which, in a way, makes it even more scary.
The "far away" thing was about particles spreading to the law of square, and how many of those particles near the source where they would be much more common could do to whatever had been there. Imagine something like Earth getting hit by, e.g. a bucket full of this "stuff".
4J is a lot for a single particle, where one usually thinks in multiples of 1.6x10β»ΒΉβΉJ...
Agreed on all points.
The gravity drag would be tiny however. The gravitational gradient in deep space is tiny, it's being dragged forward almost as much as backwards. Further, (with a 2 mass approximation) it's reliant on both masses. The equivalent mass of a photon is via E = MC^2 . Therefore M=E/C^2 . Plug the numbers and this Uber photon weighs 4.45x10^-17 kg. Stupidly huge for a subatomic particle, stupidly tiny for a relativistic mass.
Depending how far it's travelled, it likely has more loss from the universe expanding. Unfortunately, I can't remember the equations for that however.
The main point is that, beyond these effects, there is no slowdown. It either flies at full speed, or hits something and creates a cascade of far slower (boring) particles.
Thanks! I learned a lot in this discussion!
Or its empty because nothing filled it yet, and we are seeing the first bursts of a new event. Birth of a star, or some other grand spacial phenomena
A new chunk being loaded into RAM
AFAIK "first burst of a star" is sufficiently understood not to cause that kind of energy level.
The universe is often estimated to be pretty young. Maybe its a type of star formation we have never seen before.
Or maybe its the birth of something else, that previously was extremely rare or hard to see.
Empty space lacking things just seems more likely to be pre-start rather than post-end, from what I understand about reality's overall age and makeup.
Stars don't pop into existence from nothing. They form from large clouds of gas. We also understand physics enough to know how that interaction happens to know that isn't it. Physics has been studied for a long time. Unexplained things usually aren't explained by simple guesses. It's probably something either much stranger, or much more mundane, like an error somewhere.
Im assuming when the post says "empty," they are meaning "empty of light," since we cannot know the space is genuinely devoid or just not sending detectable radiation our direction.
Im also pretty sure that a particle we have never seen before acting in a way we've never seen before is likely going come from a phenomena we've never seen before. After studying physics for a long time, we know that new ways to do things we previously thought we understood all the ways to do are discovered when we keep studying physics.
My point wasn't that it isn't something new, it's that it probably isn't something that simple.
Gas clouds are devoid of visible light often, but they still emit electromagnetic radiation (aka light). It's pop-science, so who knows what their meaning of words is, but a gas cloud would not be empty, and stars can't come from nothing. Also, presumably, we'd detect the star formation afterwards. Instead of a star it could be a direct collapse black hole (which we don't know for sure if this is even possible), which would be harder to detect after, but would still have to form from an even denser gas cloud, so even more EM radiation would be coming from it. Regardless, it's probably not something like this, assuming they used a reasonable definition of the word "empty".
You will notice I explicitly said lacking radiation. You will also notice nothing I suggested was even mildly simple.
My comment was not subtly implying that this particle would be a forerunner of an event, moving far ahead of traditional radiation. This would be the beginning of detecting the afterwards.
I also was very clear that I thought it was the birth of a phenomena, and named a new type of star birth as an example of one such possibility.
I do find it kinda funny that youre telling me Im wrong by repeating my comments back to me
Good observation. You may be on to something